Greene on the Rejection of Socialism

Socialism often manifests itself in a religious form. Its adherents can consciously identify their political beliefs in terms of transcendence. Before 1947, Stalin was like an ecumenical mainline protestant evangelist. Those who stuck with public ownership of the means of production during the Cold War were like Pentecostals, intense in their belief but having little hope for mass appeal. Post Cold War socialists have been analogous to pantheism which tends to be spiritual but not religious. A belief in the end of capitalism has been a truism taught in the humanities departments of universities but stopped populating pews with the proletariat three decades ago.

Graham Greene’s early novels sympathetically depict socialists of the early 20th Century. They look like Lutherans: orthodox, organized, faithful, and friendly. In Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me, a book about an English loafer who moves to Sweden. Greene explicitly uses this analogy to depict a young Swedish worker who rejects the prevailing proclivity of his class.

Young Anderson was conservative. He read the papers, he believed in the greatness of [his employer]. His father’s socialism was something old, tiresome, didactic; it smelled of night schools; like the morality of old people, it was a substitute for experience. “A fair share for the worker,” “proletarian unity,” like a long Lutheran Sunday his father’s phrases went droning on. They had no more meaning to the young Andersen than “three in one,” “the persons of the blessed Trinity.”

“Do you believe in nothing?” his father said.

“Stick to my job,” young Andersen said. “Things all right. Good wages. Save a bit. Well off myself one day.”

When I read about young people today polling in not-so-progressive ways, I think of this passage.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.