http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/images/mr_may_1949.jpg Perhaps this is the real importance of Albert Einstein's rightly esteemed article "Why Socialism?" Over and above the specific contents of Einstein's reflections (for example, his interesting claim that a planned socialist economy is the only way to overcome capitalism's crippling of individuals) this brief text of 1949 forms a historical watershed because, by its very approach, the physicist's writing recognizes that socialism is not inevitable and has to be wanted. That is to say, Einstein's text implicitly recognizes that socialism needs to be actively sought after. . . . Hamlet is a play that is often taken to be constitutive of modern consciousness. It tells the story of the title character's struggle to restore a lost order that has been usurped by his uncle Claudius, who has murdered the old king, Hamlet's father. Like the somewhat later Shakespearean invention of the ambitious Macbeth, Claudius is a character who, because he has taken destiny into his own hands and is a "self-made man," may be compared to a bourgeois. Thus, in this play which dates from the dawn of European capitalism, the protagonist struggles against the self-made "bourgeois" class and his inspiration comes from a figure that is old: a parental figure. It is an old mole or forgotten spectre -- a voice from the past. What to make of this Shakespearean voice from the past that Marx appropriated not once but on various occasions? Moreover, why do so many Marxist texts, even today, employ the figures of the spectre and the mole to refer to the promise of socialism -- with the former foretelling the possible advent of socialism and the latter standing for a revolutionary force that erupts irresistibly in the present? The best explanation is that the use of these Shakespearean tropes by the founder of scientific socialism and more importantly their persistence in the Marxist tradition implies that we still think that the call to socialism comes from the past, rather than from an abstract future or an abstract need for progress. It is worth pointing out that this way of interpreting the reasons for the socialist revolution is not new. In fact, it is a central theme in the romantic-influenced work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin states somewhat cryptically in his Theses on the Concept of History (1940) that the revolution will be done not for envy of the future but rather for a happiness that is essentially preterit: the revolution is to redeem present and past lives. In line with this need to redeem the past, Benjamin refers to the "weak messianic power" in present generations because past generations have a claim on them. Like Hamlet, Benjamin recognizes that this claim of the past on the present is "not to be settled lightly." . . . Mission, loyalty, adventure . . . perhaps these aspects of the human project are difficult to make convincing in anything but fiction and literature and sit uneasily in the context of theoretical essays. Yet they are essential to socialism. One must understand that the project of socialism -- an aspiration both explicit and implicit in a great many previous generations -- is not an option but an obligation. The mission that we have inherited from the past of making socialism, if it is not to be betrayed, demands loyalty and bravery. Does this seem overstated? Only if capitalism's gray-on-gray were to have finally seized hold of the human imagination would the claim seem exaggerated. In fact, socialism and its project would be disappointing if it did not work -- at least part of the time -- in this heroic register.

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