On Saturday night my wife and I attended a performance of songs and stories from the "James Connolly Songbook" at Book & Bar in Portsmouth (and purchased both the book and the CD for my folk music-loving in-laws, which I think they will really enjoy). A couple of friends joined us, and after the hour-long set was over one of them made an interesting observation.
"It seems like James Connolly, as an Irish republican, equated republicanism inextricably with socialism," he said.
That reminded me of Connolly's famous quote, from his essay "Socialism and Nationalism", originally published in the newspaper Shan Van Vocht in 1897. The full quote is:
"If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.
"England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
"England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.
"Nationalism without Socialism — without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin — is only national recreancy."
Connolly also said, "The cause of Labour is the cause of Ireland. The cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour."
Gerry Adams, president of the Irish political party Sinn Fein, former multi-term Member of the British Parliament for West Belfast, and now TD (Teachta Dala, or member of the Dail, or Irish Parliament) for the Louth constituency in the Irish Republic, put it this way, in his book Free Ireland (1986):
"You cannot be a socialist and not be a republican....[T]hose on the left in Ireland who regard themselves as socialists and as representing the working class should be the most uncompromising republicans."
He called the chapter of his book from which this is taken, "Republicanism and Socialism."
Sunday morning I sent the Connolly quote to my friend, who I should mention is a radical* libertarian — I would go so far as to say he is an anarcho-capitalist libertarian. He wrote back the following, which I found interesting:
"I think [Connolly] is wrong about ancient Ireland though. I bet it was probably more stateless and communal than socialist in the modern Marxist sense. Right? That dispute resolution was through social traditions and not the state. And any sharing of property was through communal mores and not state enforcement?"
I woke up this morning tossing and turning, thinking about this. I don't completely agree; that said, I don't completely disagree either. My concern here is with historical context.
Both Marxists and Anarcho-Libertarians like to point to examples from the ancient world as their "proof of concept" — sometimes even the same examples! For example, in For a New Liberty (1973) radical libertarian Murray Rothbard writes about "The libertarian society of Ireland, which lasted for a thousand years." Similarly, David Friedman (son of Milton), writes of a kind of quasi-statelessness in ancient Iceland in his fun book, The Machinery of Freedom (1973).
But we could argue all day about whether or not ancient Ireland (or ancient Iceland, or the pre-Roman Germanic tribes, or the various native peoples of the Western Hemisphere prior to 1492, or whatever) was really "purely Libertarian" or "purely Marxist". Both philosophies strive for a "withering away" of "the state" — to the establishment of conditions where humans are living harmoniously and cooperatively, without forceful third-party interference. Both wish to see humans living together in peaceful communities, "through communal mores and not state enforcement". Those conditions could be found, to some extent, in all of the examples listed above.
Debating the distinctions may be fun — it may even be productive — for some, but it runs the very serious risk of becoming lost in a sea of grammatical ambiguities. It also misses an important point.
Socialism is a system of government; more specifically, it is a system of government based on ideas like the "public", i.e. government ownership of the means of production, the abolition of private property, a graduated income tax, public schools, centralization of banking and credit (also read: government-owned), and the abolition of inheritance.
Libertarianism, by comparison, is an outgrowth of classical liberalism, and is based on the principles of limited government (limited to preserving the following), self-ownership, individual rights, free markets, private property, and voluntary association.
Most important, for the present discussion, is the understanding that these terms, and the ideas they represent, are modern inventions. I say modern in the sense that they came about as a result of, and are appropriate to, conditions that arose in the last two or three centuries — not those that existed two or three millenia ago.
The words "communism" and "socialism" would not have been understood, outside the circles of an elite group of intellectuals and academics, before, say, the year 1800; so too the word "liberalism". "Libertarian" was never heard before about 1960. When I became a libertarian as late as 1997 or 1998, some people actually thought I was calling myself a Unitarian — and wondering what the hell it had to do with politics!
These words, and the concepts they denote, have come about as a result of people trying to make sense of, and apply meaning to, the modern, not the ancient world. The breakup of feudal society and the onset of the industrial revolution brought unique conditions and opportunities that required understanding, and explanation — and, I would argue, government (as in law and order) in some form. My personal preference is that it be one conforming to libertarian, not socialist aspirations.
Regardless, trying to superimpose a modern understanding of government — or even a lack thereof — from either a libertarian or a socialist point of view, on conditions that pertained in ancient times is a bit like explaining Bernoulli's Principle to a magpie: reality in a metaphysical sense remains the same, but the context could not be any more inappropriate or foreign.**
Hearkening back to an ancient world that provides little historic evidence and even less context to the words we use today is risky business. If you look hard enough, you can find something to support your point of view. Then again, so can your opponent.
I prefer to look at the inhuman destruction caused by socialism — the tyranny, the genocide and terror, the racism, the incredible poverty, the intellectual and moral degradation — and compare that to the incomparable level of personal freedom and personal wealth available to those of us living in liberal societies today; to the amount of intellectual freedom and lifestyle freedom that exists in liberal societies today; to the freedom to stand and fall, the freedom to choose, or refrain, that exists in liberal societies today; to the personal security we take for granted in liberal societies today.
The extent to which we have acquired, and intend to maintain and even grow, these freedoms is directly proportional to the extent to which we embrace liberal, or libertarian, ideas and principles — today. The inverse is equally true.
*For the record, the word "radical" in this post is not intended as a disparagement.
**This should not be read to understand that I take a morally neutral position on the issue of individual rights in ancient times. A person had as much moral right then as now to, say, freely practice their religion, but explaining that to someone who considered rape and pillage to be as morally legitimate an occupation as fishing — in a world that considered rape and pillage to be as morally legitimate an occupation as fishing, and very likely more so — would have been less than pointless. You would have been too busy being raped and pillaged to recite excerpts from Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.
