Why 'Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?"'?

Albert Einstein published "Why Socialism?" in the first issue of Monthly Review in May 1949. On the essay's 75th anniversary, John Bellamy Foster, who edits the journal, has republished it in a volume with a new introduction. The book is called "Albert Einstein's 'Why Socialism?': The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay." Foster called the piece "probably the single best introduction to socialist thinking in that number of words."

Foster, who is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, discussed the essay in a filmed conversation with Lynn Fries for GPEnewsdocs, the fourth in a series on ecology and materialism. Earlier segments covered his trilogy of books tracing the materialist line from Epicurus in the third century BCE through Marx's ecological materialism. Marx considered Epicurus's philosophy the birthplace of socialism. Foster's "The Return of Nature" won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

The essay runs about six pages. Einstein described capitalism through the categories of Marxist political economy and tied that critique to the need for social change. He closed with education as the priority. Foster said Einstein built the argument on Thorstein Veblen and Marx, connecting human nature to the nature of society. The final lines call for a planned economy, pursued through democratic means. Einstein ended, in Foster's account, with the judgment that discussions on this topic were "the most important thing in our current age."

His politics were not a late addition. Foster said Einstein was a socialist all his life. In Germany in the early 1930s, before Hitler came to power, he lectured on science to working-class meetings and supported socialist movements and revolts. He believed, like Marx, that science came from the bottom, a position Foster placed in a realist, materialist philosophical tradition. Once in the United States, Einstein kept backing left causes and fought racism. He stayed close to W.E.B. Du Bois.

Foster said Einstein spoke out against racism in the United States often. Only the black newspapers reported his remarks. He wrote for The Crisis while Du Bois edited it.

The history behind the essay is stranger than the essay itself, and much of it had been lost. Foster said the research for his introduction turned up details nobody else had recorded.

The essay was born out of the attempt to create Brandeis University.

From Brandeis to Monthly Review

Brandeis was to be a secular, Jewish-founded university under faculty control. American higher education then limited minority admissions, and the founders meant to break those limits, admitting students on a meritocratic basis. Einstein took a strong interest. Money came in through the Einstein Foundation, and the original plan was to name the university for him. He refused, saying it should carry the name of a famous Jewish American. Louis Brandeis was chosen.

Einstein brought in Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist at Harvard who had helped found the Harvard Teachers Union, to write the academic plan. The Sweezy report put control in the hands of the faculty and pushed minority admissions. Foster described it as a radical view of education, one where learning starts from the bottom. Otto Nathan, Einstein's closest friend, was a German Marxist economist and close to Leo Huberman, who knew Sweezy.

The board of trustees did not share that view.

The board, staffed with wealthy business figures, turned against the plan. The Cold War had reached the campuses, Foster said, and this was the beginning of McCarthyism in the universities. Einstein, Nathan and their circle were accused of being Reds and un-American. Einstein withdrew from the foundation. Its name was changed to the Brandeis Foundation, and Einstein had nothing further to do with the university.

The same people surfaced in the 1948 Henry Wallace campaign. Sweezy headed the New Hampshire campaign for Wallace. Huberman and Sweezy wrote the preamble to the Progressive Party platform. Einstein was photographed with Wallace. When the campaign collapsed, F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard literary critic who had helped with the Brandeis planning, put up money to start a journal. Monthly Review launched with Otto Nathan among its original editors and Einstein closely involved. The first issue carried "Why Socialism?"

The First Amendment Strategy

McCarthyism got worse, Foster said. People facing accusations of communist sympathies had tried the First Amendment early on and were jailed. The working defense became the Fifth Amendment, which lets a witness refuse to testify against himself. Einstein pushed the reverse: come out publicly and defend your views on the strength of the First Amendment. Among the first to follow him were Sweezy and Huberman; Lillian Hellman also took that line.

Sweezy's case became the landmark. The New Hampshire attorney general summoned him over a course he taught at the University of New Hampshire, demanding his lecture notes and the names of Progressives and communists. Sweezy had chaired the state's Progressive Party. He refused every demand on First Amendment grounds. The case reached the Supreme Court as Sweezy v. New Hampshire. The Warren Court ruled in his favor, and the decision became the leading case on academic freedom.

Du Bois faced his own prosecution. The state branded him a communist sympathizer for serving on the World Peace Committee and brought him before a judge. His lawyer, Marco Antonio, said the defense had no witnesses, only a character witness: Albert Einstein. The judge ended the trial rather than let Einstein testify. A world news story featuring Einstein on Du Bois's side would have wrecked the judge's career, Foster said. Du Bois got off.

The essay itself suffered a different erasure. Fame did not protect it. Official circles in the United States never discuss it, Foster said, and the record treats Einstein as a liberal. A recent Princeton University Press volume, "Einstein on Politics," reads the essay as the work of a liberal who believed in democracy, not a socialist. Foster answered that reading in his introduction, calling it "wrong and silly, misconceived." The book also carries an essay by John Simon on Einstein's political history.

For Foster, the episode carries a lesson about intellectuals. The people around Monthly Review were public intellectuals in the fullest sense, he said. The network defended human rights and democracy. It argued from a materialist and humanist basis, Foster said, and stayed rooted in the struggles of workers. The left has to get that back: intellectuals involved in the fight, not academics writing on abstruse concepts for journals. His reference point is Gramsci's organic intellectual, someone engaged in struggle and in education in the deepest sense.

Einstein's essay closes, in Foster's telling, with the insistence that people cannot live as atomistic individuals or egoistic beings. They must become social individuals, conscious of each other and living in reciprocal relations. Their planning has to run to the welfare of humanity as a whole. Foster said those were not Einstein's words exactly. The essay lands in the same place.

Foster, quoting Epicurus, put the closing thought in two words: "It's up to us."