A Few Words of Greeting

...One of the outstanding tri umphs of lobbying is the success of the AMA not only in defeating approaches to socialized medicine, but in discrediting it in the minds of so many people...

...For reasons not hard to understand, PaulHenri Spaak's famous remark contains much truth: The thing that Socialists have nationalized best is socialism...

...Yet in my lifetime, it has become the fashion to defend the American system, not in terms of capitalism vs...

...It must be consciously based on the use of automation and modern technology generally to give us for the first time in man's life on this planet an economy of abundance...

...Nationalization of itself will not solve these problems, nor will economic change automatically wipe out race prejudice...

...We shall not have peace in an anarchy of 120 absolutely sovereign nations in an interdependent world unless there is a socialist type of internationalism in politics and economics...

...Within the United States, laissez-faire economies and weak government have proved unable to deal with as vital a problem as health...

...I can say this and applaud the value of our magazine in all humility, since my own part in it has been so small...

...namely, "my right to try to be as rich as Paul Getty"—a gentleman whose vast wealth derives from no corresponding service to society, but from astute manipulation of oil stocks...

...2—A greater challenge to our conventional socialist expectations is the economic progress of defeated Japan and West Germany, and war-ravaged France and Italy under an economy quite different from Marx's...

...The devastation of World War II in what were the most advanced capitalist countries was not followed by the triumph of socialism...

...Why is there no stronger Socialist party if socialism is the world's hope...

...More and more college and university graduates look for jobs, not openings for private enterprise...

...Since my youth capitalist free enterprise has steadily diminished before great corporations and government...

...That we should continue to support it goes without saying at this time when democratic socialism, necessarily of a nondogmatic kind, is at once so essential an answer to our problems, and so little regarded by articulate liberals, to say nothing of the general public...

...socialism...

...His concern, he said, was for "freedom"—in action pretty much the sort of freedom a college boy in Illinois told me that he stood for in opposition to socialism...

...And someone always loses...

...One cannot issue a blanket denial of this fact even if one cites the greater fringe benefits in many lands, the advantages of socialized medicine the substantial material achievements of communism in Russia and China after the great destruction of war...

...It is commonplace that a highway system, education, the provision of water for a society insatiably demanding it, require government planning and action...

...In my own experience, in debating the theme, it was Wendell Wilkie who gave the great impetus to the substitution of "free enterprise" for capitalism—he was then head of a dubiously ethical private "public" utility corporation...

...They are (a) the effect of a cold war economy on the general economic scene...

...The action has required a steadily increased degree of public ownership...

...socialism, but "free enterprise" vs...

...They ask how our modern socialism differs from the New Deal, Welfare State, liberalism...

...May DISSENT live many years to elaborate this truth and win support for it...

...Let me enumerate some of the reasons which go deeper than calling down curses on the success of mass propaganda by an owning class: I—The generally accepted belief that American workers are better off than the workers of any country under socialist or communist rule...

...On this subject Malthus was more right than Marx, though neither foresaw the situation as we are forced to see it...

...what socialism has to offer in the face of the population explosion, the onrush of automation, poverty in our affluent society, civil rights, the arms economy, and the foreign policy on which war or peace depends...

...But what has happened in the convulsions that began with World War I and now attend the revolution of rising expectations, makes it ever more manifest that our civilization, perhaps the very life of our race in a thermonuclear age, will depend on the application of two fundamental socialist principles: The first is that the main principle of our economy must be a conscious planning for production for the use of all earth's children...

...Still less can we thus answer the stock questions: Why is labor so indifferent or opposed to socialism...

...but it cannot be devoted to saving as much private profit as possible...

...It is true that workers in more advanced industrial nations now have something more than their chains But they and their comrades the world over still have a fraternity of peace and freedom and plenty to win...

...They have no subsidies, tariffs, parity payments, social security, guaranteed collective bargaining—nothing but their marbles...

...and (c) the fact that the civil rights revolution with its imperative and rightful demand for equality of job opportunity coincides with a diminishing demand for workers, especially in the unskilled and semi-skilled lines where once the demand was greatest...

...Nothing is more certain than that long-range planning, economic and political, is necessary to our life...

...It is interesting to observe that the civil rights campaign, and now the official, newly-proclaimed "war on poverty" have challenged the assumptions that we live in the best of possible Americas—often in what is held to be the worst of possible, Communist-polluted worlds...

...5—Socialist internationalism, emotionally so strong before World War I, while by no means dead today, has not made any such contribution to peace in the strife and confusion of the years since 1914 as some of us had hoped...

...4—Our own country, most affluent of nations and most advanced industrially, is faced with problems undreamed of as late, let us say, as the Great Depression...

...3—At the present time the population explosion creates problems that cannot be solved by a socialism indifferent to them...

...Our hopes of men's capacity rapidly to develop the attitudes and the social machinery essential to a virile socialist society may have been too high...

...Let me quote once more our friend Aaron Levenstein's classic observation that the "only genuine practitioners of free enterprise are small boys playing marbles for keeps...

...It has been a great achievement to have kept DISSENT going in this country these ten confused and difficult years...

...It was expressed in the call for the workers of the world to unite...

...Again there is not too much specific help in our older socialist texts...

...Our science, our technology, our growth in population make it inescapable...

...We socialists can and should acknowledge these facts and then go on to say that we are in a far better position to deal with the problems they present than our capitalist critics...

...The curious thing is that capitalism posing as free enterprise is so very far from free—farther than in my youth when it didn't boast of freedom but rested its case on the adequacy of the profit motive to inspire all essential economic action...

...Marx's orderly, foreordained movement from feudalism through capitalism to socialism hasn't happened...

...Where would we be if wholly dependent on the mercies of the AMA, the "ethical" drug industry, and Madison Avenue advertisers...

...Our estimate of the power of capitalism to adjust itself to the times —chiefly by appropriating or accepting measures it had previously damned as socialist—may have been too low...

...In my traveling and speaking, especially at colleges and universities, I meet an increasing number of questions which go beyond the rather naive and uninformed average...

...Such planning may make considerable use of the profit-price system...

...Yet these new concerns have scarcely brought any rush into socialist ranks...

...The second great socialist ideal which must be adopted and adapted is internationalism...

...It is not enough to point out also how different it is from Adam Smith's...

...Most of these questions can by no means be answered simply by texts out of Marx...

...b) the effect of automation...