AUTHORITARIANS OF THE "LEFT"

...Left authoritarianism," eager to find some ground for declaring Russian society "progressive" or for anticipating its "democratization," must abstract the element of industrial productivity from its social context...

...If one could convince him that oppression, terror, and misery dominated Russian life, one might break him of his loyalties...

...And if it is indeed social existence that determines human consciousness, it may well be asked: what kind of human consciousness, what quality of life, can follow from the social existence that Stalinism imposes upon its peoples...

...socialism cannot develop without the democratic rule of the workers or, if you will, the people...

...The idea of democratic autonomy, the hope for human sef-realization, was now dismissed as utopian...

...It no longer speaks to them in the name of liberty, mass spontaneity, the proletariat...

...This mode of thought is represented by Paul Sweezy in the Monthly Review, where it comes closest to an apologia for the Russian regime...

...Socialism being a kind of society that has never yet existed on this planet, he would seem to have as much right to define it in his way as we in ours...

...Nor do we speak here of the Stalinists: they are a separate problem...

...Aneurin Bevan, who is against totalitarianism but is also confused, verges upon this mode of thought when he celebrates "the Chinese revolution...

...For where the bourgeois accumulation was the opening to a new level of social consciousness, the Stalinist accumulation is the conclusion to the failure of the worldwide socialist movement and the destruction of its consciousness...

...Now, in the postliberal world of 1955, the simplifiers have taken command...

...Mutatis mutandis, Russian society may be compared to a vast corporation...

...Bourgeois society could develop without the direct political rule of the bourgeoisie...

...The real question, however, is whether a ruling class has ever voluntarily given up its essential privileges, i.e., its ruling position...

...And yet it is of the utmost importance that they should be organized, for only in this way can they become powerful...

...Now there is no way of proving that Sweezy's view of what socialism means is wrong...

...it is simply to say that if the worldwide productive forces could now be utilized in a socially constructive manner it would be possible to hasten appreciably the industrialization of the backward areas...

...Now it may readily be granted that a certain expansion of productive capacities is a necessary condition for the emergence of a more human society...

...Hitler almost conquered Europe...

...The burden of moral-political choice cannot be shifted to a defenseless future...

...Their aim was to transform passive objects into articulate subjects...

...In an authoritarian age it is almost inevitable that manipulative and bureaucratic modes of thought should stain the writings of those who oppose society as much as they debase the writings of those who support it...

...Hence, the process of primitive accumulation in Russia and/or China cannot be judged in terms analogous to the primitive accumulation of the bourgeois world...

...they forget that the present is merely the future of the past...

...It therefore seems possible that if we lived in a sane and fraternal world the problem of raising the economic and cultural level of Asia could be solved without having to subject it to all the horrors of primitive accumulation which characterized the English experience...

...Historically, the early phases of industrialization in the West were accompanied by sharp and, in the main, open social struggle...

...Frederick Schuman and I. F. Stone occasionally express ideas that fall within this orbit of thought...

...But today we have reached, on a world 182 LEWIS COSER AND IRVING HOWE level, a degree of productive expansion sufficient for beginning the construction of a world socialist economy...

...We are thinking of that "Left" tendency, amorphous in personnel but easily located intellectually, which grants most of the criti176 cisms made of Russian Stalinism (that it is brutal, inhuman, dictatorial) but then finds a rationale or a half-defense for it in the name of Historical Necessity or in the worldwide drive toward industrialization or in the need for raising, by whatever means, the level of production, or in the claim, true enough, that capitalism is a decadent society...

...To see in the cynical manipulation of Marxist terms by the state bureaucracy a means for the perpetuation of socialist consciousness is an ideological parallel to the view that the Stalinist regime performed the distasteful task of primitive accumulation "for" the workers...

...Arthur K. Davis, who is one of the purer specimens of "Left authoritarianism," writes in the American Sociological Review that freedom is a subjective feeling of personal well-being which results from the objective fact of living in an effectively functioning society .. a number of concrete patterns of societal organization can meet this abstract definition of freedom: It is entirely possible that among them is . . . the totalitarian community— once the latter has been stabilized or routinized...

...Individual members of the bureaucracy, like individual entrepreneurs, may run the risk of elimination from its ranks, but the bureaucracy as such is a self-perpetuating ruling class whose power is defined by its relation to the means of production, i.e., by its relation to the state...

...The working class can attain social power only if and when it forms itself through its own organs of selfdetermination, only if and when it creates its own institutions capable of assuming the burden of a new society...

...It thus has become the perfect philosophy for those who have lost faith in both capitalism and socialism...

...Benevolent manipulation now strikes them as the only "realistic" alternative to malevolent manipulation...

...Some years ago George Orwell, in an essay on James Burnham, foresaw this phenomenon with the same sensitivity with which he saw so much else: If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the regime is like, are strongly Russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the "managerial" class of which Burnham writes...

...It finds another variant in the "orthodox" Trotskyist groups, which see in the fact that Stalinism destroys bourgeois property relations a proof of its "progressiveness...

...Many of those who might once have been forced to the painful necessity of functioning in the interstices of society now have found an honored place close to its summit...

...What, one wonders, would Mr...

...Differentials in the sphere of consumption are only the most obvious symbols of differentials in the sphere of social and political power, as well as in the process of production...

...And while Isaac Deutscher cannot at all be identified with this intellectual tendency, he provides it, no doubt unintentionally, with the most subtle and persuasive arguments...

...For it is not inconceivable that after Stalin the standard of living may rise in Russia...

...Not very much can be expected, since the pressure of the international conflict is likely to keep the Soviet regime from making too many concessions— and for the international situation the Russian regime bears, of course, a prime responsibility...

...The restrictions on liberty which are characteristic of Soviet Russia," he writes, "are far less symptomatic of the times than the crisis of liberty in the United States...

...That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige...

...Unwittingly they revert to the very fetishism against which Marx struggled...

...AUTHORITARIANS OF THE "LEFT' 183...

...they came because the industrialization was accompanied by a rich social history in which a vast growth of human awareness took place...

...system...

...Everything admirable in Marx's thought— his intellectual complexity, his humanist passion, his philosophical flexibility—is neglected in behalf of a simplistic economic determinism which measures human progress by little more than production statistics...

...But it is a gross error to assume that for attaining such a society the mere expansion of productive forces is a sufficient condition...

...They will admit without hesitation the flaws in the social structure of Russia, but these flaws—a polite word for horrors— weigh rather lightly for them in the balance of History, since they prepare—apparently, by their very accumulation—for the glories of tomorrow...

...This is not to say that many areas of the world, taken in isolation, possess the economic prerequisites for the flowering of a socialist economy...

...In this way the Religion of History can be made to serve as a more flexible apologia for the acceptance of "the given" than can any other-worldly religious VI Why have intellectuals become more receptive to authoritarian modes of thought...

...Would the disappearance of some privileges and some abuses, together with the continuation of the basic social and human relationships that characterize Russian society today, be sufficient to give the Russian regime a clean bill of socialist or democratic AUTHORITARIANS OF THE "LEFT" 181 health...

...does not seem to concern Sweezy at all...

...T IV wenty, even ten years ago it was possible to argue with a Stalinist or a fellowtraveler...

...When it is sometimes argued that it is not...

...The masses, on the other hand, have been prevented, by the atomization and suppression to which the regime subjects them, from testing the truth at the core of the Marxist argument: that only in and through their own concerted action can men achieve the removal of hateful social conditions...

...For this phenomenon, we submit, there are no historical precedents...

...A series of curious parallels follows from this coarsely "pragmatic" argument: In 1920 Lenin lost the war to Poland...

...This was true for many radicals as well...

...they often feel a violent horror of speculative thought, an almost complete cynicism toward anything that does not proceed from the already given...

...They care for economic plans, technological advances, production figures— in their eyes these in themselves are sufficient to demonstrate the viability and/or the "progressiveness" of Russian society...

...To Marx the root is man, to Mr...

...This is a fact which historians of the future may well rank in importance along with the October Revolution...

...A moral-political judgment takes on value only when argument is made as to why present or future is "right...

...To be sure, in classical capitalism the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production because of the private ownership of each individual entrepreneur in his share of the social means of production, but such private ownership is by no means the only way a ruling class has asserted its dominion...

...Among many intellectuals there spread once more—it had never really been absent—an implicit contempt for the masses of human beings, whom they regarded primarily as creatures to be controlled and manipulated...

...Just as medieval schoolmen used elements of the Greek tradition, and the Bible was used as -a text by the inquisitors, so Marx, distorted, mutilated, and disfigured, has become a text from which the Soviet regime can, at convenience, extract citations...

...But while this may partly explain the general tendency, there still remains the minority of exceptions, those who continue to feel alienated from society and turn to the other side...

...We cannot even -attempt a full answer here, but what seems most important is the argument of failure...

...It commands them not individually but collectively...

...Between the first and second of these statements there is the difference between vulgarity and insight...

...Yet we strongly feel that if there is to be any hope for the revival of socialist consciousness, the intellectual tendency we have labeled "Left authoritarianism" must be decisively rejected...

...These new specialists in human manipulation have learned that only force counts, only toughness wins...

...But that is not the case...

...it reduces the masses to a heap, an aggregate of atoms...

...Political and moral values—and choices—have assumed crucial relevance precisely to the degree that economic and technological problems appear to become manageable...

...Suffice it to say that many of the intellectuals who do turn to 'a full or partial sympathy toward Stalinism seek there a continuation, a logical fulfillment of the authoritarian patterns of their own world...

...it thus lies, quite naturally, beyond the sphere proper of material production...

...But more...

...Here, to provide further analysis, we would have to enter the realms of individual psychology and biography—which we are not prepared to do...

...Marx did not say: economic levels determine human consciousness...

...Sweezy more sensitive with regard to human freedom...

...He had in mind, as well, a growth of social consciousness which he assumed to be parallel with the process of bourgeois industrialization— but which our experience has shown not at all parallel with Stalinist industrialization...

...Nor is this significantly changed by the fact that Marxist writings have been utilized in the Russian state ideology...

...Thus Mr...

...Here, precisely, lies the test...

...The high level of economic development they desired had meaning for them not as a "final end"— they were never economic fetishists—but as a means by which to approach the one truly human goal: the humanization of humanity...

...What is not said is how these previously dormant millions are brought into modern history...

...Economic categories, Marx insisted, could not be understood outside of the social relations which flourished at a given historical moment...

...Marx felt that "the people cannot really be happy until they have been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion"---but now we witness a displacement of religious feelings onto the abstraction of History...

...The -argument is not here exhausted, it is barely begun...

...How...

...No one goes through a process of thought quite so simple, yet as a description of an intellectual development it may be adequate...

...For we recognize that these issues are of first importance...

...Clearly, then, the meaning of industrialization in 20th-century Stalinism cannot be adduced from 19-century capitalism...

...Toward what end...

...The Russian bureaucracy controls the means of production not by right of private property but by holding in its hands the state, the levers of political and social and economic power...

...For him the dialectic of property is simple: private is bad, public good...

...Marx said that the great evil of capitalism was that it "alienated" man from his work and from his self...

...It is sometimes said that the Stalinists have at least brought millions of previously dormant people into modern history...

...that is to say, judgment declines into justification...

...And in this instance what matters is not the writer personally, but the kind of thought he expresses, reducing the socialist ideal to the prison world of 1984...

...The difference involved may be to -a limited extent compared —though comparisons are always hazardous —with that between a 19th-century entrepreneur and a modern corporation...

...For many of the intellectuals who grew up under the influence of Stalinism and who have shaken off its formulas without aba:<doning its modes of thought, the ideology of AUTHORITARIANS OF THE "LEFT" 179 "Left authoritarianism" provides an extremely comfortable outlook...

...III Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Marxian theory of economics, one that is likely to resist all attack, was that it rejected the fetishistic view that economic processes were analogous to natural processes, and instead proceeded to interpret economic relations as one aspect of the total existential relations among men...

...So that what counts now is the political-social use of the productive forces already available...

...What matters most is the relationship between the expansion of productive forces and the quality of the human (or class) consciousness that accompanies it...

...It is easy enough to say that industrialization prepares the ground for democracy, but to say this is to view the relationship of economy to politics abstractly rather than to examine the concrete way in which Russian industrialization has been purchased at a catastrophic cost to human consciousness...

...A terrifying change has taken place: a change not in ideas but in values...

...The ruling classes of classical India and China did not individually own the chief means of production, the land...

...Hence as long as the working class, as in present-day Russia, is prevented from achieving an awareness of its own distinctiveness, it cannot be said to have the capacity for ordering society...

...All one needs to know about AUTHORITARIANS OF THE "LEFT" 177 Sweezy as a socialist or simply a democrat can be gleaned from the exquisite delicacy of that word "restrictions...

...But with this difference: the fetishism of the plan is substituted for the fetishism of the commodity...

...Much could be done for the bourgeois, everything must be done by the socialist working class...

...Nor is Mr...

...inconceivable that the Russian bureaucracy might be induced to give up some of its privileges, one is ready to agree—though the problem is at present so hypothetical as to be virtually irrelevant...

...That is all: we neither omit nor suppress anything from his statement...

...Here the course of social history during the period of industrialization has witnessed the destruction of those very rights, both civil and human, which are generally pointed to as the justification for the horrors of English industrialization...

...This worship of the putative success of the future is often evident in the work of writers who might be ashamed to argue that present might is right...

...I The original impetus of 19th-century socialism was—with some familiar, significant exceptions—profoundly democratic...

...And here we come to another central trait of the political tendency we are trying to describe: its fatal 178 LEWIS COSER AND IRVING HOWE attraction to power, power as lure, power as virtue, power as the one ultimate, undeniable reality of life...

...No ruling class has ever, of course, remained free from the pressure of change, all ruling classes have to some degree felt the need to adjust themselves to new conditions...

...But to the writers who, in one or another way, speak for "Left authoritarianism" all this has become meaningless...

...Marx spoke of "the categorical imperative that all conditions must be revolutionized in which man is a debased, an enslaved, an abandoned, a contemptible being...

...No free intelligentsia, for example, has been 'able to appear in Stalinist Russia as it did in 19th-century England, fiercely criticizing the repellent features of society and developing an independent attachment to democratic norms...

...Nothing can be more misleading than the analogy that so occupies Isaac Deutscher, the analogy between the bourgeois and socialist revolutions...

...At the same time, however, "Left authoritarianism" preserves and enlarges a cynical element of the traditional fellow-traveling outlook by connecting it with the most up-todate and sophisticated theories of managerial and bureaucratic society: let the eggs be broken as they will, the omelette will still be made...

...But even if certain economic concessions and improvements were to be granted, even if a "relaxation" were to take place within the tension of totalitarianism, the one thing that seems beyond crediting is that the regime would grant, orwould grant without the most terrific pressure against it, any significant political and social rights...

...Far from being a parasitic excrescence on a healthy body, it is an integral element of a corrupt social structure...

...Burnham, although the English Russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip...

...Davis and his cothinkers it is an "effectively functioning society...

...When Marx spoke of the increase of productive forces as a prerequisite for socialism, he had in mind—one can say this with some assurance—not an isolated development in one or another country but a general or "universal" development of, at least, the Western world...

...Few of the social-cultural advantages that industrialization has traditionally brought to the West have yet appeared in Stalinist Russia...

...But this is merely a less troubled way of remarking that modern totalitarian movements, both Stalinist and fascist, have to employ, even as they rigidly channel, the energies of the masses...

...An essential element of "Left authoritarianism" is the idea that the expansion of productive forces is "progressive" or at least potentially "progressive...

...hence Stalinism really works...

...Democratic socialism has been defeated: it did not work: it cannot work: it is wrong...

...It permitsthem to be indifferent to human values while retaining their faith in Dnieperstroy...

...It not merely ignores the qualitative distinctions between bourgeois and socialist transformations...

...He could hardly have had Marxism in mind—but he might as well have...

...But if that is the best radicalism can do, then it has no further reason for existence...

...Instead of simply asserting that "what is is right," the writers who express one or another element of "Left authoritarianism" imply that "what will be will be right...

...In Russia things have been entirely different...

...For the new kind of fellow-traveler all that matters is that in Russia there is a nationalized economy, or that there has been a rise in its productive level or that (on the bones of millions) "social stability" has been established...

...V A somewhat more subtle argument focuses upon the future...

...They control the means of production and the means of coercion...

...it also ignores the specific and novel elements of totalitarianism, i.e., the fusion of ideology with terror...

...Which leads us to another point requiring clarification...

...1. he most outwardly impressive argument of "Left authoritarianism" (especially for those to whom "economics" always seems more impressive than anything else) is the argument of industrialization...

...Yet it is just as dubious to defend the rightness of the future because it is the future as to defend the rightness of the present because it is "given...

...Left authoritarianism" prefers to neglect the question of whether the economic expansion it finds so admirable in Russia has led to an increase or decrease in the "alienation" of the Russian workers and intellectuals...

...The bureaucratized and militarized modern state must use ideology, and for this it needs specialists in the manipulation of opinion, intellectuals who can create bonds of loyalty...

...Marx insisted that societies must be seen in their social totality, he called his Capital a study in political economy, he measured the claims of societies by their concrete human consequences...

...Totalitarian society breaks up human and social bonds, it destroys the ties of fraternity that are a precondition for socialist values...

...The party secretaries and executives, the Red Directors and Soviet managers do not just "live better"—though they certainly and grossly do that too...

...For they are brought into it not as subjects learning to act autonomously but as objects being manipulated...

...During its early flowering Marxism was one of the most complex and hence unfinished constructs of the human intelligence...

...all that," and the social and emotional risks accompanying it, can be assigned to the romantic past...

...In whose interest...

...II A century ago Jacob Burckhardt predicted that the coming age would be the age of the "great simplifiers...

...Marx and Engels, though not they alone, looked toward an awakening of the masses of humanity from the stupor of centuries...

...Those who are prepared to answer this question, however gingerly, in the affirmative may be said to be "Left authoritarians...

...With regard to this problem, as with regard to many others, politics in the 20th century primes economics...

...Imagine merely what a Dickens could do for and to present-day Russia...

...It is precisely the absence of any possibility of a Dickens in present-day Russia which suggests how false and facile is the analogy between the process of industrialization in bourgeois society and in Stalinist society...

...This is an elementary axiom of Marx's thought, which can also be found in Hegel, who writes in The Philosophy of Laws: "The lower classes have been left more or less unorganized...

...If the distasteful characteristics of Russian society stemmed primarily from distortions within the sphere of consumption (that is, in the distribution of goods), then indeed changes in this sphere would amount to a change in the essential structure of society...

...Davis make of Marx's view that "the kingdom of freedom actually begins only where drudgery, enforced by hardship and by external purposes, ends...

...If that is not done, judgment succumbs to the mere acceptance of the "factuality of facts," whether in the past or future...

...When a writer provides an eccentric variation to a commonly agreed-upon statement of a social goal, this may tell us almost nothing about the goal, but it does tell us a good deal about the writer...

...From this process of social struggle rather than as an automatic corollary of industrialization, the great democratic triumphs that we associate with the 19th century were won...

...The intellectual tendency of "Left authoritarianism" prefers to speak of the tempo of Russian industrialization...

...Imperceptibly, many radicals have come to accept the moral terms of their adversaries...

...Russia won the war...

...The heads of many modern corporations do not themselves own a share in them, they derive their power essentially from an ability to control, which is partly based on the incapacity for action of the nominal, owners, the often atomized and powerless stockholders...

...Along the same lines Sweezy writes that the outstanding achievement of socialism in the Soviet Union has been the victory in the war against Nazi Germany...

...But if he defines it as equivalent to the mere abolition of private property and if he then casts this definition within an argument justifying or minimizing the destruction of freedom in Russia, it must be said that not only does his view run counter to almost every strand of the Marxist tradition but, far more important, it projects a vision of the future that is utterly detestable...

...It is the Soviet Union's military success in the war against Germany which more than anything else has convinced the world that socialism really works...

...One is reminded of Kierkegaard's biting comment on Hegel: "His work is full of syntheses, while life is full of choices...

...Once, however, it became clear that socialism had failed to achieve power, all "the old crap," as Marx had bluntly called it, again rose to the surface of intellectual life...

...A society like that in Russia, which prevents the free and spontaneous organization VII 180 LEWIS COSER AND IRVING HOWE of the workers, therefore cannot be said to facilitate the achievement of socialism...

...Emphasis added.] Here we have entered the realm of "Left" Newspeak: freedom equals slavery, slavery equals freedom...

...He said: social existence determines human consciousness...

...It is here that Isaac Deutscher, while in intention clearly distinct from the political tendency we are describing, provides it nonetheless with its most sophisticated rationale...

...hence Leninism didn't really work...

...Today, however, the tough new "realist" is totally impervious to such arguments, for his half-hidden loyalty to Stalinist thinking is based not on a humanitarian illusion but on a sympathetic identification with precisely the most brutal features of Russian politics...

...The old image of the intellectual as a man on the margin no longer quite holds, neither under Stalinism nor capitalism...

...hence Hitlerism almost really worked, and indeed for a short time may really have worked...

...Without organization, they are nothing but a heap, an aggregate of atoms...

...They came not simply because England was being industrialized...

...The bureaucracy does not individually own, it collectively controls—and hence prevents all other strata from participation in decision-making...

...In his book Socialism Paul Sweezy defines socialism as "a system which disallows private property...

...Let us glance at a rather crude example of the kind of thinking we wish to attack, the very crudeness of which may help get to the root of things...

...Living as we do in a historical moment when the old socialist passion has died out and a new one has not yet come to life, all the temptations for succumbing to the prevalent trends of authoritarian thought are particularly strong...

...Nor is it inconceivable that the Russian terror will be lessened, or at least regularized and "normalized...

...From Marx's point of view the over-all development of productive forces was "progressive" because it made possible a society of plenty and leisure...

...Nor is this a matter of schematic dogmatism: it inheres in the very idea of socialism...

...By shifting the responsibility onto History (as, for example, in the argument that the horrors of Stalinism may be justified by the need for industrialization in backward countries) it becomes possible to avoid political-moral responsibility...

...We have in mind many people who begin with more-or-less socialist and democratic premises, yet, by a curious route, end with authoritarian conclusions...

...Whether in a system which "disallows private property" man might still be "a debased, a contemptible being" (and what else has he been forced to become in Russia...

...Furthestfrom our mind is to lay down any "line," any inflexible dogma...