A Primer from Richard Wolff on … Communism?

I’m not sure who wants or needs to see this introductory fact-based presentation on what “communism” is. (1)



Of course, it would be a challenge to make sense out of the last two centuries of European history or the last century of China’s without having some idea of what Communism is. Or of any other continent, for that matter (except for Antarctica).

And, if you find yourself wondering just how ditsy it actually is for Donald Trump to call Kamala Harris a Communist, Wolff’s lecture could shed some light on it.

On the other side of that point, John Stoehr recently did a piece mocking that accusation by explaining why Trump is actually the Commie. (2) It’s kind of cute. But it’s also kind of a flashback to lazy Cold War polemics. It’s meant to be a light piece, in which he has lines like this: “Trump isn’t defending capitalism. He’s defending white power.” It is cute. But trying to fit his perception with any meaningful definition of what the groups and regimes that call themselves Communist have been about would be a brain-twister.

There has been a gigantic amount written, published, broadcast and taught about Communism. If someone were trying to get a historical picture of what it is, they could research articles with names like "The Communist Theory of State" (3) or “A British Version of ‘Browderism’: British Communists and the Teheran Conference of 1943” (4).

Or, you could watch a just-the-facts kind of presentation from someone like Richard Wolfe that doesn’t require the reader to have any kind of deep background in the last two centuries of socialist and communist history, theory, and endless polemics.

The Austrian left-social-democrat Carl Grünberg (1861–1940) published an article in 1912 dealing with the origins of the words “socialist“ and “socialism. (5) The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" in the sense it came to be known in the 19th century he found was in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement and it was used to describe the “Owenites”. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, Grünberg finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it referred to the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927. He and Ernst Czóbel (6) find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840. Grünberg found the earliest usage of the noun form in German in and 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), and Czóbel found the noun used in Hungarian in 1842.

In other words, the term “socialist” in the now-familiar meaning came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as “utopian socialist”, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Since we’re coming up on the 500-year anniversary of the German Peasant Wars of 1525 that are also a major part of the story of the Protestant Reformation, it’s worth noting that radical Protestant and proto-Protestant religious sects of that era as well as some the peasant movements themselves have also been referred to in a descriptive and not necessarily pejorate sense as “communist,” because they advocated some idea of community property. The German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) in his two-volume work on Forerunners of Modern Socialism (1909) titled the first volume, “Communist Movements in the Middle Ages,” and the second, “Communism in the German Reformation.”

The term “primitive communism” is also used to refer to practices of early Christian communities. The late-medieval and early-modern versions looked to that early Christian example, as they understood it, as a model for society.

Notes:

(1) Wolff, Richard (2024): Economic Update: Understanding Communism Pt. 1. Democracy At Work YouTube channel. <https://youtu.be/-L9rxsESNGU?si=v6qRWt5ThlcDS588> (Accessed: 2024-21-09).

(2) Stoehr, John (2024): Face it, Trump is a communist. The Editorial Board 09/27/2024. <https://www.editorialboard.com/face-it-trump-is-a-communist/> (Accessed: 2024-21-09).

(4) Redfern, Neil (2005): A British Version of “Browderism”: British Communists and the Teheran Conference of 1943. Science & Society 66:3, 360-380.

(5) Grünberg, Carl (1912): Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“. Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbetiterbewegung (aka, Grünberg Archiv) 2:1912. <http://www.literature.at/viewer.alo?objid=12621&scale=2&viewmode=fullscreen&page=374> (Accessed: 2024-21-09).

6) Czóbel, Ernst (1913): Zur Verbreitung der Worte ,,Sozialist" und ,,Sozialismus". Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 3:1913, 481-485. <http://www.literature.at/viewer.alo?objid=12622&viewmode=fullscreen&scale=2&page=467> (Accessed: 2024-21-09).