HOBBES THE SOCIALIST

Despite the frequent insinuations that Hobbes may have been a covert atheist (see my earlier entry), it would still be hardly surprising to find our friend Hobbes in a boat with a Bible in hand. The real surprise may come when we find out that the boat happens to be of a joint Soviet-American make. (The anachronistic joke ends here.)

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“He who does not work, does not eat.”

This phrase in precisely such form was first used by Lenin in his work The State and the Revolution, but its origin is unmistakably Biblical. This is how it is formulated in II Thessalonians 3:10:

“…If any would not work, neither should he eat.”

For the record, and as a curiosity, Captain John Smith, of the Pocahontas fame, introduced a version of it in the American colony of Virginia in 1607-1609, as a general policy of his Jamestown settlement.

This is obviously a socialist principle that used to be known to each Soviet citizen since elementary school. Having proclaimed full employment as the citizen’s right, Soviet society made the arrow double-pointing, namely, it should also become the citizen’s duty to work for the society; anyone able-bodied, living off an “inherited fortune” (such a thing was technically possible even in the Soviet Union!), or off his own self-made savings, was to be declared a parasite and as such not to be tolerated at all. Theoretically, of course, salaries paid for the work done by anyone from top to bottom of the society were not supposed to be of the sort that allowed one to make any kind of fortune whatsoever, but under the existing then conditions of extreme subsidies on food, rent and all sorts of social services, sons and daughters of the better-paid servants of the post-Stalinist Soviet State never had to depend on a salary for their subsistence for as long as they lived.

Continuing this discussion now within the framework of my Hobbes Miniseries, the following passage in Hobbes is another practically word-for-word reiteration of the Biblical, early American, and also Soviet “workfare” principle, which ought to suggest to a sharp mind that such continuity across the centuries does not testify to the Soviet experiment as being a total freak-of-nature aberration, and that its practice may well survive the fall of the old socialist empires, while envisaging the rise of new ones in the future…

(From Leviathan, Chapter 30.) But for such who have strong bodies the case is otherwise: they are to be forced to work (!), and to avoid the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such laws, (which means that unemployment must be legally abolished) as may encourage all manner of arts; as navigation, agriculture, fishing, and all manner of manufacture that requires labor.

This passage is particularly interesting in the context of my general discussion of the faith and practices of the capitalist society as the socialist principle boils down exactly to making all able-bodied people work by providing full employment, something which the capitalist system has objected to on principle, despite the well-reasoned pro-employment wisdom of John Maynard Keynes. And this gem dropping from the mighty pen of Mr. Hobbes--- et tu, Hobbes?--- is simply heartwarming!