On November 11, 1887, August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, and Adolph Fisher were hanged for their alleged role in the deadly Haymarket bombing, which occurred at a labor rally in support of the 8-hr workday in Chicago on May 4 the previous year. Although the identity of the bomb thrower was never established, Spies, Parsons, Engel, Fisher, and four others were tried for murder on the theory that their anarchistic ideas and activism, if not their direct actions, were to blame for the bombing. The trial came to be regarded as a travesty of justice; in 1893, Illinois governor John Altgeld pardoned the three surviving defendants.
In a forthcoming essay for the Newberry Library’s Digital Collections for the Classroom project, I discuss the effects of Haymarket on Chicago‘s Jewish immigrant community within the broader context of the city’s Jewish working-class history. (Update: the essay is now online.) Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who began arriving in Chicago in large numbers just a few years earlier, were not directly involved in the events of Haymarket; nevertheless, they were profoundly influenced by them. (While Eastern European Jewish immigrants weren’t directly involved, it is notable that two of the lawyers who defended the accused Haymarket anarchists were Jewish, and one of them, Sigmund Zeisler, was a recent German-speaking immigrant from Austria.) For Abraham Bisno, a Jewish garment worker from Ukraine, Haymarket was a formative experience. A month before the bombing in April 1886, Bisno saw Spies give a German speech to a group of workers, which as a native Yiddish speaker he could understand. By his own account, the speech set Bisno’s mind “aflame” and opened his eyes to the nature of capitalism as an unjust, historically transient, class-based system that could be overcome through conscious social action. On May 5, 1886—one day after the bombing—Bisno and other Jewish tailors organized a march to demand better wages and working conditions. The procession was violently suppressed by the police as it crossed the Van Buren Street Bridge. In his autobiography, Bisno described the state of “martial law” that prevailed in the aftermath of Haymarket: “Labor unions were raided, broken up, their property confiscated, the police used their clubs freely. Arrests were made without any cause, and the life of the working man was not quite safe when out on strike.” Shaken but undeterred, Bisno and his comrades went on to organize the Chicago Cloakmakers’ Union, a forerunner of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union; in 1890, Bisno was elected the union’s first president.
Haymarket also made a strong impression on Philip Bregstone, a Jewish immigrant from a small town in what is today Lithuania (then Poland). Bregstone arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1887. The city was still reeling in the aftermath of the bombing and trial, and the defendants were still fighting their convictions in appeals court. Impressed by Spies’s fiery oratory, Bregstone said that he “hurled bombs at his enemy, the capitalistic class, not made of explosive chemicals, but bombs of logic and science” and “was an orator of dynamic force” who “spoke equally well in English and German.” In his 1933 cultural history, Chicago and Its Jews, Bregstone described how Haymarket planted the seeds for the city’s Jewish labor movement, leading directly to the formation of the Jewish Workingmen’s Educational Society. “It was there that the Jewish labor movement, Jewish radicalism, socialism and anarchism in this city, first saw the light of the day,” Bregstone wrote. The organization “established a modest library, conducted lectures and encouraged public speaking.” Bisno was one of the society’s leading members, as was Peter Sissman, a prominent socialist, lawyer, and associate of celebrated civil rights attorney Clarence Darrow.
Frontispiece from a Yiddish translation of the speeches of they Haymarket Martyrs, translated by A. Frumkin with a foreword by Alexander Berkman.
For Hilda Polacheck, who arrived in Chicago from Poland in 1892, several years after the events of Haymarket, the episode had already acquired an almost mythic status. In her memoir, she describes attending a Haymarket memorial meeting led by anarchist and fellow Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman in 1903. As an immigrant forced to work long hours in a knitting factory to support her family after her father died, Polacheck related to the events of Haymarket personally. “As I sat there listening to the recital of these events, I kept thinking of the shirtwaist factory and the hours I worked, and I could not get myself to feel that asking for the eight-hour day was a crime,” she wrote. Although she “was horrified at the throwing of the bomb” she was equally shocked by the state’s brutal suppression of labor activists. Her “father had come to America … because here in this wonderful country a man was free to say what he wanted, even if he was wrong.”
138 years later, the issues that animated the Haymarket affair and its aftermath remain relevant. People are still overworked and underpaid, immigrants continue to have their civil rights abused, and authoritarian politicians continue to threaten freedom of speech. At the turn of the twentieth century, members of Chicago’s Jewish immigrant working-class reacted to such abuses and indignities by joining with others to form a broad movement for democracy and labor and civil rights. For example, Bisno and Polacheck formed close relationships with Jane Addams and Hull House, forging coalitions to pass labor laws and support strikes from the 1890s through the 1910s, activities that helped pave the way for the social democratic reforms of the New Deal era. Their motivations were decidedly secular and political rather than spiritual or religious, yet Chicago’s working-class Jewish immigrants were still informed by a broader Jewish consciousness, which Emma Goldman alluded to when she said of the Haymarket affair, in Polacheck’s recollection, “that everybody in the hall knew the story of the martyred comrades, but like the story of the Exodus, it had to be told each year so that ‘we will not forget.’” Rather than looking to messiahs or prophets, however, they looked to themselves and their fellows to make a better world.
Several months ago, I posted a review of George Lakey’s 2017 book, Viking Economics. While overall I liked Lakey’s accessible exposition of the social democratic policies prevalent in countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, I did raise a few quibbles. One of my criticisms was that Lakey could have explained more clearly how the Nordics rely on the welfare state to prevent poverty by providing income support to people who cannot earn income through the regular labor market, such as the unemployed. A recent article in The New York Times offers a dramatic illustration of this point while demonstrating the broader virtues of social democratic welfare states as promoters of dignity, independence, and personal freedom.
Before turning to the article, it might be useful to review some key concepts. According to policy analyst Matt Bruenig, whom I cited in my review of Lakey, there are six types of people who typically cannot earn “factor income” via the market: children, students, the elderly, the disabled, caretakers, and the unemployed. Unless they own assets that allow them to collect rent or capital income, people who fall into one of the above categories cannot earn income via the market because their situation precludes paid work. The point is especially clear in the case of the unemployed, whose jobs have literally been taken from them and who have thus lost the wages on which they had previously relied.
As Bruenig argues, poverty tends to afflict people in these groups because they have no way to make money. A well-designed welfare state ensures that they are not plunged into penury by providing them with income via child allowances, old-age pensions, disability benefits, and the like. In the case of the unemployed, unemployment insurance makes up for the income shock that accompanies job loss, ensuring that unemployed people can cover basic living expenses such as housing and food, as well as other financial obligations that they might have incurred while earning income from work.
In the Nordic countries, these benefits often replace income at a relatively high percentage of the previous wages earned while also providing resources to help people who are out of work find new opportunities and upgrade their skills via training and education. In the United States, however, unemployment insurance is often much more meager, exposing people who are unemployed to the dangers of poverty and placing them in a position of dependence and vulnerability.
Unemployment insurance in the U.S. is also administered at the state level, creating a confusing patchwork of bureaucracies with different benefits and requirements. When I lost my job as a remote worker at the end of 2023, for example, it was hard to determine if I should apply for benefits in the state where I lived or the state where my employer was located. Each state told me to contact the other. In the end, I didn’t get any unemployment benefits despite losing the job through no fault of my own. Fortunately, I could rely on savings, income from my wife who was still employed, and my supportive family. Overdue bills, missed rent or mortgage payments, lack of food, and homelessness were never real risks. Not everyone is so lucky.
The mental and financial stress of joblessness is the subject of The New York Times article mentioned above, which shows that such stresses derive from choices in government policy, not immutable laws of nature. The article follows two women—one American and one Swedish—who both lost jobs in automobile plants. Melinda Minor, who worked at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio that relocated to Mexico, struggled to meet health and education expenses after she lost her employer-provided health insurance and had to pay for her son’s public university education on a diminished income. Although she was able to take advantage of a government-sponsored retraining program, her new job installing HVAC systems paid significantly less than her auto industry job. Eventually, Minor got a new auto industry job that pays more than her old GM job because the plant is organized by the UAW. Despite this stroke of good fortune, however, she is still scarred by her experience of joblessness.
Josefine Soderberg was equally shocked when the Swedish plant she worked at manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles announced that it would be shutting down, but the fallout was not nearly so traumatic. For one thing, as alluded to above, Sweden offers more generous unemployment insurance that replaces lost income at a higher rate. According to the NYT, “an American family of four—two parents and two children—typically receives unemployment benefits amounting to 36 percent of the family’s previous income” six months after losing a job. A comparable Swedish family, by contrast “would gain benefits that are almost double the American share—70 percent of its previous income.”
Cushioned by more generous benefits and assigned a job coach who helped her navigate her options and encouraged her to take her time in finding a new line of work, Soderberg remade herself as a small-business owner creating and selling art. She was able to get a six-month extension of her unemployment benefits and enrolled in a small-business training program that taught her the skills she needed to strike out on her own.
As the article notes, more generous unemployment insurance is not the only difference between the Swedish and American systems. Where Minor had to grapple with health expenses and the formidable American healthcare bureaucracy after losing her employer-sponsored health insurance plan, Soderberg was never in such a position because Sweden has a national health insurance system. Access to universal benefits independent of employment status gave Soderberg more room to breathe and maneuver—ultimately, it allowed her a greater degree of freedom to pursue her own path. As she explained to the Times: “If we didn’t have free health care, I couldn’t have done this. I don’t have to be scared of getting sick or something, because I can count on the system.”
While conservatives and proponents of laissez faire economic policies would have you believe that a robust welfare state encourages dependence and threatens to place us on the “road to serfdom,” to invoke the title of libertarian economist F.A. Hayek’s famous anti-social democratic polemic, the contrasting cases of Minor and Soderberg show the opposite: The welfare state, when properly designed, can be a bulwark against dependence on employers, overweening family members, or charitable institutions, whose non-standardized assistance in times of personal economic crisis often comes with significant strings attached. As Soderberg’s case shows, the social democratic welfare state provides people with the freedom they need to pursue their own version of happiness. For this reason, we might see it as peculiarly American. As the sociologist John Bellamy Foster asked rhetorically in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed: “Is democratic socialism the American dream?”
Enabling more personal security and freedom are not the only potentially salutary effects of embracing strong welfare states. As the framing of the Times article shows, a strong welfare state can help cushion the blows of a globalized economy, in which job loss results from international competition and the relocation of production to other countries. The economic devastation wrought by such forces can lead to populist backlashes that draw people to extreme, reactionary ideas—toxic forms of nationalism that blame problems on immigrants and conniving foreign powers. Promoting social democratic policies could thus function as an alternative to the hyper-nationalist, trade war-style policies pursued by both American political parties, but especially by the GOP under Donald Trump.
None of this is to say that the Nordic social democracies are without their own problems, including rightwing populism and xenophobia. Some even question whether it makes sense to call them proper social democracies anymore. As the Swedish historian Kjell Östberg shows in his recent book The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy, Swedish social democratic ambitions have been significantly chastened since their heyday in the 1970s, when strong social movements pushed for major reforms. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s has led to rollbacks and privatizations, especially in the realms of education and housing. Despite these setbacks, however, the successes of the Nordic social democracies can still point the way toward a more thoroughgoing democratic socialism, as Danish MP Pelle Dragsted argues in his recent work, Nordic Socialism. I hope to discuss both books in a future post.
I have long admired the Nordic social democracies. With strong labor unions, generous welfare states, and universal social programs that prevent poverty, promote equality, and preserve freedom, they are as close to “real utopias” as anything today. They are also powerful counterexamples to popular talking points about the virtues of unfettered capitalist markets. Whenever someone shoots down a proposal to make the U.S. economy fairer and more equal—by instituting, say, single-payer health insurance or a universal child allowance—on the grounds that such programs are too expensive, would distort incentives, stifle innovation, or bankrupt the nation, one can always point to the Nordic countries where such programs are the rule and life appears to go on as prosperous and happy as ever. Indeed, these counties frequently top lists of the happiest countries in the world, an impressive feat considering that half the year they’re shrouded in darkness.
That’s not to deny that the Nordic economies have their problems. Following the Great Recession of 2008, Iceland practically imploded due to the bad investments of its banking sector. In Norway, where the discovery of oil in the 1970s led to the creation of a sovereign wealth fund seeded with money from the production of fossil fuels, climate change presents acute challenges. And in Sweden and Denmark, cultural conflicts over immigration have fueled the rise of far-right parties who have used the welfare state as a wedge issue to turn working-class voters against new immigrants, who are portrayed as a drag on the countries’ public services. However, as George Lakey argues in his 2017 book Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got it Right—and How We Can, Too, despite these problems, “the Nordic model” is still worth emulating. In accessible prose and a conversational—one could almost say breezy—style, Lakey describes how the Nordic social democracies developed, what makes them thrive, and what they can teach the rest of the world.
Class Struggle and the Birth of the Nordic Model
One of the most valuable parts of Lakey’s discussion is his history of the Nordic model, which occupies a big chunk of the first part of the book. As skeptics of applying Nordic principles to the American economy often imply, the model can seem a natural correlate of Nordic culture, something in these countries’ DNA, as it were, and thus hard for other countries to replicate. What Lakey shows, however, is that although the bold adventuring spirit of the Viking past has played a role in the development of the Nordic social democracies, their history is quite recent, the product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Norwegian socialist Martin Tranmæl flirted with communism before charting a more moderate course. Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons.
Before then, Nordic societies were poor and unequal, mired in the same outmoded social customs and hierarchies as much of the rest of Europe. During the nineteenth century, many Scandinavians immigrated to North America in search of greater opportunity. The decision to adopt social democratic policies, leading to the creation of a strong welfare state, high-levels of equality, a much-diminished and chastened class of aristocrats and wealthy capitalists, and broadly shared prosperity was the outcome of social conflict and pressure from below in the form of a growing labor movement and nonviolent mass strikes that attracted broad social support. As Lakey shows in the case of Norway, the Nordic country he knows best, a militant workers’ movement that flirted openly with communism was key to the creation of a strong social democratic culture in which the power of owners was checked by democratic institutions that applied not just to the polity but also to the workplace. This history suggests that the Nordic model has less to do with “cultural DNA” than with class struggle and social movement organizing.
What Makes the Nordic Model Special?
In the second part of the book, Lakey moves beyond history to look at the institutions and ideas that underpin the Nordic model in greater detail, focusing on the areas of gender equality, work-life balance, poverty, taxes, education, racism, and efforts to combat global warming. While Lakey cites impressive initiatives in all these policy areas, I was especially interested in his discussions of work-life balance, poverty, and taxes. These topics comprise core aspects of the economy which affect large swathes of the population and are the areas where the U.S. has the most to learn from the Nordic countries, in my opinion. That’s not to say there isn’t much to learn in the other areas, whose importance must not be underestimated; but the Nordic emphasis on collective bargaining and a welfare state that provides universal services through the public rather than the private marketplace represents one of the most dramatic contrasts between the Nordic and the U.S. models.
Lakey’s discussion of these areas is illuminating. Americans have good reason to be jealous of the generous paid vacation time that Nordic workers enjoy (roughly five weeks), their guaranteed health insurance, which they get independent of employment, and the active labor market policies that ensure workers are matched with jobs that best suit their talents and interests. Although the Nordic tax burden may appear onerous from a U.S. perspective, it enjoys widespread support because of the high-quality services it finances. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that Lakey was sometimes bending over backwards to accommodate dubious U.S. assumptions about the sanctity of work and private initiative even as he extolled the Nordic rejection of “neoliberal” market logic.
My copy of Lakey’s book.
Take work. Lakey emphasizes the Nordic respect for work as a key driver of their success in reducing poverty. For example, in a section entitled “The Central Role of Work In Anti-Poverty Strategy,” Lakey writes: “For the Norwegians’ economic design, paid work is fundamental” (p. 128). While I wouldn’t dispute that assertion per se, I would argue that Lakey could have emphasized more clearly that the Nordic economies succeed in reducing poverty by distributing income through the welfare state rather than exclusively through the market mechanism of “factor income,” which distributes income based on things like rents, profits, and wages. As policy analyst and Nordic welfare state connoisseur Matt Bruenig argues, meeting the needs of people who can’t earn factor income because they don’t own assets and can’t work (because they belong to a core category of nonworkers: children, retired people, the disabled, the unemployed, students, and caretakers) is key to reducing poverty. “People who do not generally study poverty often erroneously believe that the answer to poverty is more jobs and higher wages,” Bruenig writes. “This is not surprising because this is the major poverty narrative of [U.S.] society. But this strategy runs into a wall very quickly” because “poverty afflicts nonworkers.” The reliance on the welfare state, which distributes income apart from work, is a big part of what makes the Nordic model successful and is something we should emulate here in the U.S. To his credit, Lakey does emphasize the importance of universal social programs to the Nordic model, which provide key services like healthcare, education, and childcare for all irrespective of income or employment status.
Lakey also emphasizes the role of cooperatives in the Nordic economies, taking pains to show the size and importance of this sector within the overall model. While I have nothing against co-ops and would welcome their spread in the United States, I wondered why Lakey didn’t also stress the role of state ownership in the Nordic model, a phrase that appears nowhere in the book, according to a Kindle keyword search. (Lakey does mention that Norway is home to “the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world,” but only in passing in his discussion of climate change.) Once again, Bruenig’s work is insightful. As he has discussed at length, the Nordic economies are characterized by a high degree of public ownership, often exceeding the levels of state ownership in more nominally socialistic countries such as Venezuela. I was also surprised that Lakey did not mention the Meidner Plan, an ambitious proposal by Sweden’s labor unions to socialize the country’s economy through wage-earner funds.
Another weakness of the book is its near total neglect of Finland. While technically not a Scandinavian country due to its geography and language, Finland is still considered a Nordic country, and its economy includes many of the same institutions that make the other Nordic countries stand out. Fortunately, readers interested in Finland can pick up The Nordic Theory of Everything by Finnish American journalist Anu Partanen, which complements Lakey’s book well.
Why the Nordic Model Isn’t Just for the Nordics
Aside from the history it tells, the main strength of Viking Economics is its concluding discussion of why the Nordic model is generalizable beyond the borders of the Nordic countries. Lakey organizes this discussion as a Q&A, answering the questions he has heard most frequently in the talks that he has given on the virtues of the Nordic economies. Common talking points against applying Nordic principles in the U.S. include the fact that the Nordic countries are small and have homogenous populations, whereas the U.S. is big and diverse. As Lakey points out, however, small size is generally considered a disadvantage when it comes to economics. “A big and wealthy country like ours can take on many projects that are beyond the reach of smaller countries,” he writes. “There are many ways in which the United States could use its advantages of scale to exceed the achievements of the Nordics” ( p. 245-6). And on the question of homogeneity, it’s not clear how it is relevant to providing things like free public higher education. As Lakey points out, New York City, a very diverse place, once offered free public higher ed. The contrast between Spain and Portugal provides another counterexample to the homogeneity and size talking points. Portugal is smaller and more homogenous than Spain, yet it is poorer and more unequal. One could go on, but these examples should give a taste of how Lakey addresses common arguments against importing the Nordic model to the U.S.
Finally, Lakey is at his best when explaining how nonviolent mass protest can achieve progressive change. As he compellingly shows, this is what happened in countries like Norway in the early 20th century and Iceland after the 2008 economic collapse. Lakey combines his pacifist beliefs as a Quaker with myriad examples of social reform from the 1930s and 1960s to make a persuasive case that well-organized social movements using peaceful tactics are the best vehicle for lasting change. Such movements offer a glimmer of hope in our dystopian present: It is often when countries are most polarized that grassroots change can occur most rapidly. “Just as in the Nordic countries in the 1920s and ’30s, the legitimacy of the U.S. political economy is shredding,” Lakey writes. “Now, because legitimacy has eroded, we can go well beyond the piecemeal reforms yielded in the ’60s that kept the power structure in place” (p. 264). The damage and further polarization sure to be inflicted by the second Trump administration offer a chance to test this idea—and an incentive to prove it right.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde turned heads at an inaugural prayer service earlier this week when she ended her sermon with a plea for returning president Donald Trump to “be merciful to the stranger” and “honor the dignity of every human being.” Budde’s plea evoked a proud Christian tradition of solidarity with the powerless and marginalized. While often downplayed in politically conservative strains of Christianity, that ethos lies at the historical foundation of the religion. Her reference to the “stranger,” moreover, recalled Jewish Passover traditions, which remind Jews to treat strangers with respect “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Jews have also been known to pen paeans to Christianity’s emancipatory theology, surprising as that may sound. Consider, for example, an article published in the Chicago-based, Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Labor World in 1908 under the headline “Christianity as a Revolutionary Movement.” Besides presenting a polemical reading of Christianity as a radical movement of justice and equality, it is remarkable for appearing in a Yiddish newspaper—not the first place you’d expect to read an encomium on Christian values.
Jewish Labor World (Idishe Arbayter Velt in Yiddish) was founded in Chicago in 1908. While more obscure than the famous leftwing Yiddish newspapers of the day, such as the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtime (the Free Voice of Labor), Idishe Arbayter Velt nevertheless played a significant role in the development of the Jewish socialist and labor movement in Chicago and the wider United States. The paper was published as a weekly until 1917, after which it became a daily and merged with the better-known New York-based Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward). I encountered the paper through my research into Jewish Chicago at the Newberry Library. The article, which I’ve translated from Yiddish, was written by Hillel Rogoff, the Idishe Arbayter Velt’s first editor.
Front page of Jewish Labor World featuring an image of Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket in 1908. Debs was famous for incorporating prophetic Biblical rhetoric into his speeches.
Christianity as a Revolutionary Movement by Hillel Rogoff
The original Christian ideas were revolutionary. The hope prevailed among the followers of the Christian religion that Jesus would soon return to this world with a great military force, and after a bloody war, he would destroy the Roman government and, in its place, found a state in which all people would live equally and fraternally.
Customarily, such a hope appealed strongly to the oppressed masses: the worse the poverty among the proletarians became, the more they were drawn to the Christian movement, which painted such a bright, lofty future for them.
The poverty at that time was the great social question in Rome. Even the Roman government took measures to alleviate people’s suffering. But the government couldn’t give out more than a little bit of aid, and what they gave hardly sufficed at a time when thousands of people were unable to find gainful employment of any kind. Many Roman intellectuals dismissed poverty as a harmless phenomenon. No help was to be found except for from the preachers of Christianity.
First, these Christians cast the whole blame for such troubles upon the ruling classes and awoke in the masses a feeling of revolution against these rulers. Further, they undertook practical work to help the poor. Whoever founded a Christian community took it upon themselves as their first duty to combat the poverty and need of the masses. They introduced communism into the provision of food. All who belonged to the same community ate from the same table and lived together fraternally. If there was one rich man in a community, the others did not lack. He shared each bite with everyone.
The Christian doctrines, the dogmas and ceremonies, did not at that time constitute the main point of Christianity. They were merely the clothes in which the noble work was clad. And because Christianity gave the masses something practical, because the poor man knew that being a member of a Christian community, he would at least not need to suffer any hunger, many thousands of proletarians joined up.
The article’s headline as it appeared in the pages of the Idishe Arbayter Velt on July 24, 1908.
It goes without saying that the Roman government considered these communities a great danger. They openly cursed the Roman aristocracy’s libertine lifestyles and blamed them for the troubles of the land. From the beginning, the government threatened the leaders and agitators and ordered them to stop their propaganda, but that was of little avail. To the contrary, with every day their numbers grew, and what’s more, they grew bitterer in their appeals to Roman society. The government saw that they could not achieve their goals with talk and orders alone, so they decided to drown the whole movement in a sea of blood.
This struggle of the Romans against the first Christians is one of the most appalling chapters of world history. Christians were persecuted with fire and sword. Every day, masses of them were thrown before hungry wild animals. They were forced to endure great suffering; they were routinely burned and roasted and torn limb from limb.
When trouble befell the land, Christians were blamed, and they had difficulty evading the charges. When the harvest was poor, the Roman army was defeated on the battlefield, or an epidemic broke out in the city, Christians were invariably scapegoated. The government already had its own hired servants who used to incite the blind masses in such times; they used to attack the weak, defenseless Christians and treat them a thousand times worse still than the Black Hundreds treated the Jews in the time of terrible pogroms. [The prior sentence is very hard to read due to the poor quality of the scanned microfiche, but I’m fairly confident it is accurate. Yiddish keners can correct me if I’m wrong.]
The Christian communities were strengthened by these persecutions, however. Thousands saw the government’s murderousness and began to sympathize with the persecuted. Gradually, the sympathizers were drawn to the Christian communities and became Christians themselves. Furthermore, the Christians held fast to their beliefs. For them, death was a game. Young girls used to endure burning and being torn apart by wild animals without so much as shedding a tear. Many considered it a blessing to die for God [kidesh hashem] because then the Church would recognize them as holy martyrs, for whom the doors of paradise are always open wide. The joy with which many used to sacrifice themselves for their religion drew thousands of fresh adherents, and Christianity increasingly captivated the better, noble children of the people.
By the dawn of the third century, Christianity had become a powerful force in Roman society. The government began to understand that to continue their struggle would endanger them more than it would the Christians. Thus, the persecutions gradually came to an end, and the government began to seek peace with the Christian communities. And from this very peace with Rome, developed the Christian Church, the dark power of the Middle Ages.
As long as the proletariat, the poor, oppressed worker, was its bearer and disseminator, Christianity remained true to its first principles. Then it was the preacher of revolution and the protector of the poor. As the government forged a partnership with the Christian faith and aristocrats began to adopt it as their own religion, however, Christianity took on a different guise.
The story that Jesus will soon return and introduce a free society where all will be equal and live happily has been twisted to refer only to the next life. In our world, all must go on as usual; only after death will Jesus show mercy to his true servants and make them happy. This is taken a step further still, and everyone who sticks to the old belief that Jesus will return to this world to introduce justice is cursed as a heretic. According to the preachings of the Church, the truly pious need not concern himself with this world. Here is not the place for earthly pleasure but only service to God. Pleasure will only be enjoyed later as compensation for following God’s commandments now.
Sources:
Rogoff, Hillel (under the pseudonym Ger Toshav). “Christianity as a Revolutionary Movement.” Idishe Arbayter Velt, July 24, 1908. Accessed via the Newspaper Collection at the National Library of Israel.
“Make Orwell Fiction Again.” So read t-shirts and hats mimicking Donald Trump’s infamous 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” in a not-so-subtle dig at a president who openly styles himself as something of an authoritarian leader. In 1984, Orwell’s famous dystopian novel—sales of which soared in the wake of Trump’s election—surveillance is ubiquitous, truth is malleable and coincides with whatever the Party needs it to be, and the forces of repression are readily deployed to stamp out even the faintest glimmer of dissent. Trump may not exactly be Big Brother (and to the extent that he is, the way has been paved for him by his two immediate predecessors, who created and entrenched the surveillance-deportation-police state that Trump now helms); nevertheless, Trump’s deployment of federal forces in Washington D.C. and Portland to quash protests, his suggestion to postpone the presidential election, and his evident intention to engage in voter suppression during a pandemic by sabotaging the United States Post Office do genuinely raise the specter of incipient Orwellian dystopia.
Trump isn’t the first U.S. president in recent memory to demonstrate an affinity for the Orwellian, of course. The term was widely applied to George W. Bush between 2000 and 2008. It wasn’t just Bush’s dubious claim to being legitimately elected to a first term that earned him his Orwellian reputation. The dystopian moniker acquired its real meaning with the rise of the post-9/11 national security state and the push to make war on Iraq, which involved a startling amount of lies, propaganda, and trampling on individual rights and freedoms in the name national unity. The run-up to the Iraq War, for example, was rife with the sort of duplicitous language Orwell famously deplored. As the philosopher Douglass Kellner remarks, “Bush’s discourse…displayed Orwellian features of [doublethink] where war against Iraq is for peace, the occupation of Iraq is its liberation, destroying its food and water supplies enables ‘humanitarian’ action, and where the murder of countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’” With the advent of legislation and organizations like the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, we can also see the logic of doublethink at work: American patriotism and its associations with freedom are called upon to license incursions on privacy and the chilling of thought (the Patriot Act famously allowed individuals’ library records to be examined); the defense of the “homeland” from foreign enemies is predictably used to crack down on domestic protest. Like the antagonistic power blocs of 1984 in which the constant threat of war is mobilized as a means of domestic control, the open-ended War on Terror was invoked to justify suspending civil liberties and the rule of law.
As these examples show, invocations of the “Orwellian” almost invariably refer to the threat of sprawling state power; it is the rise of unaccountable executive authority and an expansion of the apparatus of state surveillance, propaganda, and repression that most readily conjure Orwellian associations. While the reasons for these associations are obvious, they are a gross simplification of what Orwell himself considered the dystopian tendencies of modern society. Orwell saw the baneful effects of power and hierarchy in capitalist societies as well as communist, in interactions between private individuals as well as those between individuals and the state. When we narrowly equate the Orwellian features of contemporary U.S. society with state power, we neglect the authoritarian aspects of so-called civil society to which Orwell himself attributes the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. To appreciate Orwell’s insights, we must reacquaint ourselves with a part of his legacy that has remained obscure: his democratic socialism.
If you only knew about Orwell from ambient cultural references, you could be excused for thinking he was a man of the libertarian right. If one takes 1984 as the canonical statement of Orwell’s political views, for example, then one might easily come away with the impression that there can be no power more oppressive than the state, an inherently totalitarian entity whose growth must be resisted at all costs. An article published last year by the libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education is a case in point. Aiming to push back against readings of 1984 as primarily a harbinger of the dystopian potential of technology to become a form of ubiquitous surveillance, the author states correctly that Orwell intended 1984 specifically as a warning about the threat of totalitarian Soviet communism; however, she assiduously avoids mentioning Orwell’s many criticisms of capitalism. While she does make passing reference to Orwell as a writer on “the left,” one would never know from the article that he wrote a sympathetic book about socialism and joined with socialists, communists, and anarchists to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, much less that he intended his criticisms of the Soviet Union as necessary for the defense of his own understanding of socialism. The Orwell of anti-communist lore probably wouldn’t have uttered these words, which the Orwell of flesh and blood wrote in his 1946 essay “Why I Write”: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Now that the Soviet Union is a thing of the past, the inadequacies of capitalism are all the more apparent; Orwell’s positive vision of a democratic socialism is all the more timely and urgent.
How did Orwell understand democratic socialism? Although he left behind no systematic elaboration of his political ideas, fruitful hints at what Orwell considered socialism’s main elements are scattered throughout his voluminous writings. One book in which the reader encounters frequent explicit statements on socialism is The Road to Wigan Pier, a work which Orwell published in 1937 as part of the Left Book Club series edited by the socialist intellectual Victor Gallancz. “Socialism,” Orwell says there,
is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
Orwell worries, however, that despite its obvious appeal, socialism is not gaining ground while fascism is. He blames this on socialists’ poor communication and off-putting sub-cultural tendencies, which conspire to keep it a marginal force. He famously spends the second part of Road to Wigan Pier railing against socialists and proffering a series of unkind caricatures of them to explain why socialism lacks the appeal he thinks it ought to have. “As with the Christian religion,” Orwell drily remarks, “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” Orwell was so rude toward socialists that Victor Gallancz was compelled to include a rejoinder as a foreword to the Left Book Club edition of the book. (Gallancz’s foreword remains a salutary antidote to some of Orwell’s more rebarbative caricatures.)
Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier. Photo courtesy of Publishing History. Learn more about the Left Book Club here.
Though opponents of socialism sometimes seize on these passages as support for their own hostility toward socialism, it shouldn’t be supposed that because Orwell attacks socialists, he opposes socialism. To the contrary, to ably expound socialism, he explains, one must get “inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism,” or at least regard them sympathetically, in order to know how to reply. “Therefore, rather paradoxically,” he concludes, “in order to defend Socialism it is necessary to start by attacking it.” Orwell’s objections to socialism ultimately serve to strengthen his case for it by understanding how to better communicate its appeal. It is best to keep the message simple, straightforward, and intuitive rather than elaborately theorized, he concludes. “To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night,” writes Orwell, “socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.” Socialism’s underlying ideals are justice and liberty according to Orwell. “Socialism means justice and common decency,” he declares.
While it is possible to take exception to Orwell’s formulations on account of their lack of specificity, the wisdom of his advice is evident in the success with which Bernie Sanders has used similar rhetoric to describe his own brand of democratic socialism. Interspersed with myriad concrete policy proposals, the rhetoric of freedom and common decency has been used by Sanders to great effect: he came within striking distance of the Democratic nomination for president—a hitherto unimaginable feat for an avowed socialist—and helped to galvanize a popular movement on behalf of major social democratic reforms. Where opponents of Medicare for All have wielded the rhetoric of freedom in defense of the private health insurance companies, raising the specter of “big government” encroachment on the individual’s choice, Sanders has effectively countered by appealing to a different vision of freedom in which the production of universal public goods like healthcare would free people from dependence on whatever private benefits their boss does (or doesn’t) happen to provide. Based on a solid foundation of rights to such public goods, individuals would be freer to pursue happiness on their own terms. Although Sanders’ campaign did not ultimately prevail, it popularized support for both specific policies and a broader democratic socialist vision. Sanders’ success suggests that Orwell’s instinct to eschew theoretical jargon and make the case for socialism in terms of widely held values like liberty and justice is probably correct and worth bearing in mind.
As Orwell was concluding The Road to Wigan Pier, he was concerned by fascism’s rapid advance. Indeed, this was one of the reasons he was so critical of socialists; he wanted them to be strong and popular in order to thwart the fascist challenge. In 1936, the most important front in the fight against fascism was in Spain, where an alliance of monarchist and Catholic forces, which soon came to be led by General Francisco Franco, had attempted a coup against the democratically elected Popular Front government, leading to a civil war that pitted Franco and his army against a coalition of republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists. Many of them, like Orwell, came from abroad. Orwell went in association with the British Independent Labor Party and fought with the Party of Marxist Unity (P.O.U.M.). In his book Homage to Catalonia, in which he recounts his experiences fighting fascism, Orwell writes enthusiastically about the spirit of socialist solidarity that pervaded the ranks of the militias:
[T]he Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.
In spite of this spirit of camaraderie—or perhaps because of its exuberant independence—his party affiliations got him in trouble with the Stalinists, who wouldn’t tolerate an alternative to Soviet authority among the anti-fascist forces. His near liquidation at the hands of the Stalinist terror—Andres Nin, the leader of the P.O.U.M., was not so lucky—left a deep impression on him, and 1984 and Animal Farm are the product of his encounter with totalitarian Soviet communism. In the larger context of his life, however, they are clear rebukes of the Soviet system in the name of democratic socialism.
A P.O.U.M. postcard. You can learn more about the P.O.U.M. and see more postcards like this one here.
Take Animal Farm, for example, which is widely known as an anti-communist allegory and cautionary tale about the propensity of revolutions to devour their children. While in one respect this is a perfectly accurate interpretation of the story, to describe it in this way is to overlook its central irony, which is that the ultimate crime of the pigs who rule the farm with an iron fist is to become indistinguishable from capitalists. The pigs are bad because they contradict the stated principles of the animals’ rebellion, not because they are true to them. They gradually revise the revolution’s initial reforms to permit themselves to engage in behaviors that had been the reason for rebelling against human rule in the first place, culminating in the absurd proposition that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The pigs violate the spirit of solidarity embodied in “Beasts of England,” the animals’ anthem of revolution, and they finally outlaw the song altogether lest it inspire rebellion against their own oppressive class rule. Eventually, even the name of the farm reverts from Animal Farm to Manor Farm, and the pigs begin to walk on two legs. Indeed, the initial vision of revolution is inspiring and persists among the rank and file animals in spite of its perversion in the hands of the pigs. The silent meditations of Clover, one of the farm’s two carthorses, are representative:
As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak.
Passages like this suggest that the degeneration of the original values of the revolution into an oppressive order indistinguishable from the status quo ante under Mr. Jones is the real tragedy of the story.
One might still wish to argue that part of Orwell’s lesson is however good the principles of revolutions are in theory, in practice they tend more or less inevitably toward dictatorship, so it is almost categorically better not to aspire to them in the first place. Yet even if the animals’ revolutionary ideology is depicted as ill-fated, human society and its prevailing attitudes are not presented as any more attractive (in the end, they may in fact look worse). The humans appear as selfish, competitive, and authoritarian. Mr. Jones is a drunk who forgets to feed the animals and blasts a shotgun to silence their obstreperous singing. His ouster is the just and predictable result of his behavior. The other humans are concerned to suppress any yearnings for animal self-management on their own farms, by punitive and heavy-handed means if necessary, while also scrambling amongst themselves for bigger shares of the pie. After Jones is ousted, he retreats to the tap room of the Red Lion pub to nurse his wounds. Rather than genuinely caring about his plight, his fellow farmers privately scheme to make his loss their gain: “The other farmers sympathized in principle, but they did not at first give him much help. At heart, each of them was secretly wondering whether he could not somehow turn Jones’s misfortune to his own advantage.” Orwell’s depiction of the humans as ruthless competitors is reminiscent of Marx’s observation that “capitalists are like hostile brothers who divide among themselves the loot of other people’s labor.” Revolution has its risks, but it’s not clear that the status quo is any more desirable.
While Animal Farm is clearly more complex than its interpretation as a simple anti-communist allegory suggests, it is understandable how one might come away from it without realizing the extent of Orwell’s socialist sympathies. To get a firmer grasp of Orwell’s socialist views, it is necessary to read his works more widely than they are usually read.
Take, for example, his review of The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek’s famous warning that anything more substantial than the most minimal welfare state presages the extinction of freedom and individuality altogether. While Orwell does not dismiss Hayek’s concerns, he finds them one-sided, and he cautions that Hayek “does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.”
For those accustomed to the libertarian view that tyranny is synonymous with state power, this remark should be eye-opening; as Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, an elemental aspect of socialism’s appeal is the freedom from the boss that it promises. Higher wages and shorter hours mean less time at work under the thumb of another and more time to spend as you like. (The caution against concentrations of private power is all the more relevant today as major tech companies like Facebook control an ever-greater amount of public discourse while they simultaneously conduct mass surveillance.) Ever the pragmatist, Orwell is skeptical of the glories of free competition as described in theory as opposed to how it operates in reality: “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that’s where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.”
Indeed, it is just this drift of opinion in the face of market failures—and the directions toward which it can be channeled—that concerns Orwell about capitalism and makes him see the necessity for a democratic form of socialism: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Communism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can be somehow combined with freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.”
Soviet-style communism and capitalism, are, in Orwell’s view, two sides of the same coin. They reside near each other on the extremely unequal end of a continuum of social hierarchy; communism, along with fascism, is a totalitarian reaction to the initial hierarchical set-up of capitalism, in which a small minority controls a disproportionate amount of resources, living extravagantly, while the vast majority exists at the whim of volatile market oscillations, constantly facing the forced choice of work or starvation. Orwell’s proposal for a planned economy combined with freedom of the intellect may be light on details, yet it is not difficult to imagine the type of society he has in mind—it is clearly one in which democratically accountable government policy has a significant role to play in arranging economic activity and institutions so that everyone has enough to live a life of dignity and purpose. The threat of totalitarian communism may have subsided, but capitalism remains as crisis prone as ever, leading to festering resentments which all too often manifest as nationalist rivalries.
One of those who recognized that Orwell’s disdain for authoritarianism and propaganda applied to capitalist societies as well as communist was the philosopher Erich Fromm. As Fromm wrote in his 1961 afterword to 1984, Orwell’s dystopian novel applied not just to Russian and Chinese communism but also to Western societies, who are purveyors of doublethink of their own style. In Western societies, in addition to the central authority of the state, there also exist large private corporations which wield considerable political and economic power. Their decisions, insulated from democratic accountability, affect countless lives, and they engage in the perpetual propaganda campaign known as advertising. As Fromm writes, “We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism, and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, and motivated by materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.”
Although Fromm wrote during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union still existed and the threat of nuclear war between it and the United States seemed an imminent possibility, and we inhabit a post-Cold War world today (or at least so we are told), he still offers valuable insights. After all, we are returning to an era of “great power” competition in which “Communist China” plays a main role. Thanks to the revival of tensions with Russia via the “Russiagate” scandal, any post-Cold War peace dividend we gained has been resolvedly spent, and even the imagery of the Soviet Union has re-emerged as a way of imagining the Russian other. Fromm’s reading of Orwell is a timely reminder to look to our own behavior as well as the behavior of those we deem adversaries. Our society practices many of the same authoritarian tactics we accuse other nations of engaging in, and we support unabashedly authoritarian allies who commit sundry violations of democratic rights and principles. We refuse to acknowledge the authoritarianism and conformity promoted by our own capitalist society, and when it begins to break down under the weight of its own contradictions, we turn to nationalism, projecting our internal tensions onto an external foe.
As Fromm understood, Orwell remains vital because his critique of authoritarianism is so comprehensive that it entails private authoritarianism and concentration of power in addition to the state’s abuses; he understands, moreover, the dynamic set in train by the turbulence of the market, which leads as inexorably toward totalitarian nationalism as toward socialist collectivism. Orwell is reminiscent of Tom Paine: both are plainspoken figures of the left whose emphasis on liberty and democracy has been appropriated by the right and distorted to serve anti-egalitarian purposes by excising the socialist and social democratic sympathies they espoused. Yet both are important precisely because their sense of freedom and democracy is closely connected with their egalitarian economics, which is in turn related to their abhorrence of orthodoxy and nationalist prejudice. Far from being opposed, as they are in the conservative view, freedom and equality, in the view of Orwell and Paine, are mutually reinforcing and ought to belong inalienably to all. When wealth (and thus power) is as unequally distributed as it is in contemporary U.S. society, those without it do not have a meaningful say in how their own lives are run. To honor Orwell’s legacy and heed his warnings, we must continue to struggle for a socialist economic order—one which safeguards freedom from want—while never forgetting that we do so in order to further human freedom in general.
