What Is Socialism and Will It Work?
Milstein, Tom
"What Is Socialism and Will It Work?" we were thus in a position to do just about as we pleased, which, in fact, we proceeded to do with some success. Our foreign policy was well-intentioned, and full of Liberal idealism, and...
...Palmists and Scholarship Dan Joy T HERE IS SOME reason to believe that after many years o f dreariness the Academy may be coming to life...
...Better things are expected of this distinguished intellectual digest...
...The answer to this question is simple: Conservatism, as exemplified by the present Administration, and by the overwhelming conservative prejudice of the American people...
...Our foreign policy was well-intentioned, and full of Liberal idealism, and such programs as the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Berlin airlift (to name but a few), all served to enhance the standing of interventionism on a grand scale as practiced by Liberal planners in Washington...
...If the Republican Party looks to its past, to its own traditions, it will not only be able to regain the power and influence it held in the days of McKinley, but it will be able to guide America to a happy and constructive future, devoid of the kind of adventurism and domestic and international meddling that marked the years following the New Deal...
...Lost in this maze has been the traditional appreciation and quest for understanding of the society's foundations...
...If man is 'born free" and his individuality is a natural biological or spiritual trait, then every social norm, obligation and limitation - - indeed, every social relationship, every association with another individual no matter of what type - - is an infringement and a, restriction upon his inherent freedom, his 'natural rights...
...For there is no greater heresy against the mythos of capitalism than the idea that~ rather than competition can result in economic gains...
...The political power, Which is to say the collective social interest, that energizes all serious advances toward socialism is the organized working class of capitalist societies...
...As our casualties mounted, and as dissent escalated at home, many Americans, for the first time, began to doubt that our will was still strong enough to get us our way...
...10 or Un/v 8 The Alternative: April 1972 getic efforts on their part to resist it...
...One thinks of Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Moynihan...
...This criticism does not aim to demolish the authentic achievements of political democracy, but only the spurious claims which are made for those achievements - - especially, the claim that democracy in the political sphere establishes a reign of unsurpassable freedom and opportunity in all other spheres of human activity...
...Conservatives, you must remember, did not have a good press...
...But where the working class is weak, divided, disorganized, or oppressed, individual freedom is slight or non-existent...
...In the post-war world there were few who could muster the strength to argue with that presumption...
...Those who lack faith in humanity's capacity for this task lack faith in humanity itself...
...He deserves the support, not only of the Ripon Society, but of the American conservative establishment...
...Unlike capitalists and their supporters, we do not consider the establishment of political democracy to be the end of man's collective public activity, but instead the beginning...
...The point of all this is simple...
...And it has nothing to do with the bombs of the Weathermen...
...others began to move away from the old Liberalism, but in the direction of a kind of deideologized radicalism, repeating in a watered-down form, many of the cliches of the New Left...
...We look upon the man versus society dichotomy as an ideologically distorted representation of a real conflict constantly going on between groups of men within society...
...7 [-I 3 yrs...
...But many more Republicans, under mounting pressure from their constituencies and from the Liberal-dominated press, began to move closer to the interventionist views of the Liberals...
...The decisive role of the working class in the movement for socialism does not derive from any monopoly on moral virtue which it holds, nor from the fact that it is the most oppressed section of the population in modern society...
...The answer to the second question flows from the answer to the first...
...What moved us to such an elaborate exploration of economic systems was the conviction that, when the nation's ab%ndant and magniloquent dissent movements are denatured of their )ibberish, what remains is either a puny lump of nothing or, in the cases of those few movements based on palpable issues, a question of political economy or the organization of resources...
...To the individual worker's demand, "'Pay me more," the employer can always reply, 'Find another job...
...therefore it was our duty to stop, or at least to contain, Communism...
...and a new Left that held no respect for our traditional values began to emerge...
...Socialists proceed from the same observation carried out, we think, with a more powerful lens...
...If there is one encouraging thing from a growing number of intellectuals today it is the return to the question, What kind of society should America be...
...We believe man realizes his individuality not against or in conflict with society, but in and through society, which is to say, through his social relations, his associations with other human beings...
...e-o The Establishment, R.R...
...Their intellectually desolate pages abound with anguished revelations about various daydreams and favored spooks...
...With the defeat of Goldwater, the way was cleared for the hideous conflict in Vietnam...
...That the working class is the modern world's chief force for liberty as well as equality is not just an article of socialist theory but a demonstrable fact...
...But we do not regard it as the final act in the drama of human liberation...
...Measures like Taft-Hartley, or more recently, President Nixon's "'New Economic Program," have ten times more propaganda effect on politically bashful trade unionists than do the imprecations of America's all-too-few socialists...
...Nevertheless, this much can be said: the various social theories of capitalism, or what we have been calling conservatism, in general, regard individuality as an inherent human trait, as an a priori of social analysis and criticism, as the given ' datum, whereas socialist theory sees human individuality as the end product, as the thing to be striven for, as a potentiality rather than a reality, as the goal to be achieved...
...The Korean intervention was a watershed for American Liberalism...
...We seek to put an end to this tyranny by "'socializing" private economic power just as the capitalist radicals of the 18th century socialized the private political power of kings a.n.d nobles by 'democratizing" it...
...Despite all the teat tensions and conflicts separating them, the two systems have that stake in each other's existence...
...Once a worker has joined a union, participated in a strike and improved his status thereby, he has made a fundamental decision about who .he is in this world, a decision with vast ramifications...
...but it nevertheless represents a gigantic step into the center of the historical process for those workers who undertake it...
...is at stake here is not simply the obvious profit advantage which employers reap when they convince workers that a Horatio Alger future awaits them if only they display the proper Puritan virtues...
...To some extent, the second negati~ce connotation of the "'collectivist" epithet subsumes and reinforces the first...
...and it is not surprising that Republicans of that old dispensation found it difficult to get reelected...
...In America especially this apprehension conveys a clearer "'class consciousness" on their part than on that of the working class and middle class liberals, who do not at all imagine that their cause is anticapitalist or that their proposals for national economic planning, national health insurance and full employment tend to undermine private enterprise...
...To be sure, there were those, during the period of the Liberal ascendency, with more critical dispositions, who dissented from the prevailing trend, who objected to Wilson's sanctimoniousness and Roosevelt's grand design...
...Now the discussion of puny nothing hess constitutes the literary regimen of journals like Ramparts and the gazettes from the louse underground...
...Two obvious questions arise...
...When totalitarianism disappears from the world, capitalism will have lost its last justification...
...According to Rightist claims, the introduction of these measures - - the graduated income tax, social security, national health plans, national economic planning, mass public education, etc...
...ment and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie, and philosophically in the dichotomization of the individual and the collective which is the soul of capitalist ideology...
...Strange things began to happen...
...Campus unrest, political division and an incipient breakdown in public morals began to lead many Americans, including Liberal Americans, to question the very premises of American Liberalism...
...In this connotation, the measures advocated by the Left in Western capitalist societies are supposed to lead in some way toward the totalitarian collectivism that prevails in the U.S.S.R., China, et...
...the elite calls it "character...
...They will also add that it was a war that transformed America and led to the Death of American Liberalism...
...He must think twice about telling his entire work force to find another job, particularly if enough solidarity prevails among the working class as a whole to discourage scabbing...
...Daniel Moynihart denouced Liberalism before a meetLag of the A.D.A...
...and so we devoted our last number to this matter of political economy, featuring essays on the free market, contemporary capitalism and socialism...
...Prior to the ~ Revolution, political power, the means of coercion in society, was exclusively exercised by a hereditary elite called the aristocracy...
...We view human individuality as gradually emerging in historical time through a process of social evolution, much as the human infant gradually acquires identity and selfhood through the socializing influence of its family group...
...who argued with Truman that our unique political system could not easily be translated into different cultures...
...No wonder that early trade unions were regarded by respectable society as evil conspiracies and solemnly defined by law as "unfair combinations in restraint of trade...
...the conflict between the two main classes of capitalist society therefore assumes a political form and manifests itself as the struggle between two fundamentally different approaches or programs for the solution of social problems...
...Eventually he will come to believe that he did do it by himself - - all by himself: What worker, as he pockets the wage gains which his union has won him, can claim - - even to himself - - that "'I did this myself...
...With the passing of Taft and his followers from the political scene, the conversion became almost complete, and some Republicans went so far as to try to out-Lib the Liberals--again, mainly in the area of foreign policy...
...But since most of these critics were conservative Republicans in the tradition of Henry Cabot Lodge the Eider, they often failed to attract the kind of attention they deserved...
...I never amounted to anything because I'm shiftless and irresponsible, I guess" has been the terminal thought of many a worker who has in fact spent forty years of his life slaving under the most rigorous factory discipline and contributing to society far more than the pittance society has returned to him...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana, 47401 Continental, U.S.A...
...Specifically, the Left stresses intervention by the democratic state in the private economy for the purpose of introducing rational planning so as to maximize growth, minimize income inequalities, abolish poverty, establish full employment and institute a high level of social security through an expansion of the welfare state...
...First, what social force can supply the power necessary to introduce socialism...
...should have led to a gross diminution of freedom and liberty in modem society...
...The conflict between man and society is a phantom conflict between two abstractions, having no more reality than the idea of man in the absence of the society which creates him or the idea of society in the absence of the men who compose it...
...The Republicans, he suggested, can be better Liberals than the Democrats simply because they are, by nature, better managers...
...So long as the market alone i~ allbwed to determine the price at which a worker must sell his laber, wages will tend to fall to the level which those workers most desperate for a job will accept...
...Simple economics explains why workers have a material interest in not competing with each other...
...The ashes of the great wave of New Frontier and Great Society social legislation could be seen smouldering in the riot-torn streets of Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark...
...The past one hundred years have witnessed a steady expansion of all those "'collectivist" measures in the advanced Western nations that the Right regards as inimical to individual freedom...
...These questions must be left aside for separate treatment, bearing as they do on the topic of socialism as it relates to the conflict between totalitarianism and capitalism rather than to the topic at hand, which is of the nature and functioning of socialism per se...
...State power not so responsible they defined as tyranny...
...Considered as individuals, workers are not greatly more or less "moral" than anyone else in capitalist society, and certain sectors of the sub-prnletariat outside of the working class by virtue of their permanent unemployment are much more oppressed than workers...
...journals such as Commentary began to echo the views of National Review...
...This latter correlation holds true, albeit in much different degree, whether the economy of the country involved is capitalist or statist...
...The first is the association of the liberal-laborsocialist program in the Western countries with the totalitarian regimes of the Communist world...
...One thinks of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern...
...We are therefore collectivists" with respect to private economic power in capitalist society in the same sense that the French revolutionaries were 'collectivists" in regard to the private political power of the feudal aristocracy...
...we Americans were God's Elect...
...He may start his upward odyssey with the most acute awareness of his dependence on the attention and care of others, with a highly-refined sense of the importance of sheer accidefit, of being born into the right place at the right time, and with the strongest feelings of loyalty and obligation to those who helped him...
...But this conclusion immediately throws him into conflict with society's value system, according to which one is supposed to succeed by setting himself apart from his fellows - - that, is, through competition...
...Enclosed is...
...Uniting in pursuit of a common economic interest sounds like a simple enough proposition, particularly in a capitalist society (what, after all, is a corporation if not a union of owners...
...For the loyalty of workers to the private enterprise system is largely conditioned upon their acceptance of an image of themselves as model capitalists, junior grade, or on an acceptance of this model as an object of emulation, or a t the very least, on a sense of their own inferiority owing to inability to measure up to this model...
...What an appalling spectacle of immorality is presented to those imbued with this ideology by the sight of workers banding together for the express purpose of eliminating competition from their ranks and actually succeeding in elevating their economic position...
...Man versus society is the primeval theme of nearly every serious theoretical justification of capitalist society that I have encountered...
...The most irresistible propaganda in our society is the propaganda which suggests to the successful individual that he succeeded because he is superior...
...By and large, where workers are free - - free to organize, free to strike, free to press for political power - - freedom prevails as a general condition for everyone (except perhaps for the rich whose idea of freedom starts and stops with the unhindered right to accumulate and dispose of wealth...
...same conflict as characterizes most European countries, under the label Social Democrat versus Christian Democrat, or Labor versus Conservative, or simply socialist versus capitalist...
...Social democracy seeks in the economic realm what the democratic state brought about in the political realm...
...To put an end to the tyrannical state, they evolved the democratic republic, in which political power is made responsible to a citizenry composed of juridical equals through the mechanism of regular elections...
...but they mean the same thing: a sense of self-esteem directly dependent on imputing vices and failings to others and a quasi-religious devotion '.o the principle of self-promotion...
...As Russell Kirk put it in the early fifties, the conservatives had been routed by the Liberals, and many of them were forced to adopt aspects of Liberal policy for reasons of survival...
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...When Senator Goldwater ventured to differ with this school of thought in 1964, he was quickly disposed of, and declared to be a dangerous fanatic, reeking of the 18th century...
...This last mentality is perhaps the most subtly effective...
...It is that socialism, quite apart from any "Trojan horse" role which it allegedly plays vis-a-vis the external menace of Communist totalitarianism, is itself a menace to-individual freedom and liberty...
...Where there was an American governmental will, there was an American governmental way...
...The most important ideological reason .conservatives are against collectivizing the economy, from what I can gather, is that they regard social organization per se - - that is, society, social institutions - - as the fundamental source of all oppression of the individuality, and hence of repression of freedom and creativity on the part of human individuals...
...On the contrary, because they bring to fruition a profound human drive to assert conscious control over the very social processes and institutions which make man human rather than animal, they result in the flowering of human individuality on a scale undrea/ned of in earlier ages...
...Capitalism, Which Way Progress...
...Without totalitarianism, capitalism would long since have evolved into democratic socialism...
...We regard the democratic republic as the foundation and the prerequisite of all serious efforts to achieve socialism...
...All others unfortunately must still pay four dollars - - a t l e a s t until our CIA g r a n t slips through...
...On the other hand, those nations whose working class finds itself enslaved, such as the U.S.S.R., or severely oppressed, such as Taiwan or Spain, are consummately countries of tyranny...
...It became clear, by the time of the 1968 .election that interventionist Liberalism had had its day...
...He has decided that he is and in all likelihood always will be a worker, that the Horatio Alger scenario will not serve to lift him out of that role, and that his only hope of improvement lies in the improvement of the position of workers...
...In other words, even if the phenomenon of Communist totalitarianism were completely liquidated, and the entire world were filled with democratic regimes and characterized by capitalist economic relations, the socialist movement would still threaten individual freedom...
...Future historians, no doubt, will say that the Vietnam War was inspired by the good intentions of two exceedingly Liberal Presidents who really wanted to make the world safe for democracy...
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...President Nixon, I believe, is doing a good job both for the nation and the party...
...The democratic state, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of those whom it rules, "collectivized" what formerly had been the private property of the aristocracy: state power, the legitimate right to employ force...
...A trade union is a partial synthesis of social obligation and individual interest...
...The entire pattern of organized working class life, in turn, finds itself under constant attacks of varying sorts, all of which emanate from the antagonism between the interests of workers and those of their employers...
...Instead, we see society in conflict with itself and the individual in conflict with himself, and in each of these conflicts the reciprocal of the other...
...Tom Milstein What follows is the final essay in our symposium: Socialism vs...
...By playing unemployed workers off against employed workers, and low-paid workers against most highly-paid, any competent The A l t e r n a t i v e April 1972 7 employer can ensure that his wage bill sinks to a minimum level supported only by the supply of the particular type of labor he requires and by the elementary survival requirements of his workforce...
...The Left believes in measures aimed at reorganizing, social and economic institutions as a means of solving social problems...
...much more important is the ideological and political integrity of capitalism itself...
...3.50 [ ] 3 yrs...
...This abstract and delusive way of posing the problem effectively ensures that it can never be solved, but only stoically accepted, which needless to say is rather how one would expect it to be formulated by those whose interests lie in not having it solved...
...The advantages gained by the Right in discrediting the Left's program by identifying it with these regimes and their practices are so obvious as not to require further comment...
...The essence of the trade union is the strike, and the essence of the successful strike is the cohesion and solidarity of the strikers...
...The argument was simple, and, up to a point, very cogent and very plausible: Communism was a genuine threat to the survival of the Christian West...
...We analyze history and society in terms of class struggles not because we desire to "'stir up conflict between the classes" but in order to abolish this conflict in the only way possible - - by abolishing classes...
...Unlike the feudal aristocracy, however, which could obscure its contempt for mankind behind a cloak of faith in the supernatural, with which it justified its own god-like powers on earth, defenders of contemporary capitalism (which turned the supernatural into a cash proposition long before the counterculture) must assert their faithlessness in man as bald secular propositions...
...The ideological implications of human individuality and its relation to the human collectivity is not the sort of subject that lends itself to condensed treatment...
...Some leading Liberals of the KennedyJohnson years began to adopt positions traditionally held by conservatives...
...The economic position of workers under capitalism gives them a direct interest in not competing with each other...
...The transformation of France from a monarchy into a republic expropriated political power from the aristocratic ruling class and transferred it, at least nominally, to the people through the institution of the democratic state...
...In no other area of society is upward mobility achieved through a consciousness of collective interest...
...But all, or nearly all, of these justifications proceed from this fundamental counterposing of the individual to society...
...The measures we advocate, whether they be piecemeal reforms or sweeping transforraatious, do not _9 "level" mankind or impose a stifling sameness on human variety and distirctiveness...
...Evidently, the fact of capitalism's historical association with emerging political democracy is nothing more than that - - a fact about their origins which needs to be supplemented by further investigation and analysis if we are to learn anything useful about their subsequent relationship...
...They climax the historical drama of man's selfcreation which if it is to culminate in fulfillment rather than in the bloody farce of totalitarianism, must culminate in man the socialized individual confirming both his individuality arid his sociability by taking collective possession of and asserting purposive control over that which he invented to take possession of and assert purposive control over nature: his social system...
...From this view it follows that society ought to be so organized as to allow for the maximum expression of individual freedom - - "'equality of opportunity" - - consistent with the maintenance of law and order...
...The last decades, especially in the colleges and universities, have been devoted to systems analysis and decisionmaking processes...
...J u s t clip this handy order form and send it with the a p p r o p r i a t e amount of money to: The Alternative - - Circulation Dept...
...In America, special historical circumstances have led to an anomalous circumstance whereby measures associated in Europe with democratic socialist parties have here become identified with the Democratic party and more peculiarly, with "'liberalism," even though the latter has no particular philosophic or historic continuity with socialism...
...It defends business with the arguments traditionally associated with the defense of capitalism, most especially the one which holds that governmental intervention in the economy necessarily entails a loss of individual freedom and opportunity...
...This undue concern over methodology has left everyone quite bored, save for the many textbook writers who are committed to an unending review of the technique of our society's operation...
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...Some theorists line up on one s i d e o f this dichotomy and some on the other (i.e., some conceive of human nature as inherently bad and of society's restrictions and limitations on it as the source of-good, while others view human nature as spontaneously good and society as its corrupter...
...6 The Alternative April 1972 Socialism climaxes a great drama in Western history whose theme is man's struggle to liberate himself from oppression by expropriating and bringing under his own control the instruments of his oppression...
...It also uses the term as an epithet, suggesting two highly negative connotations...
...year(s) subscription to The Alternative (nine issues per year...
...To this day, enormous pressures are brought to bear on workers to get them to abandon all sense of identification and solidarity with their fellows and to undertake the competitive quest for individual economic salvation...
...Workers are energetically propgandized to the effect that their only hope of improving their lot lies through individual upward mobility earned by outperforming their lazier colleagues...
...What we have here is the traditional conservative identification of freedom with private enterprise, which is rooted historically in the simultaneous emergence of democratic self-govern...
...We therefore subject the limitations and inadequacies of the democratic state to a rather severe and iconoclastic criticism...
...This drama has its roots in Greek civilization and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in the peculiar dynamism which these two currents have bequeathed to Western man and in the sequence of progressive evolution which they have imparted, however halting and interrupted, to his social institutions and culture...
...Although partial, it is the only true realization of this synthesis in capitalist society, because it is the only institution whose members know that if they begin to compete with each other, they will injure themselves...
...For confirmation they rely upon our centu/'y's bestial innovation, totalitarianism, which, they claim, offers all necessary evidence of man's inescapable perversity...
...The institution which he deyelps to bring about that improvement - - the trade union - - will in turn give rise to a whole pattern of social relations and an ethos reflecting and reinforcing that pattern...
...The Alternative April 1972 9 Rightists who are truly concerned with the survival of libertarian values in the modern world - - as opposed to those who prefer being merely mouthpieces for the wealthy - - would do well to ponder a contemporary relationship whose significance looms much larger than the historical relationship discussed above: that those countries where the working class is well organized and politically powerful (and where as a result socialist inroads on pure capitalism have proceeded farthest), are the countries with the greatest political and personal freedom, the most" ideological diversity, the greatest pluralism and tolerance...
...His sociological situation will not permit him to come to any other conclusion...
...thus springs up the authority-anarchy debate continuum so characteristic of political discussion in capitalist society...
...We do not counterpose the individual to society...
...Socialist theory proceeds from fundamentally different premises...
...Practically speaking, the historical argument almost refutes itself...
...In terms of domestic policy this argument was well stated by Senator Brooke, when he maintained that his particular brand of Liberal Republicanism would differ from the Liberalism of the Democratic Party not in outlook or in the ends which it served, but only in the means to which it realized those ends...
...What does require extended analysis, beyond anything which can be undertaken in a short article on socialism and its workability, is the degree to which this identification is valid, and the reasons why it can be made...
...So long as they remain united, and deal with their employer as a collective rather than as isolated individual workers, they can drive the price of their labor far higher than market conditions would otherwise dictate, for the simple reason that the employer will usually find it more profitable to settle on a somewhat higher wage than to bear the expense of a prolonged strike...
...RET S OCIALISM IS a move, ment based on the working classes of capitalist societies, which aims to abolish human exploitation through the creation of a classless society...
...In the conservative mentality, the program of the Left is "collectivist...
...The current act in this drama opened with the French Revolution...
...The aristocracy of feudalism possessed political power as its "'private property...
...At the time of our initial involvement in Korea many conservative Republicans held their ground and followed the lead of Senator Taft in condemning the war as unconstitutional...
...He will nonetheless in the course of his travels find these traits increasingly burdensome, especially so when they have to compete in his mind for psychological space with the immensely gratifying and constantly growing idea that "'I did it myself...
...The trade unions are thus driven into the political arena even though they arise out of the purely economic interests of their members...
...Socialists regard the emergence of the democratic republic, with its associated features of free and open elections and civil liberties, as a tremendous achievement for mankind, to be defended against all efforts by totalitarians and reactionaries to undermine it...
...To the limited and partial achievements of political democracy, we wish to - - not substitute, but add - - the fuller realization of social democracy...
...This designation expresses its accurate apprehension that the Left's program adds up to an attack on private property in the means of production...
...The French revolutionaries of the 18th century derived the moral sanction for their radical expropriation of the aristocracy from the observation that state power, since it claims authority over everyone in society, ought to be responsible to everyone in society...
...The one in a million who actually does rise "from factory hand to company president" is regularly trotted out in an effort to convince each worker that he too can expect spectacular success if he manifests all the proper virtues - - thrift, efficiency, uncomplaining obedience and above all, hard work...
...Second, what are the specific forms of social institutions under socialism...
...The crucial significance of the working class in the movement for socialism stems instead from the unique sociology of this class, and from the special and pivotal position which it occupies within the overall structure of the capitalist economy...
...The reasons for this conservative conversion, I think are quite simple...
...The anti-New Deal arguments o f the t930s, based on economic utili10 The Alternative April 1972...
...Their sociology is such that they are capable of tearing through the veil which capitalist ideology interposes between them and the conscious realization of this interest...
...We now conclude this symposium with the case for democratic socialism, by Tom Milstein, a member of the Young People's Socialist League...
...The essential elements of this conflict are well known...
...As of this present writing there are only two disciples of the old American Liberalism with any importance in the Democratic Party, and they are not very important...
...who maintained, in short, that there were limits to intervention...
...By the time President John F. Kennedy vowed to liberate the world in his messianic inaugural address, his wildly interventionist views had become the views of just about every major American political figure, from Hubert Humphrey to Barry Goldwater...
...Nevertheless, when one speaks of the "liberal" as opposed to the "conservative" or the Democratic as opposed to the Republican approach to social problems, one is referring to very much the...
...The shred of truth in this civilized nihilism lies not in its notion of a link between totalitarianism and human nature, but rather in its implicit acknowledgement of the link between the rise of totalitarianism and the perpetuation of capitalism...
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...For no anti-socialist propaganda of the conservatives has been of even marginal significance in demoralizing Western man and obstructing his advance to socialism as compared to the devastating influence of totalitarianism...
...it will not conclude until socialism is realized on a worldwide basis...
...Most of these nations have gone far beyond the program outlined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto as steps toward a socialist society...
...There is incomparably more freedom in the West today than there was 100 or 50 years ago...
...Indeed, the very self-righteousness of our entire Liberal policy began to fall into doubt...
...According to the ideology which justifies the operations of the capitalist economy, success is supposed to accrue to those individuals who demonstrate superior ability in competition with their less well-endowed fellows...
...This is most apparent in foreign policy, but it is also obvious, as followers of the Ripon Society know too well, in the area of domestic policy...
...Taftism ceased to personify Republican conservatism, and was succeeded by an outlook not very different from Liberalism...
...He can quite properly assert I did this," but he must add, and knows he must add, a qualification: "...with the other guys...
...It paved the way for the apotheosis of American Liberalism-- the "crusade for freedom" in Vietnam...
...The right to express unorthodox or unpopular ideas, the right to associate freely with others, the right to vote, religious freedom, and so on, have not contracted but rather expanded almost in direct proportion to the extension of those "collectivist" inroads on capitalism which are supposed to be so dangerous to freedom...
...One recalls, somewhat sadly, the visceral reaction in the early 1950s to Senator Robert Taft's incisive critique of our Korean involvement as being somehow typical of the treatment conservative critics of American Liberalism received in those now distant days...
...I would suggest that Liberalism is not the future of the Republican Party, both because it is alien to our party, and because it is politically moribund...
...the sociology of poverty, of middle class life, and of the wealthy elite, are all such as to foster the illusion that success is a matter of individual talent and ability...
...Yet the fact is that the exact opposite has occurred...
...What then is our Party's future...
...The chief instrument of these attacks in contemporary times is the state...
...The impoverished lumpen proletarian calls it "hustling...
...If so, The Alternative might be j u s t the magazine you have been looking for...
...Just as the French Revolution expropriated the aristocracy's 'private property," political power, the socialist movement works for the removal of commanding economic power, the real private property of the rich, from the hands of the few and its transfer to the control of the many...
...The sociology of working class Iife is such as to promote and force this consciousness upon individual workers, even against ener~ | | U U U | U | | B B i | U R | | B R | | | | g | R | | R B | R B | ~ Do You March to the Beat of a Different Drum...
...The Right, in general, resists these measures and upholds the sanctity of private enterprise as a realm which ought to be kept free of governmental intervention...
...On the other hand, if workers band together for the purpose of monopolizing their own labor_, they introduce a hitherto absent scarcity factor into the market price of their work...
...Socialists are for collectivizing private economic power as a means of realizing human individuality, not suppressing it...
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...Contemporary critics, most of whom have resided on the political and philosophical Right, have questioned the directions taken by Western culture in general, and American society in particular...
...We note that economic power in capitalist society affects everyone even more pervasively than political power in feudal society, from which we conclude that the vast economic power which capitalism concentrates in the hands of the few is tyrannical in the same way that concentrations of political power in the hands of the few is tyrannical...
...The Right employs the term 'collectivism" as more than just a warning to itself of the anti-capitalist implications of the Left's program...
Vol. 5 • April 1972 • No. 7
