What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lost Literature of Socialism
In his hard-hitting and controversial book, George Watson examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say; the result is blasphemy against socialism's canon of saints. Marx and Engels publicly advocated genocide in 1849; Ruskin called himself a violent Tory and a King's man; and Shaw held the working classes in utter contempt. Drawing on an impressive range of sources from Robert Owen to Ken Livingstone, the author demonstrates that socialism was a conservative, nostalgic reaction to the radicalism of capitalism, and not always supposed to be advantageous to the poor. There have even been socialist monarchs - Napoleon III was one. Two chapters of the book study Hitler's claim that the whole of National Socialism was based on Marx, and bring to light the common theoretical basis of the beliefs of Stalin and Hitler which led to death camps. As a literary critic, George Watson's concern is to pay proper respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say and not what their modern disciples wish they had said. The dust grows thick on many of these tomes, while present-day socialists follow a few ossified slogans plucked selectively from the best-known books. Socialist ideas are now rescued from priggish and woolly-thinking moralists so that genuine debate can be revived. This invigorating book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought. It is certain to ruffle feathers, blue as well as red.
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1998
5 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
George Watson
28 books1 followerGeorge Grimes Watson was a scholar, literary critic, historian, a fellow of St John's College and professor of English at Cambridge University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 18, 2012
This is a book bound, by intention, to cause left-wing outrage. I discovered this book after the convinced Marxist and historian of Fascism (or more accurately, historian of left-wing anti-Fascism) David Renton accused dear Mr Waston here of inadvertently peddling 'neo-Nazi arguments' and poured scour on his liberal credentials, and implied strongly that Waston's theory that socialism could be a right-wing nostalgic reaction against capitalism was utterly baseless. Naturally, I decided then and there to buy this book. Of course, on seeing the Tea-Party style cover I immediately began to have doubts, but ploughed on.
Waston approaches the Fascist controversy from an entirely different angle than the usual 'Fascism is leftist' brigade, instead he purposes that Socialism as a whole (presumably, he never adds disclaimers to any other effect) is RIGHT-WING. It's quite hard to decide if this novel argument is stronger than the argument that Fascism is left-wing, as Waston doesn't seem to offer a workable model to replace the left-right spectrum. Whereas the Conservatives are happy to scale everything on the size of the state, Waston seems to base it on the amount of racism and unpleasantness. Certainly, I wasn't surprised at the revelations of Marx and Engel's racism, Imperialism and anti-welfarism because I've already encountered it in their writings, but many people will be. The result is a book with highly interesting evidence and uncovers a great deal the left-wing academic elite has let lie out of either ignorance or malicious intent, such as the existence of Tory or Feudal Socialism, the fact that Marx was not the first philosopher to develop class based theories of sociology, and thus, the ridiculous fact that if you approach a book with rich and poor characters on a basis that their richness and poorness affects the text, you are lazily said to be taking a Marxist approach by todays English literature teachers. This is good stuff, as far as I'm concerned because it's a challenge to the intellectual laziness and sycophancy that characterises too much of political history, be it of Fascism, Socialism, Conservatism OR Liberalism.
But that's where this falls down, as does the likes of Jonah Goldberg "Liberal Fascism'. Waston combines vicious broadsides at socialism, which though they do present much forgotten and interesting examples, are effectively just selective quotation to make socialism look like a completely and utterly bankrupt form of reactionary right-wing tyranny, with uncritical worship of Classical Liberalism. His uncovering of Tory Socialism's existence, and his critique of utopia socialists as dreamy and uninterested in class could have been easily have been balanced by pointing Marxism was extremely aggressive to both these schools of thought, as is plainly seen in the Manifesto itself where Marx and Engel's trash them off explicitly as.... errrr... a right-wing and nostalgic forms of socialism, which they opposed against their undoubtedly left-wing philosophy. Waston implies, in this book, that Socialism is the original sin of western civilisation, and Victorian Liberalism it's morally perfect saviour. Galdstone, an apologist for slavery and a Imperialist, is presented in glowing terms as the one we should be revering uncritically in Marx's place. His opposition of universal suffrage, for one thing, is shown as a valid but slightly misguided response to the threat of socialist barbarians voting to steal everything from the deserving rich, the oldest anti-democratic argument in world history, which you are as likely to find on the lips of a Cicero berating the plebs as Oliver Cormwell suppressing the Levellers.
The failings of Classical Liberalism are entirely absent from these pages, and if this was your only source one might wonder why such a rational and freedom loving ideology came to be so utterly discredited in the first part of the 20th century, the very thing that propelled Marx to such heights to in the intellectual order of the Western world and made his thought such a political force outside of it. The closet thing to an actual criticism is in the largely irrelevant chapter on 'the burden of liberty', which briefly touches on the spiritual and emotional emptiness of liberal societies. He commits the usual error of butchering Orwell and ignoring the fact that Orwell's writings are full of little snippets that show just how selectively Waston's picks his evidence. In the Chapter on Hitler, for example, Waston contends that at the time no one questioned his socialist credentials, the implication being that the view Nazism was extreme conservatism backed by big business is a result of left-wing (right-wing?) revisionism. This is easily disproved with the briefest look at Orwell's book reviews and columns from this period, in which Orwell comments on how common the view that Fascism is essentially just extreme conservatism backed by big business is these days. He makes other sweeping claims that are sure to raise eyebrows, claiming that the idea of genocide is confined entirely to the Socialist tradition. He also ignores that Marxist racism is mostly a historical curiosity because it vanished almost entirely in a generation, not just because of 'suppression', as constant Marxist involvement in Anti-Racism, Anti-Imperialism and aggressive opposition to the very idea of the West being superior shows.
Ultimately, a interesting and provocative book that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Best read together with Liberalism: A Counter-History, which will balance off the unabashed liberal propaganda this book is full of.
Waston approaches the Fascist controversy from an entirely different angle than the usual 'Fascism is leftist' brigade, instead he purposes that Socialism as a whole (presumably, he never adds disclaimers to any other effect) is RIGHT-WING. It's quite hard to decide if this novel argument is stronger than the argument that Fascism is left-wing, as Waston doesn't seem to offer a workable model to replace the left-right spectrum. Whereas the Conservatives are happy to scale everything on the size of the state, Waston seems to base it on the amount of racism and unpleasantness. Certainly, I wasn't surprised at the revelations of Marx and Engel's racism, Imperialism and anti-welfarism because I've already encountered it in their writings, but many people will be. The result is a book with highly interesting evidence and uncovers a great deal the left-wing academic elite has let lie out of either ignorance or malicious intent, such as the existence of Tory or Feudal Socialism, the fact that Marx was not the first philosopher to develop class based theories of sociology, and thus, the ridiculous fact that if you approach a book with rich and poor characters on a basis that their richness and poorness affects the text, you are lazily said to be taking a Marxist approach by todays English literature teachers. This is good stuff, as far as I'm concerned because it's a challenge to the intellectual laziness and sycophancy that characterises too much of political history, be it of Fascism, Socialism, Conservatism OR Liberalism.
But that's where this falls down, as does the likes of Jonah Goldberg "Liberal Fascism'. Waston combines vicious broadsides at socialism, which though they do present much forgotten and interesting examples, are effectively just selective quotation to make socialism look like a completely and utterly bankrupt form of reactionary right-wing tyranny, with uncritical worship of Classical Liberalism. His uncovering of Tory Socialism's existence, and his critique of utopia socialists as dreamy and uninterested in class could have been easily have been balanced by pointing Marxism was extremely aggressive to both these schools of thought, as is plainly seen in the Manifesto itself where Marx and Engel's trash them off explicitly as.... errrr... a right-wing and nostalgic forms of socialism, which they opposed against their undoubtedly left-wing philosophy. Waston implies, in this book, that Socialism is the original sin of western civilisation, and Victorian Liberalism it's morally perfect saviour. Galdstone, an apologist for slavery and a Imperialist, is presented in glowing terms as the one we should be revering uncritically in Marx's place. His opposition of universal suffrage, for one thing, is shown as a valid but slightly misguided response to the threat of socialist barbarians voting to steal everything from the deserving rich, the oldest anti-democratic argument in world history, which you are as likely to find on the lips of a Cicero berating the plebs as Oliver Cormwell suppressing the Levellers.
The failings of Classical Liberalism are entirely absent from these pages, and if this was your only source one might wonder why such a rational and freedom loving ideology came to be so utterly discredited in the first part of the 20th century, the very thing that propelled Marx to such heights to in the intellectual order of the Western world and made his thought such a political force outside of it. The closet thing to an actual criticism is in the largely irrelevant chapter on 'the burden of liberty', which briefly touches on the spiritual and emotional emptiness of liberal societies. He commits the usual error of butchering Orwell and ignoring the fact that Orwell's writings are full of little snippets that show just how selectively Waston's picks his evidence. In the Chapter on Hitler, for example, Waston contends that at the time no one questioned his socialist credentials, the implication being that the view Nazism was extreme conservatism backed by big business is a result of left-wing (right-wing?) revisionism. This is easily disproved with the briefest look at Orwell's book reviews and columns from this period, in which Orwell comments on how common the view that Fascism is essentially just extreme conservatism backed by big business is these days. He makes other sweeping claims that are sure to raise eyebrows, claiming that the idea of genocide is confined entirely to the Socialist tradition. He also ignores that Marxist racism is mostly a historical curiosity because it vanished almost entirely in a generation, not just because of 'suppression', as constant Marxist involvement in Anti-Racism, Anti-Imperialism and aggressive opposition to the very idea of the West being superior shows.
Ultimately, a interesting and provocative book that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Best read together with Liberalism: A Counter-History, which will balance off the unabashed liberal propaganda this book is full of.
October 8, 2020
Worth reading
It's not always about the lost literature of Socialism, but sometimes about the lost literature of those who criticized it.
The most important point - challenging the well established view that the Left is always well-meaning needs to be explored further.
I know of a novel that attempts to do this - The Zima Confession.
The Lost Literature of Socialism is factual but slightly dated by now. Someone should try to dig deeper and update the violence inherent in the Left to include Antifa and other recent examples.
It's not always about the lost literature of Socialism, but sometimes about the lost literature of those who criticized it.
The most important point - challenging the well established view that the Left is always well-meaning needs to be explored further.
I know of a novel that attempts to do this - The Zima Confession.
The Lost Literature of Socialism is factual but slightly dated by now. Someone should try to dig deeper and update the violence inherent in the Left to include Antifa and other recent examples.
February 10, 2019
Should be required reading.
The truth about the underlying nature of socialism as revealed in this book, has itself been “lost” — more like buried. University chancellors, if they were doing their duty, would counter the subversive staff-capture of their institutions by placing this book on a compulsory reading list, and expect it to be seriously discussed.
The truth about the underlying nature of socialism as revealed in this book, has itself been “lost” — more like buried. University chancellors, if they were doing their duty, would counter the subversive staff-capture of their institutions by placing this book on a compulsory reading list, and expect it to be seriously discussed.
May 10, 2023
Interesting read, but incredibly brief given the volume of the works of many the individuals being critiqued. That said, what is presented, like the calls for racial genocide from many prominent socialists, is pretty damning regardless of whatever else was written by these people. The "why" of why is this literature forgotten isn't really addressed in detail, unlike "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" by Robert Conquest which discusses this in detail along with the so-called forgotten literature and is overall a more comprehensive book on the topic. Overall, worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews