A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen

...In light of the recent discussions about participatory democracy, Marx's sketch needs to be elaborated...

...Self-government is a very demanding and time-consuming business, and when it is extended from political to economic and cultural life, and when the organs of government are decentralized so as to maximize participation, it will inevitably become more demanding still...

...When will there be time for the cultivation of personal creativity or the free association of like-minded friends...

...SOCIALISM, OSCAR WILDE ONCE WROTE, would take too many evenings...

...they snatch hours and sometimes days...

...Somehow power must be distributed, as it isn't today, to small groups of active and interested citizens, but these citizens must themselves be made responsible to a larger electorate...

...Society regulates the general production," Marx writes, "and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow...

...it is his great virtue that he is self-chosen, a volunteer...

...That is because of the various sorts of collusion which presently develop between small and coopted cliques of actors and critics...

...perhaps it isn't...

...It suggests also that socialism and participatory democracy will depend upon, and hence require, an extraordinary willingness to attend meetings, and a public spirit and sense of responsibility that will make attendance dependable and activity consistent and sustained...

...They are far more important in the political arena than in the theater...

...That is why the best critics in a liberal society are men-out-of-office...

...He hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, rears cattle in the evening, and plays the critic after dinner...

...But if that argument is true, it may mean that self-government also leaves government to the few...

...they harry their families and skimp on their jobs, but yet cannot make it to every meeting...

...they work hard but occasionally...

...he commits himself entirely...

...But this is very unlikely to be true of all men and women all the time—even if one were to admit what seems plausible enough: that political life is more intrinsic to human nature than is hunting and cattle-rearing or even (to drop Marx's rural imagery) art or music...

...The small numbers of participating citizens in the U.S...

...He isn't in any simple sense wrong...

...it is one of the dangers of participatory democracy that it would fail to provide any effective protection for these rights...

...they perform all these functions as a matter of duty...

...Some make a full-time commitment...

...The apathetic, the occasional enthusiasts, the parttime workers: all of them will be ruled by full-timers, militants, and professionals...

...their work has more palpable results...

...Immediately after lunch, a special session of the Fishermen's Council will be called to protest the maximum catch recently voted by the Regional Planning Commission...

...They may lend passive support to the movement and help out occasionally, but they won't work, nor are their needs and aspirations in any sense embodied by the militants who will...

...today, the widespread fearfulness, the sense of impotence and irrelevance: all these are signs of social sickness...

...without it we will only get one or another sort of activist or apparatchik tyranny...

...A powerful figure looms behind Marx's hunter, fisherman, shepherd, and critic: the busy citizen attending his endless meetings...

...I'm not sure precisely how to adjust the two...

...I am sure that they have to be adjusted...

...the movement becomes their whole life and they often come to disbelieve in the moral validity of life outside...

...W W E CAN ASSUME THAT a great many citizens, in the best of societies, will do all they can to avoid what Mel Tumin has nicely called "the merciless masochism of community-minded and self-regulating men and women...

...Rousseau develops his own critique of the division of labor by absorbing all human activities into the idea of citizenship: "Citizens," he wrote, "are neither lawyers, nor soldiers, nor priests by profession...

...The fanciful sketch above is only intended to suggest its possible truth...

...If society is not to become an alien and dangerous force, however, the citizens cannot accept its regulation and gratefully do what they please...

...The proper response to such protests is not to tell the laggard citizens that they should have been active these past many months, not to nag them to do work that they don't enjoy and in any case won't do well, but to listen to what they have to say...

...Socialists since have worried that it is not economically feasible...

...it is another danger that these would not be sufficiently valued...

...Too often, of course, the reviews are favorable and the audiences come...

...An enormous growth of creative talent, a new and unprecedented variety of expression, a wild proliferation of sects, associations, schools, parties: this will be the flowering of the future society...

...Others are established outside, solidly or precariously...

...N N ONPARTICIPANTS HAVE RIGHTS...

...How many of the people you and I know...

...And that we have already...

...As a matter of duty: here is the key to the character of that patriotic, responsible, energetic man who has figured also in socialist thought, but always in the guise of a new man, freely exercising his human powers...

...Then off they will go to meetings of study groups, clubs, editorial boards, and political parties where criticism will be carried on long into the night...

...BUT IF ONLY SOME CITIZENS participate in political life, it is essential that they always remember and be regularly reminded that they are...

...None of this can rest for any long period of time or among any substantial group of men upon spontaneous interest...

...Tyrannies and oligarchies, Rousseau argued, might tolerate or even encourage license, for the effect of sexual indulgence, artistic freedom, extravagant self-decoration, and privacy itself was to corrupt men and turn them away from public life, leaving government to the few...

...In order to guarantee public-spiritedness and political participation, and as a part of his critique of bourgeois egotism, Rousseau systematically denigrated the value of private life: The better the constitution of a state is, the more do public affairs encroach on private in the minds of the citizens...

...What kind of conversion is necessary...

...We rightly resent the way actors play upon and manipulate the feelings of their audiences...

...To symbolize his virtue, perhaps, he adopts an ascetic style and gives up every sort of self-decoration: he wears sans-culottes or unpressed khakis...

...In the world of the meeting, when will there be time for the tete-a-tete...

...How many Christian women are there," John Calvin once wrote, "who are held captive by their children...

...Before hunting in the morning, this unalienated man of the future is likely to attend a meeting of the Council on Animal Life, where he will be required to vote on important matters relating to the stocking of the forests...

...Not only the participants, but also the nonparticipants would come into their own...

...But many of the people who stay away from meetings do so for reasons that the militants don't understand or won't acknowledge...

...This is the delightful portrait that Marx sketches in the German Ideology as part of a polemic against the division of labor...

...Now, how is such a man produced...

...Rousseau might well have written these lines out of a deep awareness that private life will not, in fact, bear the great weight that bourgeois society places upon it...

...More important, he foregoes a conventional career for the profession of politics...

...Socialism's great appeal is the prospect it holds out for the development of human capacities...

...Alongside the democratic politics of shared work and perpetual activism, there would arise the open and leisurely culture of criticism, second-guessing, and burlesque...

...He embodies what political theorists have called "republican virtue"—that means, he puts the common good, the success of the movement, the safety of the community, above his own delight or well-being, always...

...Nor does it seem possible that spontaneity will flourish above and beyond the routines of social regulation...

...The idea of citizenship on the Left has always been overwhelming, suggesting a positive frenzy of activity, and often involving the repression of all feelings except political ones...

...These last two groups make up the majority of the people available to the movement (any movement), just as they will make up •the majority of the citizens of any socialist society...

...In a radically democratic society they would be men who stay away from meetings, perhaps for months at a time, and only then discover that something outrageous has been perpetrated that must be mocked or protested...

...Certain crucial features of socialist life have been omitted altogether...

...This isn't easy to arrange...

...Men and women will secretly plan love affairs even while public business is being transacted...

...The meeting will probably not end much before noon, for among the many-sided citizens there will always be a lively interest even in highly technical problems...

...But even the new drama requires its audience, and we ought not to forget that audiences can be critical as well as admiring, enlightened as well as mystified...

...They stay away not because they are beaten, afraid, uneducated, lacking confidence and skills (though these are often important reasons), but because they have made other commitments...

...tomorrow he may select another set of activities, just as he pleases...

...He is, above all, dutiful, and this is only possible if he has triumphed over egotism and impulse in his own personality...

...All these have been associated historically (at least until recent times) not with tyrannical but with republican regimes: Greece and Rome, the Swiss Protestant citystates, the first French republic...

...We would prefer politics to be like the new drama with its alienation effects and audience participation...

...The militants represent themselves...

...But Wilde's 244 objection isn't silly...

...Both imply also an injunction to the others: join us, come to the meetings, participate...

...And if they do not govern themselves, they will, willy-nilly, be governed by their activist fellows...

...How many "community people" miss meetings because of their families...

...More important, political actors, like actors in the theater, need the control and tension im posed by audiences, the knowledge that tomorrow the reviews will appear, tomorrow people will come or not come to watch their performance...

...they contribute time and energy—but unequally...

...Fair enough...

...The debates will go on so long that the citizens will have to rush through dinner in order to assume their roles as critics...

...And the Marxist man will participate eagerly in these debates, even postponing a scheduled discussion of some contradictory theses on cattle-rearing...

...After all, what would democratic politics be like without its kibbitzers...

...they work every minute...

...Ultimately, it may well require almost continuous activity, and life will become a succession of meetings...

...Radical politics radically increases the amount and intensity of political participation, but it doesn't (and probably oughtn't to) break through the limits imposed on republican virtue by the inevitable pluralism of commitments, the terrible shortage of time, and the day-to-day hedonism of ordinary men and women...

...Sometimes young radicals sound very much like old Christians, demanding the severance of every tie for the sake of politics...

...The purpose of Wilde's objection is to suggest that just this self-regulation is incompatible with spontaneity, that the requirements of citizenship MICHAEL WALZER are incompatible with the freedom of hunter, fisherman, and so on...

...Yet he is neither hunter, fisherman, shepherd, nor critic...

...They must participate in social regulation...

...He is certain he is their agent, or rather, the agent of their liberation...

...Under these circumstances, words like citizenship and participation actually describe the enfranchisement of only a part, and not necessarily a large part, of the movement or the community...

...Still others attend no meetings at all...

...How many ought they to be...

...Politics itself, of course, can be a spontaneous activity, freely chosen by those men and women who enjoy it and to whose talents a meeting is so much exercise...

...Many people feel that they ought to join MICHAEL WALZER this or that political movement...

...Now for any democrat this is an unsatisfactory relation...

...It is an act of the most extreme devotion...

...they must be social men, organizing and planning their own fulfillment in spontaneous activity...

...Ardent democrats have sometimes urged that citizens be legally required to vote: that is possible, though the device is not attractive...

...But underlying this new individualism and exciting group life must be a broad, self-governing community of equal men...

...Surely there is something to be said for the irresponsible nonparticipant and something also for the part-time activist, the halfvirtuous man (and the most scorned among the militants), who appears and disappears, thinking of Marx and then of his dinner...

...The militant in the movement, for example, doesn't represent anybody...

...More likely, however, he wrote them because he believedthat cooperative activity could not be sustained unless private life were radically repressed, if not altogether eradicated...

...It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of all these, even if they aren't marked, as they generally won't be, by responsibility and virtue...

...How are these people to be represented at the meetings...

...They come up in every radical movement...

...A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SOCIALIST CITIZEN T IS PROBABLY more realistic to see the citizen as the product of collective repression and self-discipline...

...they have A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SOCIALIST CITIZEN created viable subcultures even in an oppressive world...

...This is, it seems to me, one of the most significant criticisms of socialist theory that has ever been made...

...A certain amount of commitment and discipline, of not-quite-merciless masochism, is socially desirable, and efforts to evoke it are socially justifiable...

...they have found ways to cope short of politics...

...they are the stuff of contemporary controversy...

...What are their rights...

...We need, beyond our families and jobs, a public world where purposes are shared and cooperative activity is possible...

...Requiring people to attend meetings, to join in discussions, to govern themselves: that is not possible, at least not in a free society...

...For, if we reject the discipline of Rousseau's republicanism (as we have, and for good reasons), then only those men and women will be activists who volunteer for action...

...Radicalism and socialism make political activity for the first time an option for all those who relish it and a duty—sometimes —even for those who don't...

...The same thing will be true in any future socialist society: participatory democracy has to be paralleled by representative democracy...

...Indeed, he will probably love argument far better than hunting, fishing, or rearing cattle...

...MAGINE A DAY in the life of a socialist citizen...

...He takes their failure to put in an appearance only as a token of their oppression...

...Certainly no radical movement or socialist society is possible without those ever-ready participants, who "fly," as Rousseau said, "to the public assemblies...

...only some...

...For activists and professionals in the movement or the polity don't simply contrive effects...

...For many people in America today, politics is something to watch, an exciting spectacle, and there exists between the activists and the others something of the relation of actor and audience...

...Selfgovernment is an important human function, an exercise of significant talents and energies, and the sense of power and responsibility it brings is enormously healthy...

...Nothing is more important than that responsibility...

...But nonparticipants also have functions...

...And those who don't go may well turn out to be more effective critics than those who do: no one who was one of its first guessers can usefully secondguess a decision...

...While the necessary meetings go on and on, they will take long walks, play with their children, paint pictures, make love, and watch television...

...Or what kind of rigorous training...

...Rousseau set out to create virtuous citizens, and the means he chose are very old in the history of republicanism: an authoritarian family, a rigid sexual code, censorship of the arts, sumptuary laws, mutual surveillance, the systematic indoctrination of children...

...Private affairs are even of much less importance, because the aggregate of the common happiness furnishes a greater proportion of that of each individual, so that there is less for him to seek in particular cares...

...But in an entirely free society, there would be many more political actors and critics than ever before, and they would, presumably, be self-chosen...

...Self-government requires selfcontrol: it is one of the oldest arguments in the history of political thought...

...But there is nothing to be done...

...How exhausting it would be...

...The very least that can be said is that these people, unlike the poor, will always be with us...

...They will attend sometimes, when their interests are directly at stake or when they feel like it...

...they show up, perhaps, at critical moments, then they are gone...

...We dislike the aura of magic and mystification contrived at on stage...

...Social regulation is his entire life...

...But since he sacrifices so much for his fellowmen, he readily persuades himself that he is acting in their name...

...But what a suffocating sense of responsibility, what a plethora of virtue would be necessary to sustain the participation of everybody all the time...

...His citizen does not participate in social regulation as one part of a round of activities...

...Too many evenings" is a shorthand phrase that describes something more than the sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting business of resolutions and debates...

...Socialism means the rule of the men with the most evenings to spare...

...Their policies touch us all in material ways, whether we go or don't go to the meetings...

...Participatory democracy means the sharing of power among the activists...

...These are not only problems of the future, when popular participation has finally been established as the core of political and economic life...

...they do join...

...I I SUPPOSE THERE WILL ALWAYS be time for the tete-a-tete...

...If the movement is to be democratic, the others must be represented...

...But they won't make the full-scale commitment necessary for socialism or participatory democracy...

...But there is another difficulty that I want to consider: that is, the curiously apolitical character of the citizen Marx describes...

...Its character can best be examined in the work of JeanJacques Rousseau, from whom socialists and, more recently, New Leftists directly or indirectly inherited it...

...How many will that be...