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Title: Marxian Socialism Author: Laurance Labadie Date: 1930-1935 Language: en Topics: communism, labor theory of value, Laurance Labadie, Karl Marx, marxism Source: Retrieved on 6/9/22 from https://c4ss.org/content/56847. Notes: Probably written sometime in the early to mid 1930s and archived by the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan Library.
Socialism can be explained partially by man’s eternal desire and faith
in a better life to come.[1]
The very attitude of dogmatism and cock-sureness brands Socialism as
unscientific.
The socialists hold an exaggerated idea of the importance of economics
in the materialistic interpretation of history.
They hold the incorrect labor-cost theory of value.[2]
Their wage theory is incorrect.
Because of their exaggerated stress on economic determinism they take a
fatalistic attitude of the inevitability of the “social revolution” not
realizing the many factors that are likely to retard or totally
eliminate what they consider the inevitable impoverishment of the
masses.
They have an unbounded faith in the justice, humanity, and wisdom of an
all-inclusive State. A faith for which there are no scientific grounds
to substantiate.
They have a perverted notion of the importance of men to react upon
their environment and class all such attempts by the derogatory name of
“utopian.”
Their replies to the criticism that the vast centralization which
socialism implies would mean incompetence, tyrrany, corruption, a
condition of classes, an insufferable bureaucracy with no limits to the
denial of individual freedom give evidence to their utopian faith that
such would not be so. This unfounded faith they brand as “scientific”.
History can best be explained by man’s will to live, that is his
unquenchable desire to express himself to the full extent of his
potentialities, and the economic factor is but a part of the
manifestation of this will.[3]
This will to live expresses itself in many non-economic phases such as
art, religion, sex, power, ambition, contest, display, pleasure, play,
love of emulation, etc. which though inseparably bound up with economic
processes are more or less distinct from them. In other words life is
much more complex than the Marxians seem to think. Tho it is true that
to a hungry man the filling of his belly seems to him to be the most
important thing in life.
Man is more than the passive recipient of progress, but also the active
creator of it.
While history can largely be explained by a theory of class struggle to
say that this struggle is based only on economic grounds is to take a
lop-sided view of things. The fact is that these struggles were seldom
between those who had and those who had not as Marxians think but
between those who had and desired more with those who had not doing the
fighting.
[1] “Man’s” mistakenly spelled as non-possessive.
[2] The original document has a typo double “the.”
[3] “Man’s” mistakenly spelled as non-possessive.