In more civilised, dimly remembered times one could find reactionaries who understood socialism and did not concentrate criticism on chimeras. Bertrand de Jouvenel (Baron de Jouvenel des Ursins) was one such remarkable conservative thinker – a dashing man-about-town who had become a committed, convinced, card-carrying fascist for a while and, in consequence, after the second world war had to spend his life in a sort of internal exile.

Still, he was invited to deliver the Boutwood Lectures at Corpus Christi in 1949 which later appeared as The Ethics of Redistribution (1953, 1990). There, right at the beginning, he made an extremely important tripartite distinction between the three main kinds of “progressive” politics.

The first he dubbed “agrarian redistribution”, or an “agrarian egalitarianism” present in history from times immemorial. This is the traditional redistribution of land in every new generation, which creates an equality in seed capital, but no equality of income: de Jouvenel calls it an equality of rewards.

The second kind is socialism proper which does not aim at equality and redistribution and, especially, does not aim at increasing wealth at any price. “Socialism aims even higher than the establishment of ‘mere’ justice. It seeks to establish a new order of brotherly love. The basic socialist feeling is not that things are out of proportion and thus unjust, that reward is not proportional to effort, but an emotional [I would rather say: moral] revolt against the antagonisms within society, against the ugliness of men’s behaviour to each other.” It is not necessary to revert to an earlier or “primitive” state – socialists can accept complex, interdependent societies – but men (and women) should serve one another even through modernity “in newness of spirit” as “a ‘new’ man who finds his delight in the welfare of his brethren”. The pattern is “the Pauline pattern of law and grace as transformed by Rousseau. For Rousseau, social progress increases strife, [for] it arouses man’s desires. [...] Rousseau’s answer to this... was the displacement of man’s centre of affections, love of the whole being substituted for self-love. This is the fundamental pattern of socialist thought.” But Rousseau (and Marx) also believed that social antagonism arises from “objective situations”, chief among which is private property that will have to be destroyed.

And Bertrand de Jouvenel adds: “Such a community works. It has worked for centuries, and we can see it at work under our very eyes in every monastic community [where] material goods are shared without question because they are spurned. The members of the community are not anxious to increase their individual well-being at the expense of one another, but then they are not very anxious to increase it at all. [...] In short, they are members of one another not because they form a social body but because they are part of a mystical body. Socialism seeks to restore this unity without the faith that causes it.”

Whoever has studied radical revolutionary communism as I did, knows that this was indeed the mindset of the true rebels, “the dead on furlough” whether they were anti-Marxists like Gustav Landauer or Marxists like Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, from 1917 to 1923. And this was behind the heroism and cruelty of the revolutionaries, the cult of sacrifice and martyrdom and self-abnegation. This was the modern Ebionist heresy (Ebionites in the second century AD considered poverty a blessing or a virtue and did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, “ebion” being Aramaic for poor).

The third kind, according to de Jouvenel, is what people would call “left” today, a redistribution of incomes serving egalitarian goals, mostly through taxation and social aid to the poor that leaves capitalist private property mostly in place in order to achieve “freedom from want”. This is associated with a number of other egalitarian policies such as universal suffrage, the suppression of hereditary privileges, the creation of an egalitarian social culture without deference and contempt and the like. All this is predicated upon a shared belief in the inherent goodness of creature comforts and of the easing of pain. This is what people call social democracy or, in America, “liberalism”.

Soviet-type systems

The Soviet-type systems were a combination of all three variants but particularly of the last two. It was archaic agrarian reform, the egalitarian redistribution of lands which won the Russian and the Chinese peasantry for the cause of socialism and it obliterated the chief source of injustice, the large landed estates, hated for millennia together with the most hated class, the great aristocracy. At the beginning, the idea of peasant co-operatives seemed to be reconcilable with a system of equality of rewards. But this aspect soon disappeared.

From the start, there was a conflict between, on the one hand, the intrinsic socialist idea of “brotherly (and sisterly) love”, that is, the exclusion of social conflict which would have also meant the exclusion of the state and of war – and, on the other, the progressivist and positivist idea of ever-increasing material improvement for all, based on technological (thus, scientific) development. The communist party was hesitating between the two – and then it was forced to do something very old-fashioned.