Dostoevsky's Critique of Socialism

[TylerRay]

This is from the mouth of Porfiry, from Part III, Chapter V of Crime and Punishment. In my opinion, it's an insightful, if brief, critique of Marxism.

Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!

 

[TheOldCourse]

One of the central thrusts of the whole book, really, is a savage critique of socialism or at least rationalistic utopianism. It's a dominant theme in many of his books but especially here and in Notes from the Underground. We probably would not agree with his preferred alternative as he could be extremely critical of Protestant republicanism as well, but there are few novelists who could better illustrate the limits of unaided human reason and the fundamental irrationalism that plagues fallen man. He is probably my favorite author of fiction and is always worth a read if you can stomach some of the bleakness that results from him probing the outworkings of atheistic rationalism.

 

[RamistThomist]

Demons is fun, too. There the critique is mostly against neo-liberalism at first, and then it moves to anarcho-socialism.

We see elements of a critique in Karamazov as Ivan is teasing out a few issues.

 

[ZackF]

Great minds think and well don't think. I know he kicked the habit by the end of his life but most of the proceeds from his books went to cover gambling debts.