Why We Need Socialism in America
Harrington, Michael
Raised letters, such as a, refer to textual NOTES, which begin on page 288. Raised numbers, such as 1, refer to bibliographical REFERENCES, which begin on page 301. AMERICA NEEDS SOCIALISM. Our...
...but a majority of the people, including tens of millions who were not poor, were also deprived of benefits that should have rightfully been theirs...
...Under Communism," Sidney Hook once wrote, "man ceases to suffer as an animal and suffers as a human...
...To offset this trend, such decisions have to be made with major consideration of the social costs —a kind of calculus (as will be seen shortly) that is at odds with the very character of the capitalist economy...
...John Maynard Keynes, though a principled antisocialist, was more visionary on this count than either Kautsky or Crosland: For the Western world [Keynes said in 1931] already has the resources and the techniques, if we would create an organization to use them, capable of reducing the Economic Problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance...
...172 ff...
...120...
...yet it is under the broad supervision of the federal government in Washington...
...Nor is it necessary to accept all of these dangers fatalistically...
...The "nation's most productive citizens," the Journal reported, were dismayed at this turn of events...
...100...
...It is therefore important to insist upon the limitations of socialism as a prelude to describing how it seeks to break through some of our present limits It proposes a solution, not to all human ills, but to those based upon the economic, social, and political conditions of life...
...116 On the other hand, capitalism proposes to measure, and consume, this output in terms of labor time which sets a limit upon what can be sold...
...Ibid., p. 148...
...My text will make clear shortly how profoundly pessimistic this analysis is, for Marx regarded leisure as the distinctive mark of that kingdom of freedom which socialism was to gain...
...A. P. Lerner's analysis converged with Lange's but added a crucial point...
...72 (Emphasis added...
...his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical...
...Nixon talks in this manner, there is no real question of innovations that could threaten the power and privilege of his most important supporters...
...Robert Dorfman, in Measuring the Benefits of Government Investment, 301 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Robert Dorfman, ed...
...There was one tradition, with origins in Saint-Simon, that emphasized state action, planning, and socialized investment...
...There has been widespread state intervention to correct the "natural" tendency of the system to catastrophe (though, more often than not, these measures were introduced at the behest of the labor and socialist movements and against the determined opposition of a significant section of business...
...This concept of "state socialism" was popularized in the American socialist movement by Louis Boudin (The Theoretical System of Karl Marx [Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1915], pp...
...The intellectual realization in Russia and the Soviet Union that fiat planning is wasteful—that Trotsky's 1931 criticism was quite right—applies even more to a democratic socialist society than to totalitarianism...
...There is also a certain danger in carrying out the socialist idea to its ultimate conclusions...
...The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx...
...and even if these first two obstacles to providing every citizen with a decent house, income, and job were overcome, the system still has an inherent tendency to make affluence self-destructive...
...That last phrase is a brilliant and prescient summary of what Nixon, Macmillan, and the other "conservative collectivists" want: a "consciously regulated society" (planning) "in antagonistc form" (the continuing domination of private interests even in the public intervention...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Originally it was given considerable autonomy in order to take it out of "politics...
...291 MICHAEL HARRINGTON The emergence of a rationalized capitalism was subjected to different interpretations by the left and right wings of the socialist movement...
...If it is indeed impossible to take a single, giant stride into utopia, one surely cannot arrive at a society of brotherhood by way of gradual terror and coercion...
...Throughout the nineteenth century, some of those calling themselves socialists wanted to destroy the state and transfer all political functions to work groups, while others used the same word defining proposals to make the state the main agency of social transformation...
...The American welfare system in the sixties reached only a third of the poor and provided them, on a national average, with only half of what 244 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA they needed.i° Meanwhile, in 1969, the richest one-sixth among the farmers (individuals and corporations) received two-thirds of the agricultural subsidies, or about $2.5 billion...
...Even then—and I admit this possibility for the purpose of argument only—it would be necessary to go beyond capitalism and toward socialism...
...35 This is a remarkable admission...
...In this context, the following analysis of the severe limits capitalism imposes upon the welfare state is designed not to prove that liberals are foolish and deluded, but that their liberal values can only be completely realized on the basis of a socialist program...
...he held that it would become a necessity.n 3 The output of an automated economy, Marx said, would increase so fast that, if title to consumption were still determined by labor time, society could not possibly use up its own production...
...It is precisely this conventional assumption about our present and future that I propose to challenge...
...Right can, by its nature, only develop through the application of uniform norms...
...For the radicals, Keniston discovered, are overwhelmingly the children of the middle, and even uppermiddle, class...
...If, as I will argue in a moment, the abolition of money and work are basic socialist values, that has some bearing on tomorrow's urgent trade union negotiations and on the next welfare measure in the legislature...
...Ibid., p. 150...
...the theory that the workers as the source of economic value have the right to its rewards...
...It is therefore a right of inequality like all other rights...
...Is it poetic license to say that Marx was talking about automation...
...Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 256...
...The other standard criticism of free goods is the charge that they invite waste...
...Ironically the political deductions that follow from such a hypothesis about new forms of scarcity are as socialist as those based upon unprecedented abundance...
...When considering giant industries, one should think in terms of the TVA model of a public corporation—with considerable autonomy and the right to innovate—rather than of the Post Office, a public enterprise under the direct and political control of the government...
...Tests are merely the results...
...We believe that, in economics, this kind of a force quickly 298 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA becomes an end in itself and then exercises its power over relationships among men...
...In the absence of a vigorous mass movement capable of democratizing this trend toward collectivism—in the absence, that is, of a socialist alternative— planning will be conservative, manipulative, and at the service of social and economic privilege...
...261 VI MICHAEL HARRINGTON There are other structural changes that could socialize some of the functions of property...
...The essence of bourgeois society," he wrote to Ludwig Kugelman in 1868, "is exactly that there is no a priori conscious, social regulation of production...
...After the government had played such an important directing role in the economy during World War I, this concept became even more widespread...
...105...
...Hans Muller, Ursprung and Geschichte des Wortes "Sozialismus" [Hanover, Germany: Dietz Verlag, 1967], p. 137...
...Adding in the blue-collar service workers, that would mean over 40 million citizens in working-class occupations in the mid-seventies...
...For as he recalled his own theory it had but one element—that trial and error would lead to the fixing of prices by correcting surpluses and deficits over a period of time...
...Already, they noted, feudalists, shopkeepers, preachers, and the bourgeoisie itself used socialist rhetoric to conceal antisocialist purposes...
...14 Now it is bad enough that such a group should exist at all...
...When, for instance, the Attlee government nationalized industry after World War II in Britain, it did not follow the principle of Clause Four of the Labour party's constitution and did not provide "the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service...
...A quite similar idea was proposed by Douglas Jay of the British Labour party, which would make a government investment bank the recipient of the stock paid as death duty...
...So FAR, THIS DISCUSSION has dealt primarily with huge units of modern production, but there are also many instances where cooperative, regional, and even neighborhood forms of social ownership are desirable...
...Income," as defined by the Internal Revenue Service, excludes more than $7 billion a year in capital gains...
...Alain Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique [Paris: Seuil, 1968], p. 177...
...That prediction is partly based on the parochial assumption that man will act in a radically new environment exactly as he did in the old, that the greed and acquisitiveness of several hundred years of capitalism are of the human essence...
...the advocacy of national planning as an equivalent to socialism...
...And what Roszak is articulating is, in part at least, a self-righteous call for such people to withdraw into their tight little universe and, in the name of ultra-radicalism, reduce the opportunities for basic change...
...27 External diseconomies are a result of an opposite phenomenon: acts of consumption that create a collective evil, e.g...
...Joseph Pechman, "The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay," Public Interest, Fall 1969...
...The characteristic of 'modern capitalism,' " he wrote, "is based on the tendency toward the concentration of industry which, on the one hand, expresses itself in the 'abolition of free competition' through the formation of trusts and cartels and, on the other, by the ever closer relationship between bank and industrial capital...
...but we did not realize the various disguises this trend could adopt...
...Planning for whom...
...As the "individual grows rapidly more comfortable, the community becomes ever more rapidly weaker and weaker...
...By 1882 he could tell the Reichstag, "Many of the measures that we have adopted for the welfare of the land are socialistic, and the state must introduce even more socialism into our Reich...
...In other words, planning could and should broaden the range of choice for the majority...
...If he still considered himself a socialist, that was either in deference to tradition or as an expression of his essential reformism: utopia, at least for a time, had been partially conservatized...
...Nixon noted that by the year 2000 the number of Americans was going to increase to 300 million and that this growth would be predominantly urban...
...Portions of this ideology—as, for that matter, hippie styles in clothing—are to be found among a very large number of the growing college-educated constituency...
...In France, after May 1968, the authorities adopted a version of the foregoing analysis and acted upon it...
...As Keynes, who was certainly not a radical dreamer, put it: the author of these essays, for all his croakings, still hopes and believes that the day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and human relations, of creation and behavior and religion...
...If the European social democrats have not been able to go beyond the welfare state, isn't it preposterous to suggest that they—and an America that doesn't even have a mass social democratic movement— should now prepare to go much farther...
...And to the extent that there is a mass "left wing" in the United States, it is composed largely of precisely those groups—trade unionists, minorities, middle-class idealists—which fought these great battles and are determined to preserve the gains they brought...
...Ibid., p. 125...
...under capitalism the welfare state has a built-in tendency to take much better care of the rich than of the poor...
...With socialist planning—at once massive, comprehensive, and democratic—there is at least the possibility that man can master the environment he has created...
...We begin with the specific problems that have just been identified, and within a context established by capitalism where resources are limited and choices have to be made...
...it also cannot deal adequately, no matter how sophisticated it has become, with either poverty or affiluence...
...And they might create an entrenched bureaucracy with a self-interest of its own...
...Other cases in point can be found in literally every department of government...
...Another change in psychology is taking place, not in the slums, but in the surburbs of the upper middle class and the rich...
...In every advanced nation there was unprecedented student and youth unrest...
...There was, however, another important component to his point of view: the role of prices in determining the alternate uses of limited resources, and this remains a complicated question of politics and value judgment which cannot be left to machines...
...At the same time the vision of an utterly transformed society which the European workers had adopted so frightened the capitalists that they yielded to reforms...
...The worker in the welfare state had a certain stake in the established order as well as powerful grievances against it...
...In thus documenting the limits of the welfare state it may seem that I am contemptuous of past reforms or of those liberals who do not share my conviction that there must be fundamental, structural change...
...The only humane criterion is that of need, and these growth "industries" are therefore natural candidates for social investment...
...Vague metaphors—the state will "seize" or "take over" the means of production—provide no guide for political action in a complex, technological economy...
...In the past, socialists have tended to ignore the enormous potential of tax policy as a way of getting to a decent society...
...For those among the young who were preparing for careers in the "knowledge economy," this delay was functional...
...Confusion as to the meaning of socialism is to be found on the Left as well as the Right...
...But on the far side of such a process— and verging toward that second phase of socialist transition Marx envisioned —it is not at all utopian to expect that the relative disappearance of scarcity will give rise to new social forms of motivation...
...This analysis underestimates the resourcefulness and adaptability of sophisticated corporations...
...This process should establish the broad priorities of the society and annually monitor the result of past efforts...
...240 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA tem of power...
...Under socialism there will be no end to history—but there may be a new history...
...Eisenhower came out for relocating masses of people in new, more wholesome communities...
...the Independent Labour party heritage of an emotional identification with the "bottom dog...
...Action Program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, April 5, 1968...
...Economist (London), January 31, 1970 59...
...Public servants are expected to manage public funds as conservatively as their essential purpose permits...
...Whenever Wilson, who had received a democratic mandate, sought to raise pensions or to introduce other reforms, bankers in London and throughout the world took reprisals against the pound sterling...
...An unprecedented accomplishment, Marx concluded, would contain the seeds of crisis...
...The nature of the legal ownership has an undoubted bearing on the amenability of the technostructure to social goals...
...In such a system, prices do "not reflect the relative urgency of the demands of different people...
...I believe that the second half of the sixties bore out my analysis more than that of the "end of ideology" people...
...The latter groups were simply more discrete (or disingenuous) about their disenchantment, and more frenetic in their search for new saviors...
...On the one hand, I want to avoid that absolutist view of socialism which is so transcendental that it drives its true believers to totalitarianism and an antisocialist society...
...That is one reaon why an extension of social ownership is necessary...
...MEW, 23:287...
...109 By now we have become so accustomed to the regime of compulsory (in an economic sense) labor that we have lost even the memory of the precapitalist period when leisure was more common...
...It is possible that there is, in fact, more to the case for the autonomous public corporation that the modern socialist now sees...
...At the same time, the government would be a bad administrator of socialized industry...
...Ibid., p. 240...
...Yet there has been a great deal of confusion, partly, I suspect, because this prodigious age is producing not one but two new social groups, related yet distinct...
...But if they were part of a comprehensive policy which sought to limit progressively the rights of property in the means of production, they could encourage and direct the "euthanasia of the rentiers...
...And then, in a perceptive statement of the kind of economic calculation that should rule in a publicly-owned enterprise, Kheel writes: Austin J. Tobin, executive director [of the Port Authority] for 27 years, once said, "Above all else, the people expect their officials to give them prudent and conservative management of public funds...
...Riesman and Jencks write: So long as the distribution of power and privilege remains radically unequal, so long as some children are raised by adults at the bottom while others are raised by adults at the top, the children will more often than not turn out unequal...
...Yet who can say that such an increase in sociability and recreation is "wasteful...
...It can be achieved through the progressive socialization of the functions of ownership and it is an essential measure to offset, and eventually abolish, the political power of private ownership...
...If Marx, the greatest of the socialist thinkers, did not resolve this ambiguity, it was because it can only be transcended in practice—through painstaking, undogmatic innovation...
...And if one considers the various deductions in the tax codes as an indirect form of government expense—by not collecting money from an individual, Washington increases his income as surely as if it had sent him a check—one will note that they total up to $50 billion, with the bulk of that sum going to oil men, home builders, stockmarket speculators, and others from the top of the economic pyramid...
...and it is profoundly hostile to technological rationality...
...In their advocacy of new cities Eisenhower, Nixon, and Stans really were talking about a version of the old schemes providing federal subsidies for private interests, which are then supposed to fulfill a social purpose...
...5. Rudolph Oswald, "The City Worker's Budget," Federationist, February 1969...
...290 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA c IN MARX'S "PURE MODEL" of the trends of capitalism, the system is fundamentally unplanned...
...For affluence does not simply narcotize and make men passive, as Herbert Marcuse seems to think...
...Marx, notes Crosland, had assumed that the transition to the new society would take place "only after capitalism had actually fulfilled its 'historic function' of developing the production system to a saturation point where further growth would be superfluous...
...Therefore, as a matter of survival, such an economy would have to shorten the working day and increase the consumption of the masses...
...Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1965), pp...
...At a 1969 conference they decided that they must take "the road of an ever more authentic socialism...
...The new constituency that is emerging as a result of mass higher education is important...
...They contrast their standard of living, not with that of their parents or grandparents, but with the enchanted creatures of television...
...Yet the leading themes advanced by such young radicals— the conflict between revolutionary technology and conservative society, the need for comprehensive planning—were the very ones that socialists had identified more than a century ago...
...reprinted, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 145...
...Johnson made that statement, the president of the Ford Motor Company attacked the dangers of government overregulation, and the Wall Street Journal observed that business was mobilizing to fight Johnson's modest reforms...
...The labor organizations registered 4 6 million voters, printed more than 100 million leaflets and pamphlets...
...Perhaps I can sum up this vision by retelling a famous socialist parable...
...Are our cities prepared for such an influx...
...Karl Marx's resolution of this difficulty is one of the main reasons he is the greatest of all socialist thinkers...
...For Washington has, in effect, been aggravating the very social problems to which it points with alarm...
...He contended that only when men had learned to live cooperatively through a long experience and abundance was an economic fact, the old bourgeois limits could be transcended and society inscribe on its banner, "From each according to his talents, to each according to his needs...
...Capitalism went through two successive industrial revolutions—coal, steam, and textiles were the basis of the first, steel and electricity of the second...
...I think that this is one of the contradictions of capitalism, not the only one, and Crossman's thesis has to be amended to note that sophisticated corporate policy does increase the amount of social spending—but not in proportion to the public crises it engenders...
...87 And a majority of those in the service industries-9 million people and 12.6 percent of the whole work force—were blue-collar...
...Even though it was designed to be high254 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA minded and serve the public, and even though there are no private owners, it acts at least as irresponsibly as any private corporation...
...Given this basic and capitalist limit to their thinking, any planning measures they urge are going to be inadequately funded...
...Edmund K. Faltermayer, "Better Care at Less Cost Without Miracles," Fortune, January 1970, p. 83...
...But the evidence of more than half a century corroborates Kautsky's basic insight of an antisocialist potential in state intervention and even in the nationalization of industry...
...In the summer of 1969 when Congress considered— and promptly forgot—the idea of limiting some of the privileges of stock speculators by changing somewhat the favored status of capital gains, the Journal replied in an indignant editorial...
...79 If such a profound psychological mutation does not lie in the immediate future, the attitudes of the educated and affluent young suggest that it is not impossibly distant either...
...Given this technocratic emphasis, it comes as no surprise that the Saint-Simonians were not particularly concerned with democracy...
...The present procedure of clearing areas that are already urban and then turning them over to profit-seekers has indeed had the disastrous effect of subtracting from the housing supply, increasing the rent on existing, inadequate dwellings, and in general making life more miserable for the poor and minorities...
...Nathan Glazer, "Beyond Income Maintenance," Public Interest, Summer 1969, p. 120...
...9 In a society based on class inequality and suffused with commercial values, it just doesn't "make sense" to waste resources on social uses or beauty —or anything that cannot be quantified in dollars and cents...
...37 In his comments on the "Asiatic mode of production" he even described a system in which state control of a decisive means of production (water in an economy based on irrigation) could provide the basis for a kind of bureaucratic class rule.38 Yet Marx did not anticipate that a sort of antisocialist "socialism" could be the successor to capitalism in one third of the world, or that capitalism itself could become planned and rationalized for an entire historical period...
...such an increase in government power would be dangerous to democracy...
...Our legislators, drawn almost exclusively from the middle and upper classes, cannot bring themselves to forget those principles that are sacred to a private economy...
...Jaures, as Otto Bauer after him, proposed to have elected representatives of the workers in an industry as well as representatives of the state and the consumers on the council that would direct such enterprises for the nation...
...there was another, represented by Fourier and Proudhon, that envisioned communes and free associations carrying on production...
...We should also seek to get at the enormous increase in land value—worth $25 billion a year in the United States between 1956 and 1966—which takes place without any effort on the part of the owner...
...I propose to be more specific...
...In the nineteenth century, the immediate experience of capitalist society was one of poverty, insecurity, periodic crisis, and the degradation of a mechanized division of labor...
...65 Indeed, one can argue, as Marris has, that the essence of the most sophisticated stage of corporate capitalism is not the famous separation of ownership from control but the fact that an organization is financially independent, i.e...
...The whole of capitalist production could be consciously regulated by a center that determines the size of production in all of its spheres...
...MEW, 36:88...
...Galbraith contends the fundamental reason so many people regarded the public sector as a place of compulsion and the private market as an area of free choice is that they have been programmed to do so by the media...
...Were this to happen, some of the dreams of the anarchists and Guild socialists would become a realistic byproduct of technical and social change...
...Urban middle-class life in general and professional work in particular seem to nourish potential academic skills and interests in parents, while 245 MICHAEL HARRINGTON lower-class life does the opposite...
...In The Accidental Century, I challenged this thesis and contended that revolutionary changes taking place in technology and economic structure could well radicalize masses of people again...
...GALBRAITH CORRECTLY NOTES that this was one of the problems that caused the socialists in Europe to retreat from the commitment to public property after World War II...
...the tendency of capitalist governments to intervene in the economy and even to nationalize certain industries on behalf of preserving the status quo...
...59 ff...
...e ONE OF THE MOST profound passages in all of Marx's writings is the discussion of how systems of "rights," even those based on equality, are fundamentally antiegalitarian...
...82 Many of the taxes in this country—for social security and unemployment insurance, state and local sales taxes—are regressive...
...As the Urban Problems Commission put it, ". . . renewal was and is too often looked upon as a federally financed gimmick to provide relatively cheap land for a miscellany of profitable or prestigious enterprises...
...To carry out the program of the "counter culture" would literally threaten millions with starvation...
...New York: Norton, 1963), p. vii.] The economic basis of this hope, as I noted earlier, was that capital would cease to be scarce...
...so in the nature of things it will be located beyond the sphere of material production in the proper sense of the word...
...258-59...
...Yet the Proudhonesque notion of financial state support for cooperatives was also urged by Louis Blanc—author of the formula, "From each according to his talents, to each according to his needs"—who is usually placed in the statist tradition...
...We must realize," Johnson said, "that in dealing with fuels for motor vehicles we are dealing with matters of enormous importance to every section of the nation and to many economic units...
...Cited hereafter as MEW...
...The pollutants generated in such large-scale urban and industrial concentration may threaten a large segment of the environment inhabited by a majority of the United States population...
...The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence said that, "lacking effective public action," the centers of the great American cities would be safe only in the daytime when crowds gave the individual a sense of security, and that they would be dangerous and empty at night...
...Bruno Bettelheim, "Obsolete Youth," Encounter, September 1969, p. 31...
...For in addition to the socialization of investment and the progressive socialization of ownership, there must be a vigorous tax policy directed toward achieving a more egalitarian society...
...That is impossible...
...And, in notes added to a later edition of Anti-Diihring, Engels interpreted this evolution in a polemical way: In the trusts, free competition is transformed into monopoly and the unplanned production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the emergent socialist society...
...Our minds and emotions are conditioned by that bitter experience...
...281-82...
...Part of the confusion about what socialism means derives not from cynical manipulations of the term, but from the richness of its tradition...
...Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, p. 140...
...The decisive resolution of this ambiguity waited upon the development of the German Social Democratic party before World War I. Originally, when the Marxist and Lassallian wings united at Gotha, the party advocated "producers' cooperatives built with state aid and under the democratic control of the working people...
...Should It...
...If he could not (rightly, I think) accept the syndicalist cry of "the mines to the miners," he could at least try to guard against the obvious bureaucratic evils of state administration...
...As far back as 1849, Marx had recognized the possibility that capitalist success would make labor rebel...
...Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957), p 231...
...The ideal of the artist, of freely chosen and loving work, Schapiro said, is problematic even for the the artists themselves and would be infinitely more difficult to apply in the lives of the masses of people...
...No people will allow the trusts to be the property of a little band of coupon clippers who direct production and engage in the naked exploitation of everything...
...Granting that Galbraith has identified a serious problem—the Scylla represented by the Post Office, the Charybdis represented by the Port Authority—it is impossible for society to carry out liberal reform, to plan and allocate social costs properly, unless it asserts a decisive interest over the huge corporations...
...That, they hold, "could be a formula for misery...
...In the debates within the International Workingmen's Association—the First International of the 1860s—Marx was engaged in a struggle with Bakunin and the followers of Proudhon, and once again the counterposition seems clear: centralism versus decentralism...
...Karl Kautsky, The Labour Revolution, H. J. Stenning, transl...
...Once 284 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA the basic needs of all of mankind are provided for, and productivity still grows, men may be forced to live without compulsory work...
...Thus the author of these essays, for all his croakings, still hopes and believes that the day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion...
...Yet when Marx, in the third volume of Das Kapital, related his abstract analysis to the eccentricities and contradictions of the actual world, he was quite conscious that there was planning under capitalism...
...Robin Marris, The Economic Theory of "Managerial" Capitalism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964), p. 101...
...Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1967...
...But that is a risk infinitely preferable to the one incurred by leaving the corporate structure in its present, irresponsible form...
...But if we proceed to socialize the specific functions of property over a period of time, there is much more of a chance for originality and imagination...
...Each was not so much an error in thought as a response to two of the most basic trends of the age: (1) the way in which large-scale technology was accomplishing a de facto collectivization of the economy...
...So they rebelled in a thousand ways against the irrationality of their life...
...Whatever Saint-Simon himself intended to say, his message was interpreted in history by men and women who often redefined it according to their own needs...
...Here again the economic context is central...
...Do all these ambiguities and complexities of definition mean that there is no usable tradition with regard to how socialism will work...
...One could then think of human and communal relationships within the socialized enterprise, and the classic socialist vision—that production will be carried out by the "associated producers"—would become newly relevant...
...We socialists support every struggle for the partial and liberal reform of this inadequate structure...
...But this optimism ignores the evidence presented in this essay: that government spending, precisely because it follows a commercial calculus, has "solved" one crisis by worsening other crises...
...So the "old" issues of wages and working conditions were still very much a factor in the experience of the majority of the people...
...The "radical" proposal for new towns and cities that Agnew had approved was criticized by Nixon because 246 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA the total number of people who would be accommodated if even this bold plan were implemented is only 20 million—a mere one-fifth of the expected 30-year increase...
...In a shrewd assessment of the fact that the class polarization predicted by Marx had not taken place, Bernstein argued that there was no imminent proletarian majority...
...Those would reduce the rate of profit...
...MEW, 25:453...
...610-11...
...At the very least, planners will determine, much more narrowly than present processes do, the range of alternatives from which consumers may choose...
...New York: McGraw Hill, 1964], pp...
...Later, in a higher phase of communist society, after the slavish subordination of the individual and the contradiction between spiritual and manual work has disappeared...
...As Paul Samuelson remarks, Smith would now agree that dollar wealth has to be distributed "in an 'ethically optimal' manner—and kept so by non-distorting, nonmarket intervention" in order to get the most efficient production and "to give people what they really deem is best for them...
...62 Taken individually, none of these changes would basically transform the power relations within capitalist society...
...After World War II, this issue became a very practical question in the bureaucratic collectivist societies of the Communist world...
...I don't mean to say that the hippie view is completely without substance...
...then this new majority that I have just suggested must come into being...
...in the United States there were explosions of black anger...
...292 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA d R. H. S. CROSSMAN HAS IDENTIFIED this Galbraithian contrast between private affluence and public squalor as the "inherent contradiction" of modern capitalism...
...In 1965 in America, 37 percent of the job holders, or more than 26 million individuals, were craftsmen, foremen, operatives, and laborers...
...And though he uses a patch or two of Marxist-sounding rhetoric, he could hardly afford to acknowledge the basis of Marx's insight: that an economy dominated by self-seeking units is, precisely because of that fact, incapable of seeking the common good of the "whole society...
...MEW, 3 0 : 617.] Meanwhile, as indicated in Note a Karl Kautsky was responding to the political aspect of this process and to Bismarck's social insurance programs in particular...
...92 After World War II this tendency became more and more pronounced...
...In The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), Anthony Crosland describes the extraordinary range of socialist doctrines: The natural-law argument...
...Writing in the same volume as Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, a French Marxist, argues that modern capitalism as we know it is more likely to lead to an integration of the workers into the established order than to a release of socialist consciousness...
...What is truly intolerable is the extent to which the social class structure denies it effective access to tax-supported education and works and thereby makes it both self-perpetuating and hereditary...
...116...
...See also "A Talk with Walter Lippmann," New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 14, 1969...
...It is significant that in all the Nixon administration's talk about new cities and towns one of the key conclusions of the Urban Growth Policy report is ignored: "the development of new communities by solely private means will occur in those rare circumstances where the dynamics of growth in particular areas will afford a timely and reasonable return on private investment [emphasis added...
...Zoning by a fragmented set of competing jurisdictions, highway planning uncoordinated with land-use planning or without comprehensive urban-suburban transportation planning simply fails to meet the issues...
...It was achieved through struggle and great sacrifice—sometimes of life itself—on the part of "ordinary" people who, even though they had usually been denied an adequate education, tutored the wealthy in some of the fundamentals of social decency...
...Our vision of society, even when most liberal, is too conservative to resolve these contradictions, for they are aspects of a system that has a deep, even principled commitment to the wrong priorities...
...it is political power as well...
...114 This reference to the "socialized individual" has a very specific economic meaning...
...vii, 3 fr...
...In the socialist order," he wrote, "profit having disappeared, it will hardly be necessary, in order to undertake an enterprise, that it be able to run at a profit...
...At a conference sponsored by DISSENT in 1969, Meyer Schapiro, a brilliant art critic and socialist, placed this kind of crisis in a thoughtful context...
...Barone's "Il Ministro della Produzione nello Stato Collectivista" is translated and included in Collectivist Economic Planning, F. A. von Hayek, ed...
...In the twentieth century, socialism has been used to define politics that would emancipate man—but also politics that would enslave him...
...Exposition, Premiere Armee, 1829 [Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1924...
...That was the feeling of some young radicals in the sixties...
...Galbraith, The New Industrial State, pp...
...Saint-Simon himself tried to convince both Napoleon and Louis XVIII of his ideas and, after his death in 1825, his followers sought to influence Louis Philippe when he came to power as a result of the Revolution of 1830...
...Moreover, a key Saint-Simonian term was "association," a word that conjured up a vision of producers in a decentralized workshop taking charge of their own destiny...
...The problems of welfare capitalist society are becoming so obvious and overwhelming that conservatives and even reactionaries have understood the need for state intervention—if only to maintain as much of the old order as possible...
...Each year the President should make a Report on the Future—with projections ranging 5, 10, or even 20 years ahead—which would be submitted to a Joint Congressional Committee where it would be debated, amended and then presented to the entire Congress for decision...
...Martin's Press, 1953-60), 3, Part 3:558...
...He and other conservatives are sophisticated enough to understand that the "chaotic" growth of modern society is no longer tolerable and that, in order to contain the future, a modicum of planning and discipline must be imposed on the corporations.b This realization has penetrated to all advanced societies in the West, so much that the British economist Andrew Shonfeld can write that planning is "the most characteristic expression of the new capitalism...
...In his famous essay on the economics of socialism, Oskar Lange argued that those goods and services for which demand is relatively inelastic can be made free without running the risk of wastefulness...
...8. Economic Report of the President, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 175...
...It created 1.7 million "jobs" to prosecute the tragedy in Vietnam without hesitation, but it would only fund a handfull of social employments...
...And this ambiguity can be found in the work of the greatest of the centralists, Karl Marx...
...There were, to be sure, good reasons why Marx adopted this attitude...
...Leon Trotsky, Ecrits (Paris: Librairie Marcel Riviere, 1955), 1:125-26.] Trotsky and Kautsky understood this point in a general way, but it was Oskar Lange and A. P. Lerner who, in the thirties, and in response to an attack by the conservative economist Ludwig von Mises, defined the notion of using market criteria and interest rates within the context of a socialist plan...
...Moreover, I think there is a strategy for achieving social ownership that does not involve a sudden, apocalyptic leap (impossible under democratic conditions) but rather employs structural reforms...
...On the other hand, alarmed conservatives and complacent liberals in the countries of advanced capitalism have assumed that government action is necessarily a step toward a new society...
...In this context, the cooperatives would provide a possibility for the growth of new forms 297 MICHAEL HARRINGTON of social property within the old society and might hasten, even signal, the coming of the new order...
...In fact, the Kaiser patients go to the doctor less than do the patients of expensive fee-for-service systems...
...Education and Social Inequality IT IS IN EDUCATION that the effect of systematic inequality is most damaging...
...It was, for instance, technological rationality—in this case, applied scientific research—that resulted in the "green revolution" of new strains of wheat and rice, making it possible to generate huge increases in the agricultural production of India...
...And even as various academics were explaining how the proletariat had ceased to be a historical actor, there were tens of millions of workers who continued to face many of the old problems of working-class life...
...The anticipation of regularity," the Bolshevik economist E. Preobrazhenski wrote shortly after the Soviet state was formed, "constitutes the first characteristic of the new socialist production, distinguishing it from the old...
...As Gregor Strasser the "left-wing" Nazi said in 1932, Hitler was responding to the "anticapitalist yearning" of the overwhelming majority of the people...
...In effect, Servan-Schreiber advocated a confiscatory tax on the stock holdings of very wealthy individuals...
...23 One would think that such an apocalyptic presentiment in Mr...
...p. 100...
...21 Marx and Engels, as also some of their more perceptive followers, had understood that capitalism might try to regulate the "anarchy of production," but they felt that this attempt could only constitute a brief moment of transition before the advent of Socialism...
...Ibid., p. 593...
...and even when it functions to produce the highest living standard in the world, the social consequences of that achievement are so appalling as to vitiate much of it...
...93 Daniel Bell has said that the "new men" in this emergent order are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists and the engineers of the new complex technology...
...4 This point needs special emphasis if only because many people, with the best of intentions, concluded from the rediscovery of poverty in America in the sixties that the bulk of the nation was affluent while only a minority was poor...
...The new information technology, he held, made it possible for the planners to solve hundreds of thousands of equations and to relate them to each other, and therefore the indirection of using market prices was no longer required...
...The Vision of Socialism T HOUGH THE CHANGES I have been talking about go far beyond any proposals by major political movements in neocapitalist society, they are still only transitional measures...
...Now, as society has grown more affluent, it has created still another period of human life, one that "intervenes between adolescence and adulthood...
...586 Government, we must conclude, cannot leave profit policy to the "conscience" of the corporations...
...It is obvious that the criterion of profitability to which the Council refers is private since, as the gloomy projections of the Violence Commission demonstrate, the social cost of the present system is bankrupting the society...
...T HERE ARE THREE BASIC REASONS why the reform of the welfare state will not solve our most urgent problems : • the class structure of capitalist society vitiates, or subverts, almost every such effort toward social justice...
...June 23, 1931," Joseph Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1955), 13:59...
...I say these things with a full knowledge of the ways in which the socialist idea has been confused, betrayed, and eviscerated during the past 150 years.a Indeed, one of the aims of this essay is to try to face up to these difficulties with candor and to make the idea of socialism more precise...
...For even though corporations engage in long-term programming and accept government policies which put a floor under effective demand, the capitalists cannot accept subsidies to mass consumption on a large scale...
...Joan Robinson, "Socialist Affluence," in Socialism, Capitalism, and Economic Growth, G. H. Feinstein, ed...
...Ibid., p. 398...
...113 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oeconomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p. 592...
...In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels anticipated this development...
...Robert Heilbroner, "Socialism and the Future," Commentary, December 1969...
...But if there was good reason for Marx to refrain from speaking precisely about the face of socialism, there is no such reason today...
...Indeed the most profitable investment is often one that demolishes homes of low-income families to make room for business and higherincome families...
...Planned, rationalized capitalism demands higher and higher skills from its labor force, and this opens up the possibility of a very educated opposition among the technicians employed in the most advanced industries...
...Berle, Power, p. 258...
...If there were a universal brain described by the intellectual fantasy of Laplace, a brain could simultaneously register all the processes of nature and society . . . such a brain could obviously construct a priori an economic plan which would be definitive and faultless, starting with the calculation of how many hectares of fodder should be planted for livestock, and ending with the buttons on a vest...
...If these projections turn out to be accurate, these three groups could account for over 40 percent of the employment in the United States...
...Is THERE EVIDENCE to indicate that these statistics point to a group with a consciousness of its own, let alone a special receptivity to radical or socialist ideas...
...Only a democratic mass movement could challenge this vested interest in our current crises...
...And under socialism, prices would be comprehensive, i.e...
...National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City: Report, p. 182...
...As the Department of Labor projected the evolution of these categories, the number of industrial workers would increase by 1975 to 30 million, even though their percentage would drop to 33.3 per272 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA cent...
...There is a consciously regulated society in antagonistic form...
...Robert Dorfman, The Price System (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 140...
...114...
...References 1 Alvin Schorr, Explorations in Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 275...
...When the means of production were still relatively on a small scale at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he said, the notions of phalansteries and socialist colonies made a certain sense, at least as a product of their time...
...National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, Technology and the American Economy: Report, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), 1:9 ff...
...Boudin may be right and Galbraith wrong...
...The society cannot afford to leave to private decision the pricing of basic goods—or how the huge annual increments in wealth are to be distributed...
...As another paradoxical result of the May 1968 student rising, the technocrats are opening a new school teaching management techniques and introducing the study of technology in the science faculties so that the students will be prepared to work in industry...
...That would, of course, make them part of the "professional" category as defined by the statisticians in Washington—but it would certainly not qualify them as part of the technostructure (since most of them are oriented toward primary or secondary teaching and wish not to participate in either the research institutions or the corporations...
...Needless to say, these new areas must not become just added enclaves of segregation...
...The growing stratum of professionals and technicians— whether they are called new class, new working class, technostructure, or what have you—have already had a political impact in the antiwar and civil rights movement...
...Marx saw increasing productivity and automation as the material precondition for socialism...
...Hence anyone who says he believes in socialism must make plain what he means by it...
...Left, Right, and Center, there were politicians who sought to put these tendencies to their own uses and employed a "socialist" rhetoric to do it...
...Moreover, the various reforms acceptable to business tend to educate the workers to become concerned with the economy as a whole and to struggle for a better division between profits and wages...
...Now it is quite true that the industrial working class in America is a declining percentage of the population...
...And they are to be distinguished from yet another stratum, similar to them in certain respects, but with important characteristics of its own...
...Summarizing Marx's view of socialism he notes that free time, which is always on the increase, is supposed to give man the leisure for higher activity and turn him into a "different subject," that is, a new kind of person...
...MEW, 35: 323-24...
...The American tax system—the same is true for most advanced capitalist countries—is a labyrinth favoring the wealthy who can afford lawyers and accounts...
...For instance, I think that Stanley Moore overreacted in his legitimate hostility to the demands of some of the youthful New Leftists for "Gemeinschaft Now...
...What is happening, I would suggest, is not the 274 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA mere expression of a transitory mood among young people who will forget their egalitarian fantasies once they have to submit to the rigors of the labor market and "grow up...
...but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are only measurable by a single standard which subsumes them under the same point of view and considers them from one specific aspect, e.g...
...New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 107...
...Many contemporary economists now argue that the cyclical breakdown of capitalism, which turned relative abundance into immediate want, has been mastered...
...In all these reforms, the point would be not to penalize hard work or actual risk-taking but to limit severely, and eventually to eliminate, the tribute society pays to passive wealth and stock gamblers...
...There is also, of course, the possibility that such gradualism will be an excuse for not challenging the basic power of capital itself...
...Misere de la Philosophic," in Proudhon, Marx: Misere de la Philosophie...
...and by doing so it could contain even a revolutionary technology within the established framework...
...Friedrich Nietzsche, MorgenrOte, in Nietzsche's Werke (Salzburg: Bergland), 2:475...
...104 [And this vision culminates in the proclamation of] . . . a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men...
...Oskar Lange, "The Computer and the Market," in Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth, C. H. Feinstein, ed...
...The really crucial question is: what kind of planning...
...Yet, if one understands it as the statement of a limit toward which mankind strives but perhaps will never reach, it serves to free the mind from the narrowness of the present...
...But for others, who sought enlightenment or simply the "credential" of a college degree, the experience was bewildering...
...The crucial question about such techniques and institutions are: who employs them and according to what priorities...
...In 1960 the Swedes saw socialism as compatible with a pledge "to stimulate private investments in fields where it shows that it can combine efficiency and progressive thinking with responsibility toward the consumers, the employees and the community...
...I do not mean to say that the housing design or the exact mix of public and private transport will be settled by a ukase from Washington...
...There must be a radically new economic calculus, a radically new political and social structure...
...This is what I call the 'space ship earth.' " (Kenneth Boulding, "Is Scarcity Dead...
...But if the workers have not become the overwhelming majority of society, as the Marxists predicted, the very development of the capitalist economy may be creating new allies for them in the struggle to democratize economic power...
...For as soon as one examines the question of motivation within the context of affluent societies there emerges the possibility of a productive egalitarianism—and trends in this direction can be seen despite the outrageous inequality still prevailing in these nations...
...To them it seems logical to invest the federal dollar in undertakings that run the lowest risk and will show the highest and most immediate return...
...For even conservatives have come to realize that government programs have to be coordinated: the Nixon administration talks of a national urban policy and uses five-year projections in its 1970 Budget...
...With the third technological revolution within capitalism, electronics, chemicals, computers, and the "knowledge" industry were in the vanguard...
...But there is at least the possibility that the new professionals will be drawn to support more radical transformations...
...The capitalist structure was not simplified so as to counterpose a gigantic proletariat and a tiny bourgeoisie...
...109...
...I suspect that Schapiro has touched upon one of the fundamental socialpsychological issues of the twenty-first century: whether, in an economy of abundance, men can find within themselves and their relations with one another, rather than in external necessity, a reason for living...
...nobody manages undertakings worse than the state...
...117 The basic technological trend Marx predicted has indeed come to pass...
...Eduard Bernstein, in Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1923...
...Fabian Essays in Socialism, Bernard Shaw, ed...
...When its private egotism led to antisocial behavior, the government would intervene in the same way major shareholders confront poor management...
...New cities cannot be built by a myriad of private developers, each making his own decisions about a small parcel of real estate...
...That is the socialist project...
...A hundred or so years later we have "progressed" to the point where we have forgotten how natural it is not to work...
...So the increase in productivity within a class society—where its benefits are necessarily maldistributed—has a tendency to decrease effective demand...
...In 1969 a Department of Labor study predicted that by 1975 this country 275 MICHAEL HARRINGTON would have a 45 percent increase in the number of professionals as compared to 1965, a 23 percent rise in the number of managers, and a 32.5 percent growth of the clerical work force...
...The Face of Socialism CLASSICAL MARXISM OFFERED a powerful argument of the objective need for a new society...
...The state would not assume permanent control but see to it that the direction of corporate policy was changed so as to observe the proper social priorities...
...At the same time the resistance of the ruling class lessens, for its power is based on unscientific ideas and it has no insight into the conditions of the exploited and oppressed classes...
...Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 1:94...
...As a group of independent French leftists have put it, "By socialism . . . one means a global conception of man and the world which seeks to substitute the principle of conscious solidarity for the traditional resort to domination and private interest in the organization and functioning of society...
...And now, looking toward a conscious movement that could make the objective need for socialism into an effective political force, let me suggest a possibility (not an inevitability) : that the traditional protest of the workers, the grandchildren of the prisoners of starvation, and the unprecedented rebellion of the youth, the children of affluence, may converge into a force capable of transforming modern society...
...etc...
...As many economists have recognized, money is the basis of a system of "rationing by the purse...
...after work has ceased to be the means of life and has become the first need of life...
...MEW, 6:412...
...MEW, 19:21.] f THE NOTION THAT there is a social "profit" which is distinguished from private profit can be found in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations...
...Despite such an advance [Marx wrote] right is still marked with bourgeois limitations...
...Yet, even with this background, the Saint-Simonians were not simply the progenitors of planned and centralized socialism...
...89 For—and this point is extremely important—the political potential of social classes cannot be determined by a simple head count...
...A SECOND BASIC DISTINCTION between capitalist and socialist planning concerns comprehensiveness...
...New York: Ballantine Books, 1965], p. 101...
...In contrast to that hope, Marcuse writes, "Today advanced industrial society is creating free time but the possessor of free time is not a 'different subject...
...And then Mr...
...After World War II it became clear that capitalist planning was not just a presocialist episode, which gave rise to an ingenious if paradoxical theory developed by the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel...
...102 Dropouts from Work-oriented Society SOME OF THE YOUNG DROP OUT of the work-oriented society altogether...
...Saint-Simon, Marx, Lassalle, and Lenin are put on the statist side...
...This is true of the fundamental determinants of the urban environment, such as housing and transportation...
...Alienation—and greed and invidious striving—can only be 265 MICHAEL HARRINGTON overcome, as Marx observed, when the means of production are so developed that they provide the material basis for general abundance...
...But now that the economy had become so interrelated and huge, "There is only one social organization that has the necessary scale so that it can be used as a framework within which socialist cooperation can develop, and that is the modern state...
...The critics of socialism who cite such dangers ignore, or conceal, the fact that these are the consequence of the complexity of all forms of modern, technological society and that socialism is the only movement which seeks to offer a structural and democratic challenge to that trend...
...The price which the modern, managed capitalism pays for avoiding the old crisis of mass unemployment is the continuous sacrifice of public service, community welfare and national security to private profit...
...If over a long period of time private ownership of huge corporations were to coexist with planned social investments, the corporate rich, be they managers or owners, would come to dominate the new, supposedly democratic institutions...
...that it works to the advantage of the technically and professionally obsolete as against the talented and those who take initiative...
...Sidney Homer, a partner in Solomon 269 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Brothers & Hutzler, told the paper, "Every time you add $1 billion to the volume through new stock offerings you take out $1 billion that could be used to push up stocks already on the market...
...Is it true, however, as John Kenneth Galbraith optimistically assumed in The Affluent Society, that the masses have basically decent values, which are perverted by the manipulators who dominate the communications systems...
...But this remains always as the realm of necessity...
...He provided not a final answer but a realistic method of analysis in which •the word takes its meaning from the living texture of history...
...it exempts various state and local bonds...
...So it was, for example, that in the French general strike of May 1968 the greatest militancy was not found among the coal miners, the classic source of proletarian intransigeance, but among men and women working in electronics, the chemical and auto industries, among teachers and the employees of the state-run radio and television network...
...Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1923], pp...
...A higher living standard, with good diet and medical care, certainly can make people more beautiful, as the rich discovered a long time ago...
...In the late fifties and early sixties most of the European social democrats redefined their aims This was done not out of temerity or laziness but because they felt that the experience of socialists in government failed to corroborate the classic Marxist texts...
...Society should move toward, even if it never reaches, the abolition of work and money...
...A 1970 analysis in Fortune has even suggested that it is impossible for the nation to achieve its health goals unless there is an even greater increase in the employment of paraprofessionals...
...Lawrence A. Mayer, "The Housing Shortage Goes Critical," Fortune, December 1969...
...In the last century, according to Galbraith, firms were run by entrepreneurs, and as a result the state, or the collective of workers, could take over from them without too much trouble...
...Nor was this consciousness of the inadequacy of the classic capitalist model confined to economists...
...But as the barbarities of the system were moderated, precisely through the impact of that class consciousness, the consequent new conditions—the new social being, if you will—gave rise to a new consciousness...
...In this and other areas of advanced capitalist society, its injustices and 279 MICHAEL HARRINGTON perverse values afflict a diverse group of classes and strata, which may possibly join together to transform the society...
...But if Bernstein often had a sharper eye for the actual evolution of society than his "orthodox" opponents, he was hopelessly optimistic in his assessment of the cooperatives' potential...
...This would not be the case under socialism —even though such a society would still have to take costs and alternate uses of resources into account...
...The big downtown apartment buildings would become "fortified cells for upper-middle and high-income populations living at prime locations in the city...
...51 It was a distinguished conservative, however, who most clearly drew the socialist conclusions from this economic tendency...
...In the America of the seventies these fantastically skewed priorities will have momentous social consequences...
...That was unfortunate...
...Vinceremos...
...7. Schorr, Explorations in Social Policy, p. 275...
...See also Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957...
...Quoted in Harold Wilson, Purpose and Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 964), p. 264...
...there are others who, in one way or another, would like to impose the law of the desert upon the Promised Land...
...Without succumbing to decentralist panaceas, one can easily see that a much more imaginative structure, with major elements of workers' and consumers' control, would have led to profound changes in the society...
...115 The Promise, or Threat, of Automation WITHIN CAPITALISM THIS DEVELOMENT THREATENS the very existence of the system: success is suicidal...
...A bit later they might even respond to a realistic strategy for reaching the kingdom of freedom, not through disaffiliation of a sensitive if irresponsible minority, but through the conscious activity of the majority...
...In 1845, Friedrich Engels complained that the socialism of many Germans on the Left was "vague, undefined, and undefinable...
...Ibid., p. 594...
...Yet the crisis it was supposed to occasion has not...
...But in the case of the means of production (and they, not personal property, are what is of concern to socialists), one can think of private property as conferring series of functional and divisible rights...
...There is a similar trend in industry, among technicians and engineers...
...Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, p. 111...
...it has had disastrous social consequences...
...In his notes for Das Kapital, Marx was even more specific about the tendency he summarized in Volume Three of that work...
...Martin's Press, 1963], p. 148...
...Carl Kaysen, "Model Makers and Decision Makers," in Economic Means and Social Ends, Robert Heilbroner, ed...
...70 The London Economist could thus summarize an interesting article about the attitude of the exprivate steel executives in January 1970: "The British Steel Corporation would like Labour to start nationalizing the industry before the elections— and the Tories not to denationalize it afterward...
...But they also found themselves in new mass institutions of higher learning which could give them no convincing reason as to why they should be there...
...47 When there was a renewal of social consciousness in the sixties, the corporations began to move into these new markets and designed various human care programs according to the logic of profit...
...For if, as Christopher Jencks and David Riesman document in The Academic Revolution, society is divided into blue- and white-collar groups, the high school seniors from the white-collar background are four times as likely to score in the top rather than in the bottom 10 percent, while the blue-collar students are twice as likely to be at the bottom rather than at the top.'5 One way of coping with such depressing statistics is to argue that they reflect the "middle-class bias" of the tests used to evaluate students...
...Corporate Interests and the Social Good IN THE NOT SO DISTANT PAST, such a conflict between corporate interest and common good was thought of as exceptional...
...Ibid., p. 27...
...The economic theory of "external economies" and "external diseconomies" helps to explain why...
...The Fabians, with their penchant for basing the socialist case on neoclassical economics, emphasized this development...
...123 SOCIALISM, THEN, IS NOT SIMPLY A PROGRAM for socializing investments and ownership and redistributing wealth, important as all those goals are...
...24 The infrastructure for a metropolis of one million is, of course, extremely costly and, even though such undertakings have paid for themselves in Europe, the time period before there is any return is quite long...
...take social as well as private costs into account...
...Yet precisely this private calculus is the one the government follows...
...John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963 ), pp...
...The phrase comes from C. Bouglie and E. Halevy, editors of a 1924 edition of the Doctrine de Saint-Simon...
...New York: St...
...Strangely enough, it was in England—where the labor movement, to the disgust of some of the continental Marxists, had always been untheoretical and reformist—that the old decentralist image of socialism flourished right before and just after the First World War...
...This constitutes a marvelous refutation of the Journal's editorial, for it shows that the main form of activity on the market is legalized gambling of a sort that provides no new venture capital whatever...
...c What we must now confront, however, is an entire historical period in which planning is of the capitalist essence...
...For a discussion of the term, see Bouglie's and Halevy's comments in Doctrine de SaintSimon, p. 203, n. 91...
...In Marx's famous critique of the Gotha Program he called the idea "worthy of Lassalle's fancy that one can build a new society with a government loan, just like a new railroad...
...Socialism is thus defined not simply as a dream or an ideal but as that social order which can fulfill the needs of people struggling to master their environment at a specific point in history...
...A serious Marxist analysis would reveal that on many issues Marx was wrong...
...Yet in the face of what consumers' choices are leading to, some such substitution appears inevitable...
...Others, like the various Maoist groups or the followers of 299 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Fanon and Guevara, look to the peasants of the Third World to take over the mission of proletarian revolution but without showing how such a premodern class could, even under the changed conditions of the twentieth century, become the architect of a new society...
...Peter M. Blair and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), p. 79...
...Similarly with transportation within a city...
...Robin Marris, "The Truth About Corporations," Public Interest, Spring 1968, p. 45...
...In Marx's view, evidence of this clash was to be found in the recurrence of depressions...
...To understand the creative potential of the workers, take the United States of America, the advanced nation where labor seems most integrated into the prevailing order and utterly lacking in any kind of revolutionary consciousness...
...103-104...
...A mobile, fluid society in which men move up and down is simultaneously a competitive, insecure, and invidious society...
...Many people in the middle class "freely chose" single-unit surburban homes because decent, reasonably-priced housing in the city was not available...
...but it does not have a solidarity imposed upon it by the very conditions of life and work, as the workers do...
...Heilbroner speculates on how advanced capitalism may be changing economic psychology...
...It is right in saying that, once the basic needs of all the people of the earth are satisfied, man should turn to other pursuits...
...Capitalist planning, Mandel holds, is a sign of the decline of the system...
...150, 458...
...There are even sociologists who compare the workers of late capitalist society to the peasants of the nineteenth century...
...David Marquand, "May Day Illusions," Encounter (London) August 1968, p. 56...
...MARX'S VISION OF SOCIALISM was as radical as Stanley Moore complains it was...
...For as the process of accumulation becomes much more social, with industry generating its own investment funds or getting them from institutions, it is absurd to pay generations of functionless coupon clippers on the grounds that their distant ancestors made a contribution to the economy...
...both of these resulted in a hierarchical structure with a detailed division of labor...
...Marx saw no need to add still another...
...Even such a modest reform is intolerable on the basis of capitalist ideology...
...The history of the debate is summarized by Joseph Schumpeter (in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [New York: Harper 1950], pp...
...The nineteenth-century socialists were deeply confused about the status of ownership in the society they sought...
...69 And when the Wilson government renationalized steel in the sixties, it not only 264 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA paid 450 million pounds in compensation to the owners but left many of the previous managers in control of the public enterprise...
...Indeed, Bismarck's various social insurance programs led Karl Kautsky to describe a new phenomenon: "state socialism...
...If resources were misallocated under such procedure, that fact would become obvious when there were either surpluses or shortages and it could then be empirical_ y corrected...
...In the elections of 1968 the supposedly decrepit trade unions were clearly the single most important element in the coalition which, despite the most difficult odds, almost elected Humphrey President in 1968...
...Yet there are signs that we are, without really having planned it that way, marching out of the desert...
...The tendency Marx had described he said, had been "raised to the second or third power" and now involved nothing less than the "regulation of production...
...106 To grant that socialism is not a final redemption should not, however, paralyze the imagination, for even within these limits there are enormous possibilities...
...See also "NHI [National Health Insurance]: What It Is, What It Isn't," Federationist, January 1970...
...Oswald, "The City Worker's Budget," Federationist February 1969...
...58 When Richard Nixon came into office, he abandoned all efforts to persuade industry and labor to obey guidelines in price-and-wage policy...
...6 But then this is a familiar injustice: "Fifty years ago," wrote Alvin Schorr in 1968, "a British Royal Commission for Inquiry into the Housing of the Working Classes observed, with dismay, that poor people rarely benefited when land was cleared and model housing erected...
...121...
...he spoke in the language of Fourier and Proudhon...
...111 Nietzsche's insight reflected, if from a reactionary point of view, an instinctive understanding of working people whose lives had been subjected to the calculation of clocks and the division of labor...
...The right of the producer is proportional to what he produces . . . . But supposing one worker is physically or intellectually superior to another and accomplishes more in the same period of time or can work more hours...
...40, Theodore Kheel, "How the Port Authority is Strangling New York," New York, November 17, 1969...
...If that attempt is successful, what will emerge at the end of this study will not be the promise of a magical cure-all to bring complete and eternal happiness to all men but a more modest yet still audacious program for making America a good society...
...Political Clout of the Workers EXPRESSIONS OF WORKING-CLASS DISCONTENT did not take the turbulent, near revolutionary forms that it did in France and Italy in 1968 and 1969, but it was still a powerful political force...
...Gunnar Adler-Karlson, Functional Socialism: A Swedish Theory for Democratic Socialization (Stockholm: Prismen, [in English] 1969...
...it is also an opportunity for innovation...
...They have profound differences among themselves in style, tradition, and even in politics...
...Johnson proceeded to express the wish that corporate polluters would realize that "out of personal interest, as out of public duty, industry has a stake in making the air fit to breathe...
...Ibid., p. 147...
...3 ff...
...THE CONCEPT THAT SCARCITY MIGHT BE ENDED through the development of technology was postulated at the very beginning of the modern socialist movement...
...The problem with this aspect of the ultimate socialist projection arises because Marx's cultural vision was so thoroughly aristocratic...
...As Gardner Ackley, a leading new economist of the sixties, put it concisely a few years ago, "If one were to examine all of the thousands of decisions made daily by the managers of the modern corporation, I think he would be struck by the relatively small number in which significant questions of conflict between public and private interests arise...
...Collectivism—But What Kind...
...And this change in psychology could be utilized to help America solve its problems—or it could serve as an excuse—which Heilbroner fears as a possibility and Nixon embraces as a policy—to substitute the coercion of law for the weakened discipline of the market and thereby to drive people to do humiliating work...
...If the socialist state tries to exercise too close a control over such an organization, it almost guarantees waste and incompetence...
...Martin's Press, 1953-65], 2:72 ff., "Marxism and Anarchism...
...Forty percent of these young people said that they were no longer primarily interested in preparing for commercial careers in the profit sector.76 This trend will be dealt with in more detail shortly, for it has enormous political consequences...
...I refer to the young people who are educated—but not for technological functions...
...On the one hand, capitalism "uses all the power of science and nature, of social cooperation and social exchange, to make the creation of wealth (relatively) independent of the amount of labor time expended...
...That more distant future will be the subject of the last section of this essay...
...The Guild socialists received an intellectual impetus from this development and, after the War, put forward plans for industrial self-government and a national legislature of the producers...
...The New Economics [Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965], p. 54...
...52 There are two reasons why I believe this straightforward proposal of socialization is to be preferred to the European social democratic notion of the state programming a market economy with social goals...
...Cooperation and informal, transitory team relationships become the norm, replacing fixed and formal lines of authority...
...45 All these suggestions, the liberal as well as the conservative, assume the continuation of the present structure of the housing "industry"—if so modern a word can be used to describe so backward a sector...
...In turn, these reforms helped to integrate the Left into a welfare economy that was still privately owned...
...Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 417...
...to deploy the labor force...
...The changes outlined in the previous paragraph could be welcomed by social engineers determined to impose their values on the people...
...By virtue of their cohesion and organization, it is this working-class component that must be the spine, the decisive element, of any new socialist movement...
...A Fortune survey taken in October 1968 reports that 8 million youths between 18 and 24 are or have been in college...
...In his Population Message of July 1969, Mr...
...Even in recent economic literature, the conscious maximizing of welfare is still considered an exception to the rule...
...Not only is this policy morally outrageous...
...This concept of an antisocialist "socialism" is, I would suggest, a key to an understanding of some of the most important events in recent history, particularly of sophisticated conservatism in the capitalist West and Communist totalitarianism in the East...
...For those who did not find employment locally, swift mass transportation should be created to take them to jobs in the cities...
...As Robin Marris has noted, "the most fundamental difference between business firms and government departments lies in the former's capacity for autonomous growth...
...Das Kapital, in MEW, 25:828...
...123...
...It is possible, he writes, that in such a society "affluence will weaken the condition of economic dependency on which the market system is tacitly based, opening up the prospect that normal differentials of income payment will no longer suffice to attract men to less desirable jobs, and thereby requiring that capitalism resort more and more to planning and coercion...
...In this sphere, freedom can only emerge if socialized man [vergesellschafteter Mensch], the associated producers [assozierte Produzenten] regulate their relation to nature rationally and bring it under communal [gemeinschaftliche] control, rather than being ruled by it as by a blind power...
...41 There is now a voluminous literature on this subject.f Socialist planning would seek to get as precise a measure of costs as possible...
...And that will take more ingenuity than just writing a federal check...
...For every successful painter or sculptor there are many others whose hopes are disappointed...
...I would argue that this very trend of separating ownership and control increasingly demonstrates the functionless character of the legal title to property and suggests a very practical, unapocalyptic method of doing away with it...
...For many of these young people understand that, despite or because of their liberal education, they are becoming obsolete in 277 MICHAEL HARRINGTON a technological economy...
...London: Routledge, 1935...
...Discussion of this practical potential of man's idealism has been confused because it has so often turned on the experience of Communism, and on what happens to human psychology in a regime of totalitarian scarcity and class privileges...
...interest-rate changes, tax reductions or increases, balance of payments proposals] would have on the successful building of the number of housing units set by the President in his annual housing construction goal message...
...He regarded it, however, as a brief transition period that heralded the coming of socialism...
...Nixon's Message on the Environment would have been the prelude to decisive action...
...America's technology and natural resources development are intimately involved in any program that effects fuels and their uses...
...Clement Attlee and the British Labour party enacted sweeping social reforms within the framework of a parliamentary monarchy...
...Ibid...
...119 But it was Trotsky, among the Marxists, whose optimism was the most audacious: Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler...
...As Le Monde reported in 1969, The students in the various faculties are also upset for another reason: the uncertainty of the job market...
...These problems have to be faced candidly...
...73 Yet if Heilbroner's observations of this trend are accurate, his conclusions are overly pessimistic...
...The chaotic history of urban growth suggests they are not and that many problems will be severely aggravated by a dramatic increase in numbers...
...Suppose by an act of political will the schools could be transformed so as to favor the minorities while the fundamental social inequalities were left intact...
...That does not for a moment mean that the rest of the world doesn't matter, or that America's problems can be solved in isolation from the fate of the globe...
...And even though Mr...
...Socialist Humanism, p. 42...
...Ibid...
...It is the mark of the antisocialist "socialisms" that, despite their promises, they serve the purposes of various elites...
...A Case for Social Ownership B UT EVEN IF society would thus socialize more and more investment, consciously planning the allocation of resources for cities, transportation, and human care, that in itself would not change the prevailing order...
...New York: St...
...Ibid., p. 104...
...Yet the very conditions that make some of the young susceptible to such an appeal might make them open to a socialist program for the humanization of technology...
...In 1967, the Council of Economic Advisers—hardly an anticapitalist agency—noted that government direction of the economy had smoothed out the cycle of boom and bust and therefore removed a great deal of the risk in the marketplace...
...103 It integrates oriental mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and communitarian impulses...
...the very organization of inequality itself must be undermined...
...But these abuses are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society as it comes out of capitalism after long labor pains...
...50 And Robin Marris, an outstanding theoretician of the contemporary corporation, has pointed out that "once the classic idealization of capitalism is thus destroyed [when, that is, it is seen that the managers are not working "for" the stockholders] there is no economic case for its superiority over socialism...
...The Wall Street Journal was more realistic: "This was a major victory for such industrial groups as the coal producers, who vigorously opposed toughening federal standards...
...Raymond Fletcher, "Where Did It All Go Wrong...
...The Editors of Fortune, Youth in Turmoil (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969), p. 43...
...We have seen too many tyrannical distortions of the socialist ideal...
...So the idea of functional socialization is not simply a political necessity...
...Long before the socialist movement will even be in sight of its final aims, it can ameliorate this outrage by the redistribution of income, for then the rations will at least be more justly shared...
...it generates problems, like those of the urban environment, which demand comprehensive planning...
...Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 177...
...Paradoxically, I will base the case for social ownership on the same 258 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA economic trend—the separation of ownership and control under contemporary capitalism—which was cited by many socialists in the sixties as a reason for giving up the traditional position on the nationalizaton of industry...
...now it is organized intelligence...
...Images of the Future THE QUESTION OF EXACTLY HOW OWNERSHIP iS to be socialized is another area of difficulty in the socialist tradition...
...The people are quite capable of making a wrong decision after having been given all of the facts...
...For the great mass of these people indeed work for large corporations and universities and often have developed a "trade union" consciousness of the need to band together and fight for their group interests...
...Our technology has produced unprecedented wealth, rotted great cities, threatened the very air and water, and embittered races, generations, and social classes...
...To speak as if an increase in the impersonality inside a mechanized plant will make a new society and turn the scandal of slavery into a virtue...
...It may seem quixotic to raise such a point just as the Socialist parties of Europe have abandoned it...
...After 1965, writes David Marquand, social expenditures under Labour went up—but the voters did not like it...
...Traite d'Economie Marxiste [Paris: Julliard, 1962], 2:178-98...
...63 How prescient Bauer's insight was can be seen from our recent American experience, as well as from our current understanding of the sources of creativity within the corporation...
...These economic theories, Lerner said, would only apply where there was political democracy...
...Nationalization of industry, planning, cooperative production—all these, he insisted, were only means to an end...
...We must keep this clearly in mind when Che Guevara, one of the most determined opponents of material incentives within the Communist camp, says: "We do not deny the objective need for material incentives but we are certainly unwilling to use them as a fundamental driving force...
...That is disingenuous...
...the use of vigorous tax policy (more on this shortly...
...But Roszak and those for whom he speaks want to pass immediately into the kingdom of freedom, even though the vast majority of mankind is still forced to live in the kingdom of necessity...
...that it works to the advantage of the unskilled against the skilled...
...Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms, in MEW, 19:20 ff...
...The right to locate or relocate a plan in a given area can no longer be considered a private matter...
...See Cole, History of Social Thought, 2:126...
...People fight and die and connive over it...
...It is important that socialists demonstrate the inherent inability of the welfare state, based as it is upon a capitalist economy and social structure, to deal with problems that demand anticapitalist allocations of resources...
...Can All Men Be Creative...
...3° By the seventies, the menacing consequences of uncontrolled and maldistributed affluence had become so obvious that even the thoughtful business press had begun to doubt whether the market on its own could maximize welfare...
...2. Alan Otten, in the Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1969...
...25 David Fletcher is even more pessimistic: Gone, in fact, is the delusion that we Socialists represent the "real" interests of the People, and that the People would see it if only they were not blinkered by the "capitalist press" . . . Aspirations that once had to be expressed in social terms (that is, in the organized demand for more schools, more welfare and more public control of other people's lucrative activities) are now personal or family ambitions (that is, an individual's desire for a good job, an enhanced status, a good education for Johnny as a passport to a good job and a bigger car to carry the family further...
...Later, Rudolf Hilferding, the distinguished Austrian Marxist economist, was to use this concept in his analysis of finance capital and its tendencies toward conservative planning...
...The totalitarian accumulation of capital that Stalin ruthlessly carried out under conditions of economic backwardness has made inequality a basic principle of Soviet life...
...2) the fact that hundreds of millions dreamed that this revolutionary process could be made the servant, rather than the master, of man...
...Adolescence, as Kenneth Keniston points out, was an invention of industrial society.° 9 Before the rise of urban industrialism, children entered adult society as soon as they were physically able (and, in the early days of capitalism, even before then...
...The harmfulness of egalitarianism lies in the fact that it works to the advantage of idlers, loafers and irresponsible workers, and against sacrificing and hard-working individuals...
...The dream of the New Jerusalem, Marx argued, must be subjected to empirical tests...
...The Chinese argued that the Russians had actually retreated from socialism to capitalism...
...Marx rightly held that the "kingdom of freedom" was one in which there was no compulsory work (a point I will develop shortly...
...141 if...
...it provided billions in disguised welfare for the housing of the rich and a pittance for the poor...
...In truth the bureaucracy often thinks it is such a brain...
...private, corporate power cannot tolerate the comprehensive and democratic planning we desperately need...
...Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy [London: Martin Lawrence, n. d.], p. 165...
...It is necessary to take this bleak premise into account, if only because socialism is not going to emerge full-blown as the result of a sudden apocalyptic leap...
...2° If it was suprising to find a conservative Republican endorsing such an idea, it was even more remarkable that Richard Nixon proceeded to criticize it from "the left...
...Punning confusion into the very name of his ideal commonwealth, Thomas More had Utopia mean both "no place" and "good place...
...Marx had insisted that the new society would be conceived within the womb of the old and therefore would be born with the heritage of the past as well as with the hopes of the future...
...The Fortune data describes liberal arts students for the most part...
...SOCIALISM WOULD BE FREE OF PRECISELY THOSE CONSTRAINTS which make it structurally impossible for capitalism to make a truly social use of its productivity...
...This is a sort of economic analogue to Freud's psychological insight that the more sophisticated society becomes, the more repressive it is, since instinctual energy must be disciplined in order to make large-scale organization possible...
...But in February 1970 there was another report in the Wall Street Journal...
...Any movement that attempts to carry out such reforms will be going against the grain of the system itself...
...For capitalism it is "natural" to assign resources where there will be the greatest commercial return, and without regard for social consequence...
...George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism [New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969], p. 43...
...Given the relation of social classes in this field, America's commitment to promote "agriculture" is also a commitment to help the rich at the expense of the poor...
...and by William English Walling (Socialism as It Is [New York: Macmillan, 1912], a book-length analysis...
...in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain the working class engaged in the most determined struggle since the thirties...
...26 These gloomy conclusions are based on the bitter experience of men who wish they were not true...
...Yet I think it does identify one crucial problem of the system: that even though capitalism has learned (and usually rebellious workers have been its teachers) that its self-interest lies in maintaining minimal levels of consumption, it is by no means prepared to spend the billions required to deal with the profound crises that are a by-product of affluence...
...As a result such related evils as violence, bitter old age, intensified racism, the decay of the traditional centers of culture, all grew worse...
...In a discussion of property which produces unearned income John Strachey argued that, given such a phenomenon, "a moral poison is bound to permeate the society...
...74 Now one possible conclusion is to force these women to work...
...it recognized the role of the working class as the conscious agency that was to lead humanity in the desired social transition...
...That, he felt, was one more sign of the transition to socialism...
...New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp...
...P. Lerner, The Economics of Control [New York: Macmillan, 1946], p. vii...
...So long as American life is premised on dramatic inequalities of wealth and power, no system for allocating social roles will be very satisfactory...
...People, one is told, will lavishly misuse their new rights, and a socialist society will therefore be the least efficient in human history...
...And while Labour did manage to put through a qualitative expansion of social spending, the proportion of unearned income in Britain rose...
...There have been debates on how effective such measures would be, yet the principle is both clear and excellent...
...He had lived for a time as an exile in England where they played a relatively important role, though even there they never fulfilled the promise he assigned to them...
...But even this dichotomy is much too simple...
...Lange, and all the other theorists who 294 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA discussed this point in the thirties, acknowledged that the Italian economist Enrico Barone had worked out the basic theoretical problem as early as 1908...
...Ibid, p. 216...
...8 Essentially Marx is saying that, in the fullness of socialism, all men will work like artists, out of an inner need and satisfaction, and not because they are forced to earn their daily bread...
...But it is extraordinary that his analysis of the capitalist dynamic did lead him to anticipate in broad outline what automation would mean...
...Conversely, where the demand for loosening up dictatorial economic control arises—as it did in Czechoslovakia in 1968—it is almost inevitably accompanied by an insistence upon political freedom...
...For labor to serve as a measure of wages it must take the intensity, or duration, of work into account...
...Socialism, Crosland concludes, "is not an exact descriptive term, connoting a particular social structure, past, present, or even imminent in some sage's mind, which can be empirically observed or analyzed...
...Social Change and Human Psychology YET, ALL THESE PREVIOUS IMAGES of the possible future of social property have a certain unimaginative quality...
...To achieve that 1966 level required a weekly pay check of $177...
...In 1965, in formulations that must have grated on traditional socialist sensibilities, a group of French Left intellectuals argued that socialists had to abolish "the myth of the public appropriation of the means of production" and to "rehabilitate" the market economy...
...Wright Mills, in Power, Politics and People, Irving Horowitz, ed...
...Yet we insist—and I believe that the previous analysis has documented the point—that the fundamental solution of these problems requires measures that go beyond the limits of the capitalist economy...
...In the Fortune survey which showed 40 percent of the college youth to be fundamentally dissatisfied with the values of the society, the majority of this group—Fortune dubbed them the "forerunners"—were students in the arts and humanities...
...For the current state is nothing but a boss like other bosses...
...when the decision of a high school student to remain in school raises his skill level and makes him a more productive worker rather than a candidate for welfare...
...How does one then separate authentic democratic socialism from the antisocialist "socialisms...
...All quotations from Marx and Engels, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this East German edition of their works and cited from here on as MEW...
...In this case, however, Touraine is not driven to the pessimism of Mills and Marcuse because he believes, from the vantage point of the explosion in May 1968 in France, that there is a "new class" that will take over the leadership the labor movement is now surrendering...
...Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution), p. 44...
...That is why this process can only culminate in a fundamental transformation of power structures if there is a conscious socialist movement which aggressively educates and persuades the electorate to see these reforms as steps toward a new society...
...There is a quite successful model in this country of what a public corporation can accomplish: the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...270 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA Who Will Do the Job...
...These professionals and technicians, then, are not an age group or a youth phenomenon, but the expression of changes in the American class structure...
...It also signifies a socioeconomic process, at once dynamic and destructive, which determines that public and private resources shall be spent in an increasingly antisocial way, thereby threatening the well-being of the entire society...
...National Committee on Urban Growth Policy, The New City (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), pp...
...National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, Technology and the American Economy: Re302 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA port, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 36...
...This is one of the reasons why college expenditures have increased faster than has GNP since 1950, and that school teaching has been one of the fastest-growing professions...
...Now there is no question that the seventies will see planning in the United States...
...Under Communism, the publicly owned means of production are in the service of a bureaucratic elite with class privileges...
...Kenneth Boulding, a distinguished economist, believes that these visions of an end of scarcity are wrong...
...Andrew Shonfeld, "Business in the Twenty-First Century," Daedalus, Winter 1969, p. 202...
...In the May 1968 issue of Reader's Digest, in an article entitled "To Insure Domestic Tranquility," Mr...
...And with these caveats, I would stress two elements as crucial in my definition of the socialist future...
...As capitalism developed, it needed more and more people who were not engaged in actual production...
...And he understood that, if one dispensed with the discipline of the labor market, it would mean a mutation in the psychic character of man—there would be "new" men...
...So when Mr...
...What may well be happening—youth apart—is a change in economic and social structure that could have large political consequences...
...We suspect that these differences account for more of the class variation in college changes than all other differences combined...
...This is, of course, an option taken by a tiny minority, yet there is a remarkable response to the hippie style among those who have not disaffiliated completely but share the dissatisfactions of those who have...
...that output be fixed so that marginal cost equals the price of the product...
...Investing in new housing for low-income families—particularly in big cities—is usually a losing proposition," the Council said...
...Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, 3rd ed...
...Socialists cannot abandon their insistence on social ownership...
...And many of these citizens were concentrated in factory jobs that were physically grueling...
...The standard response of many economists to such a proposition is that cliché of Economics One: nothing is really free...
...If it were made free it is doubtful that individuals would suddenly and vastly increase their use of it...
...yet an investment would not be made simply because it could bring a high return and in spite of its social cost, as is the case under capitalism...
...Yet, much as I agree with Kaysen's perspective on the future, I think he is too easy on the capitalist past...
...It can use an array of techniques to socialize this important area of economic life: price-and-wage controls in an inflationary period...
...249 MICHAEL HARRINGTON 1 I I The Nightmares of Affluence THE THIRD MAJOR REASON for the basic transformation of capitalist society I is this: Let us assume that the system proves to be much more ingenious than the preceding analysis suggests...
...In fact, however, inequality means not merely that there are sharply unequal proportions of goods distributed among the various social sectors of the population...
...Far from being simply a matter of keeping the record straight, this point has profound political implications for the future...
...But this does not mean that the neoKeynesian complacency of the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress is justified...
...Advance in Human Aspirations BUT THERE IS ANOTHER WAY of handling this situation, one that socialists propose here and now, even within the context of welfare capitalism...
...This prophetic joke is referred to in an introductory poem...
...Manpower Report of the President, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 235, Table E-8...
...In France, Jean Jaures, one of the most appealing and unsectarian leaders in the history of French socialism, reached conclusions similar to those of Kautsky and anticipating those of Otto Bauer...
...In the United States these taxes are quite low—or quite avoidable, which amounts to the same thing...
...In short, some radicals like Mills, and some Marxists like Marcuse and Goldmann have all come to believe in one variant or another of the theory of "mass society" in which the militant social classes are submerged and lose their distinctive identity...
...90 If one updates Marx's insight into the radicalizing effect of good times, another aspect of recent working-class militancy can be brought into focus...
...Here again, the crucial issue is not so much the legal form of ownership as the kind of economic calculus it follows...
...Nevertheless, there will only be a possibility of making a humane choice if the institutions of democratic plannhig relentlessly encroach on the private sector in such decisive areas as housing, transportation, and education...
...It simply describes a set of values, or aspirations, which socialists wish to see embodied in the organization of society...
...It does propose to end that invidious competition and venality which, because scarcity allowed no other alternatives, we have come to think are inseparable from our humanity...
...Marx, it turned out, was wrong to think that capitalism was necessarily helpless to deal with its own abundance...
...For socialism, by contrast, it is "natural" to allocate them on the basis of human need as democratically determined...
...It is important to understand how decentralist the emotions of the centralizers were in the International...
...For, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics computed the figures, in late 1966 it took about $9,200 to support an urban family of four in the United States at a "moderate standard of living" (the definition allowed, for example, the purchase of a new suit and a twoyearold used car every four years...
...It was, in effect, 266 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA a vicious public policy forcing mothers into the labor market (by 1969 there were practically no able-bodied men on public assistance...
...281 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Can Work Be Abolished...
...It is further clear that our past methods for dealing with the major externalities are increasingly inadequate, if they ever were adequate...
...When Engels published the third volume of Das Kapital after Marx's death, he added a lengthy comment to the discussion on the joint stock company...
...Workers, in the cities, are concentrated in very large numbers, subjected to a common discipline in the work process, and forced—in the defense of their most immediate interests—to build collective institutions...
...they have helped to promote a fantastic antidesign for living...
...There should be an Office of the Future in the White House...
...but at the same time, he expands the productive forces which satisfy them...
...On such issues as foreign policy, civil liberties, and civil rights, this emergent stratum is likely to differ considerably from traditional working-class attitudes...
...But Karl Kautsky, though he tried with all his might to be an orthodox Marxist, had some doubts about his master's more apocalyptic visions...
...Nevertheless, the public corporation with both the right to internal financing and the responsibility to democratically-elected representatives of the people is, with all problems acknowledged, a right step in the best direction...
...So, if the changes in capitalist structure that are proposed in the following pages are only transitional, they must also move in the direction of the ultimate vision of socialism...
...It does not promise or even seek to abolish the human condition...
...The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic...
...Ibid., p. 263...
...Ibid., p. 592...
...Suppose it constructs a welfare state that really does respond to the needs of the poor and that it manages, without fundamental changes in structure, to accommodate itself to democratic planning...
...It will to use the language of psychoanalysis . . . be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form...
...And even though these societies are antisocialist, their experience does have some bearing on the future...
...In contrast to what Marx thought, it may well be that once man stops dying from famines and depressions and starts to die only from death, there will be a resurgence of the religious spirit, not an end to it...
...Berle considers it at least possible that such attitudes can be given a social rather than a military thrust: "A day may come when national glory and prestige, perhaps even national safety, are best established by a country's being the most beautiful, the best socially organized, or culturally the most advanced in the world...
...Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1967], pp...
...Dostoevsky did not understand his own prejudices when he made this analysis, but the alarm he sounded was quite real...
...the thesis put forward by John Stuart Mill and Henry George that rent represents unearned income and therefore should belong to the society as a whole...
...Trotsky said that in the new society the average citizen would be an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx—but the English Fabian Sidney Webb was content to foresee a "discretely regulated freedom...
...America is becoming a "knowledge economy" in which higher and higher educational credentials are required, sometimes unnecessarily, in order to get a good job...
...and, of course, athletic records, and presumably biological prowess, have been dramatically extended...
...78 The greatest feats of invention, Berle continues, have been accomplished by 267 MICHAEL HARRINGTON defense corporations under conditions of war and with survival and patriotism as central motives...
...In addition to the poor there were tens of millions of working Americans who, if not hungry, had to struggle and scrape to make ends meet...
...At the Brussels Congress in 1868, the Proudhonists were defeated and the assembly voted for the collectiviza296 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA tion of the land, the mines, the railroads, and the communications system, and they held that the working class should "possess" the machines in producers' cooperatives which would receive "gratuitous credit...
...The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, John Gerassi, ed...
...How Inequality Is Built into the System THE CLASS DIVISIONS OF WELFARE CAPITALISM which are the root cause of this problem are not, it must be stressed, simply unfair in some abstract sense...
...Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), p. 111...
...New York Times, January 30, 1967...
...He 252 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA contrasts the market choices, which supposedly pampered the consumer, with planner's choices, which are said to be more restrictive...
...How willing are they to set aside technocratic priorities in favor of a new simplicity of life...
...h THE COMMUNIST DEBATE OVER MOTIVATION, though conducted in a Marxist vocabulary, has •taken place within a context Marx would have seen as making the emergence of a socialist psychology impossible...
...This new class—I use the term loosely—has been glimpsed by many observers...
...Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, quoted here from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960- )4:462...
...Marx had rightly seen (and Joseph Schumpeter thought it his great accomplishment) that one of the basic laws of motion in capitalist society was for competition to beget monopoly and a consequent tendency to increase investment in machines (in the Marxist vocabulary, for constant capital to grow in relationship to variable capital, thus changing the "organic composition" of capital itself...
...Economic Report of the President, 1967 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 133...
...Harold Wilson's problems in England during the sixties provide an example of the first point...
...Second, it is now possible to have a relatively painless transition to social ownership if socialists will only learn how to give direction to the underlying trends of the corporate economy...
...They propose to socialize the functions of property while leaving the title to it temporarily undisturbed...
...Not only must the wealth generated by the intervention of the state serve society on a democratic basis...
...There are reasons to fear that these different groups, all with a practical interest in the transformation of society, will war with one another rather than coalesce in a new radical majority and eventually into a socialist movement...
...Corporate Profits and the Wage Gap," Federationist, July 1968...
...Claude Bruclain" [pseudonym for a group of members of the Club Jean Moulin], Le Socialisme et L'Europe (Paris: Le Seuil, 1965), p. 56...
...The natural bias of economists is toward believing that consumers "ought" to get what they want in some ethical sense of the word...
...the average for industrial workers was actually $114...
...110...
...By the beginning of the sixties, this momentous development had affected not merely the revisionist social democrats but all the orthodox Marxists and intransigeant radicals as well...
...Yet it must be emphasized that in thus investing billions in the creation of public problems, Washington did not act maliciously but only followed—unconsciously, automatically, "naturally"— the priorities structured into our society's class divisions...
...88 With our rampant inflation, it is clear that this figure would have to be revised to somewhat more than $11,000 for 1970...
...The Germany of the 1840s had more than its share of lofty and irrelevant blueprints for utopia...
...New York Times, February 11, 1970...
...The key question becomes, "By what political mechanism are planners' choices reviewed and controlled...
...The question is not whether this will happen but how it will take place: under commercial priorities (Marcuse's pessimistic vision...
...For this reason we have never advocated the nationalization of industry but always its socialization...
...118...
...The "Radicalism" of Copping Out POLITICALLY, IT IS IMPOSSBLE TO PERSUADE THE MAJORITY of the people of the advanced countries to become voluntary ascetics...
...National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility: Final Report, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), pp...
...Where there is political democracy, economic dictatorship will be even more intolerable than it is under a one-party Communist regime...
...Encounter, November 1969, P. 9. 27...
...But then ironically—for he writes as an American liberal who is critical of socialist dogma—he takes up an ambiguous position somewhere to the Left of many of the revisionist social democrats...
...Finally, there is an irony that should be recorded in this intellectual history of the market under socialism...
...The vocational choice that attracted the largest single group among them (39 percent) was teaching...
...For, as the next section will demonstrate, it should become more and more obvious in the rest of this century that the greatest threat to living standards in the advanced countries is social in character: i.e...
...originally published in 1899), argued that this development made a peaceful evolution possible...
...Many dead-end jobs can be mechanized out of existence...
...For it would be a policy attacking the wealth of a parasitic minority, and once all the outmoded rationales for favoring the rich were shattered, a majority of the people might be educated to see the value of a radical system of taxation...
...The evidence is provided by the children of the rich and the mothers of the poor in contemporary America...
...In the case of Czechoslovakia, the most economically developed nation in which the Communists ever seized power, economic troubles are due not so much to scarcity per se as to the tremendous shortages and inefficiency the Stalinist model of central, fiat planning had visited upon the society...
...Neocapitalist planning with its commercial priorities is inherently limited and unable to solve the crises it has been forced to acknowledge...
...209 ff...
...Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p 681.] Smith and his followers regarded such governmental action as an exceptional case in an economy that would primarily operate on laissez faire principles...
...In a democracy," he argues, "Socialist governments can only succeed if the absolute total of private consumption continues to rise while its share of the national income is falling...
...the revolutionary technology cannot be contained within the social and economic system...
...There are none...
...In the Soviet Union itself, the scientist Andrei D. Sakharov not only spoke out for intellectual freedom but based his appeal for Soviet-American cooperation— and his hope that the two societies would converge in democratic socialism— on the thesis that managerial groups were more and more important in both countries and had a common interest in a new socialist order.95 And in the spring of 1968, when Czechoslovakia searched for the "human face" of socialism, the journalists and intellectuals played an innovating role--and the support they received among the workers turned their critique into effective politics...
...39 If this solidarity does not suffuse the new institutions, then it is possible to nationalize all the means of production, to plan the economy meticulously and yet to end up, not with democratic socialism, but with a new and oppressive form of class society.e The Port Authority in New York City is a useful example of such an antisocial collectivism...
...This is a response to present, so far limited problems that nevertheless point toward fundamental changes in the relations of wealth and power...
...And it is just possible that the "success" of American capitalism will accomplish what its sweatshops failed to do: make socialism politically relevant...
...Stanley Moore, "Utopian Themes in Marx and Mao: A Critique for Modern Revisionists, Dissent, March-April 1970, p. 170 (reprinted from Monthly Review, June 1968...
...In his popular discussion of the Erfurt Program, Karl Kautsky argued that cooperatives would be subject to failure, crisis, and bankruptcy, and would end by pitting the successful collectives against the unsuccessful ones...
...the progressive socialization of the functions of corporate property and then of that property itself, with an attendant increase in the social motivation of the people...
...it is their percentage, not their total, that is going down...
...Professionals and Technicians as Workers ONE COULD IDENTIFY THIS STRATUM in terms of the traditional Marxist analysis, as some on the Left have done...
...In traditional Marxist theory, economic crisis was the result of the accumulation of a glut of unsold goods due to a sustained decline in effective demand...
...But if this group decides, out of naivete or arrogance, to "go it alone" and refuses to work with trade unionists because of the latter's dominant concern with bread-and-butter questions, it will not be able to transform the society...
...That led to the theory of "state socialism," which Kautsky worked out in the 1880s and 1890s, i.e...
...He hoped for nothing less than that every citizen become a Renaissance man...
...i C. WRIGHT MILLS FELT, at the end of his life, that the educated public, which had been the hope of liberalism, and the organized workers, to whom the socialists looked, "had either collapsed or become most ambiguous" as historical actors...
...Two Systems and Their Values THE FIRST DISTINCTION BETWEEN CAPITALIST AND SOCIALIST PLANNING has to do with money...
...I stress this aspect of working-class life which is so often ignored by the affluent, college-educated, and issue-oriented people who must form coalidons with the unionists...
...115...
...If then the crisis of advanced society will become more pressing in the years ahead, and if it can be resolved only through radical innovation, there is a growing group that could become conscious of this fact and decide to act upon it politically...
...Thus one of Marx's fundamental theories was vindicated in a way he himself would never have imagined...
...And here early socialist theory was more advanced than later socialist practice...
...As an American Presidential commission recently reported, ". . . over the last decades, government action through urban renewal, highway programs, demolitions on public housing sites, code enforcement, and other programs has destroyed more housing for the poor than government at all levels has built for them...
...Euthanasia for Rentiers": A Modest Proposal SOCIAL OWNERSHIP NOW seems easier to achieve if socialists will encourage the "euthanasia of the rentiers...
...They might even be used by sophisticated corporate leaders to make the status quo more rational and 257 V MICHAEL HARRINGTON stable...
...External economies usually derive from public investments in schools, hospitals, and the like...
...30, 35...
...Moreover—and here we move toward the line separating the traditional blue-collar working class from the new professionals—there are changes in class structure in the affluent economy which occasion new kinds of discontent...
...In the immediate future, a democratically socialized society could use this enormous economic power to meet the needs of America and to aid in the industrialization of the world...
...As Cole put it, "It was not state ownership or control of industry for which the Congress declared, but cooperative ownership on a basis of decentralization, or rather localization...
...There are some who loathe to leave behind the consolation of familiar brutalities...
...122...
...It was actually a form of antisocialism in which the capitalist state intervened in economic affairs in order to shore up the existing order...
...In 1878 Bismarck outlawed any organization that even advocated socialism...
...Now, however, there is the corporation with its intricate "technostructure" of scientists and administrators...
...I am indebted to Erazim Kohak for the translation.] But is that not precisely what an old-fashioned free enterpriser would think...
...260 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA For example, private investment decisions must be socialized...
...The administration of public property, they argued, should take a corporate form in which the board of directors of an industry would be divided between representatives of the workers directly involved, of the consumers at large, and of the state authority...
...Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfactions which they give him fall in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalists which are inaccessible to the worker, and in comparison with the state of development of society in general...
...The debate over nationalization of industry began at the Lausanne Congress in 1867, which voted for public ownership of transportation and the banks, but not of the land...
...106...
...In this scheme, the corporation would be left to its own devices as long as it conformed to the national plan and did not irresponsibly impose social costs upon the country...
...Further, one worker is married, another is not...
...It is a familar phenomenon that some people are crushed by retirement, bewildered when the compulsion of work is removed from their lives...
...19 Exactly...
...8. 23...
...For if capitalism was more flexible than Marx thought, it still had to design, or stumble into, ameliorative programs that would preserve the structural injustices of the society...
...and the Chinese, or at least the Maoist faction, criticized the fat Communists bitterly from the point of view of a nation that was only at the beginning of this process...
...There were, he said, "insufficient federal enforcement powers" to fight air pollution...
...An external economy occurs when an act of consumption creates a collective good, e.g...
...There is, however, one important area where planning is made more simple because of tendencies within the economy itself...
...Therefore, they ingeniously proposed to cut off inheritance after the third generation, arguing that the present heirs would be so greedy that they would not object to the expropriation of their grandchildren's wealth...
...For meeting the social problems that have just been described will require an investment of billions of public dollars...
...Wall Street Journal, February 16, 1970...
...In the United States there has been no significant change in the distribution of income since 1944...
...People will divide into "parties" over the question of a new gigantic canal, or the distribution of oases in the Sahara . . . and over the regulation of the weather and climate, over a new theater, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in art and over a best system of sports...
...It is property income that should become the target of taxation, a kind of income easy enough to distinguish from the reward for present accomplishment...
...Moreover, as John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The New Industrial State, because the corporation has become huge and makes multi-million dollar investments projected over long periods of time, a whole new stratum of industrial planners is needed...
...To those who charge that the tests are "unfair to the poor," Riesman and Jencks cogently reply, "Life is unfair to the poor...
...That is why socialists do not foresee an ultimate stage of human existence in which all conflicts are resolved...
...This, it must be emphasized, is an inherent pattern in a society where huge investments are made privately...
...The fulfillment of liberal values, in short, requires structural changes in our class relationships, changes transcending the capitalist limits of today's welfare state...
...MEW, 3:378...
...36 Not only, then, is contemporary capitalism heir to many of the traditional evils of the system, even if sometimes in ameliorated ways...
...And all these fields require a great number of highly skilled people...
...and if this is accomplished with the least expenditure of effort and under conditions worthy and adequate to human nature...
...It can be accomplished only on a national scale and within the framework of planning...
...Instead of episodic victories within an antisocial environment, there must be a concerted effort to create a new human environment...
...8 (Emphasis added...
...IS Reform of the Welfare State Enough...
...Yet in the more distant future it is not only possible, but perhaps necessary, for society to enter that Kingdom of Freedom which Marx described...
...For Saint-Simon's followers managed to reach a sympathetic working-class audience during the period of Louis Philippe, and it was in one of their publications that the word "socialism" was used for one of the first times in France...
...As Otto Bauer put it after World War I, If the government controlled as many undertakings as possible, it would be too powerful as against the people and the popular assembly...
...Supposing even that such a tactic could provide the billions of dollars needed (it cannot), the housing industry hardly has the resources, the overview, or the legal right to engage in national, regional, and metropolitan planning...
...Were that the case, a sophisticated conservative argument might be persuasive: since to some extent the growth of the economy benefits everyone, even those who are worst off, there is no point in endangering these gains on behalf of a vision of egalitarianism...
...The economic basis of this possibility, Keynes thought, was "an increase in the volume of capital until it ceases to be scarce so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus...
...A. A. Berle, Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), pp...
...Anthony Crosland was even more skeptical than Kautsky...
...The forces of production, Marx held, come into contradiction with the mode of capitalist production, i.e...
...if the solutions described in the middle of it are to be practical politics...
...we do not dare to think that things could be otherwise...
...Yet I suspect that they overstate the case...
...One cannot trust these matters, as the Wall Street Journal put it in a telling anticapitalist phrase, to the "mindless market...
...tax policies can provide incentives for internal financing or for distributing profits...
...The whole field is dominated by the existence of externalities, i.e...
...For it is clear that only conscious planning could achieve such a careful hoarding of resources...
...Strangely enough, it was the right wing of German socialism—the revisionists under the leadership of Eduard Bernstein—who insisted on the continued relevance of cooperatives...
...Now it is obvious that he did not have advance knowledge of the computers and cybernated equipment that were not invented until long after his death...
...And this is on the agenda today...
...Ibid., p. 593...
...Ibid., 2:126...
...Saint-Simon and his followers have been justly charged with trying to organize a "church of the engineers...
...But does this mean that socialists have no way of determining how to allocate scarce resources, and that all decisions are to be made by fiat...
...Then, as the New York Times reported the incident, "Asked to define terms, a spokesman replied that [the word] socialism in French is rather vague...
...Moreover, the effective rate of taxation on the rich and the upper middle class (the top 15 percent of the society as measured by incomes) declined in the years between 1952 and 1967...
...Now a much more profound and conscious socialization is required of more of the functions of property...
...But their antiestablishmentarianism may also reflect a certain self-interest, as Bruno Bettelheim has suggested...
...The reform would "punish the nation's most productive citizens" and this disincentive to the stockholder would lead to a decrease in economic activity and lower federal revenues...
...In their 1969 electoral campaign, the German Social Democrats understood at least part of this point and made the extension of "co-determination"—which provides for workers' representation on the boards of certain large and private corporations—a central political demand...
...Equal right is then unequal right for unequal work...
...But in some crucial aspects the Marxian prophecy failed...
...the air pollution visited upon society by a private automobile...
...85 Part of that prediction has come true...
...they are also made discontented when they contrast their own material gains with the affluence enjoyed by a relatively small minority...
...That was the response of the Nixon administration in 1969, when it made the benefits of its proposed minimum family income program conditional on the recipient working or training for a job...
...As the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs and to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man do the same thing under all social forms and possible modes of production...
...Ibid., p. 213...
...67 To Whom Is the Corporation Accountable...
...Engels, though at first dubious about Kautsky's term, later applied it to France in criticism of Jean Jauris for supporting the nationalization of grain imports...
...There is a need, as a National Academy of Science panel pointed out, for "technological forecasting...
...When Dwight Eisenhower proposed in May 1968 that there be new, integrated communities with jobs, schools, parks, and high-speed transportation links to the old cities, he was unwittingly committing himself to radical innovation...
...Shortly before his death Oskar Lange modified, and almost repudiated, his thesis arguing in effect that computers had provided the universal brain Trotsky had derided...
...See G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols...
...he writes that the industrial system "brings into existence, to serve its intellectual and scientific needs, the group that, hopefully, will reject its monopoly of social purpose...
...It is also possible that we will seize this opportunity and make of the earth a homeland rather than an exile...
...Affluence seems to subvert itself...
...This remarkable text will be discussed at length later on...
...The dominant trend of this century is to move economic activity away from primary pursuits, such as agriculture, and even away from industry, into areas like service and education...
...But if Crosland is right and socialism is whatever socialists happen to say it is, a fundamental problem remains...
...Yet in February 1970, when Nixon's Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans made the most authoritative and detailed administration statement on the new city proposal, all he advocated was some tax and other government subsidies to the private sector...
...49 [1891-92]: 705 ff...
...How, then, does such an approach differ from the rules that capitalism, in theory at least, is supposed to follow...
...I would not suggest that a psychic transition of this character will be easy...
...It would then end up with politics similar to those of the American Medical Association, a group organized to exploit the community it is supposed to serve...
...In effect they argued that the old, militant antagonisms of capital and labor were ended, or largely muted, and that social change had become a question of how experts would divide an ever increasing Gross National Product...
...But with the growth of wealth and the middle class, the children of the well-off were granted (to use Erik Erikson's idea) a "moratorium" in their teens during which they were neither quite children nor adults...
...The extreme form of this attitude leads to a dangerous utopianism, in the worst sense of that word...
...See, e.g., the attack on equality in "New Conditions, New Tasks in Economic Construction...
...For he knows, with an existential certitude, that it is human nature to fight over water...
...Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), p. xii...
...One would expect such a response from a socialist leader in a nation that has as strong a syndicalist tradition as France...
...Karl Marx, Die Deutsche Ideologie, MEW, 3:34-35...
...See Utopia, Penguin Classics edition [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965], p. 29...
...112 In other words, the evolution of technology would progressively reduce the need for human labor, and this economic trend would make possible the socialist realm of freedom...
...but about the content of the desired future, the substance of what socialism would be, it had little to say...
...In the United States, to take but one example, the electrification of the rural areas was largely achieved through a New Deal measure that provided cheap federal credit to local cooperatives...
...John Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1965), p 243...
...Nor is there much doubt that the central contradiction of capitalist society as it has been described by socialists—the clash between forces of production more and more social in character and modes of investment and appropriation that remain private—is basic to the contemporary crisis...
...Even more important, dealing with the agony of the poor in the advanced countries—with the hundreds of millions in the Third World who are much more desperate—requires that contemporary technology be used for the creation of food, housing, and clothing...
...As a result there was a revolutionary class consciousness...
...Proudhon is often thought of as the very antithesis of Saint-Simon...
...A great many of the areas thereby expanded have been traditionally public or private nonprofit: schools, hospitals, social services, and the like...
...In classic capitalist theory, a man must be able to leave his fortune to his children if he is to have an incentive to work hard all his life...
...In any case, this is a very important aspect of the capitalist reality...
...Mr...
...If there is a tendency under capitalism for reforms, and even in structural changes a tendency to benefit the wealthy more than the poor, a rigorously progressive income tax could provide a major corrective...
...If we were to accommodate the full 100 million persons in new communities we would have to build a new city of 250,000 persons each month from now to the end of the century...
...for the middle class and the rich, but provided only 650,000 units of low-cost housing for the poor...
...For it has been noted in New York that when welfare benefits to the mothers of dependent children became competitive with or superior to the pay for unskilled jobs in the labor market, these people did not seek work...
...But the third revolution—in electronics, data processing, and petrochemicals—is not so prone to bureaucracy and subordination...
...John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1967), pp...
...One of the most important American theorists of the corporation, A. A. Berle, has some fascinating speculations on this development...
...239, 271-72...
...46 ff...
...We may well be on the eve of psychic mutations...
...the abolition of money is another...
...With equal work and equal participation in the social consumption funds, the one actually receives more than the other...
...The problem of the technostructure . . . is whether it can be accommodated to social goals or whether society will have to be accommodated instead to its needs...
...Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, (New York: John Day & Co., 1933), p. 14...
...If socialism consists in extending the regime of state industry and administration to private industry," Jaures wrote, "I would be the adversary of socialism . . . the socialist regime is the exact contrary of the present state industries...
...The Swedish socialists bring an ingenious contribution to this area...
...That motive could easily be protected by providing for relatively low death duties on the first transfer of wealth, from father to son...
...Eventually, he thought, this rationalizing trend would lead to single-firm industries...
...New York: Macmillan, 1968], p. 341...
...The confusion persists to this day...
...The growing stratum of professionals and technicians may simply want to ameliorate, not really change, the existing order...
...104...
...3. National Commission on Civil Disorders, Report, 1968 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [cited hereafter as GPO...
...The sentence decreed in the Garden of Eden will have been served...
...318 ff...
...Economists accordingly tend to resist, as a matter of fundamental principle, changes in decision-making processes that substitute planners' choices for consumers' choices...
...because the profit could never repay the expense of any individual or small number of individuals, though it may fre293 MICHAEL HARRINGTON quently do much more than repay it to a great society...
...Herbert Marcuse is even more pessimistic...
...it comes from the congestion, pollution, and ecological mayhem resulting from an unplanned technological revolution...
...THERE IS STILL a politically potent dissatisfaction, based on the old working' class deprivations and also on the new needs of affluence...
...In the, old, apocalyptic proposals for the sudden and complete nationalization of basic industry, there was little room for promoting diversity and a variety of institutional forms...
...to keep domestic peace...
...As August Bebel, the leader of early German socialism, put it: As the knowledge [of capitalist exploitation and the need for socialism] grips increasingly larger groups it finally wins over the overwhelming majority of society which has a direct interest in this transformation...
...In his comments on the Gotha Program he imagined a society in which there is no exploiting class and all workers are paid according to their labor...
...54 We tend to reify private property into something indivisible, so that one either owns or does not own...
...National Committee on Urban Growth Policy, The New City, p. 171...
...The overthrow of the old order would then be relatively simple and, at least in some cases (England, America, Holland), possibly nonviolent...
...The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise...
...It retains the notion of a truly new order of things and it asserts this through the vision of seeking, in the distant but conceivable future, to abolish compulsory work and the rationing system of money as far as is humanly possible...
...It requires long-range projections and a conscious coordination of government policies...
...Is the Working Class Obsolete...
...ix Is There a "New Class...
...MEW, 25:828...
...Our desires and pleasures spring from society...
...For the continental socialists who revised their basic programs in the late fifties and early sixties, this development made the classic case for nationalization seem irrelevant...
...National Commission on Civil Disorders, Report, 1968, pp...
...If that is so, then a radical reform of the advertising industry may allow the electorate to get the truth and the vote for that social spending which is in its objective and long-term interest.d A more ominous possibility has been suggested by two Labour members of Parliament on the basis of the experience of the Wilson government...
...The welfare state was an enormous advance over the cruelty and indifference to human suffering that characterized early capitalism...
...Using almost the same theory, the French sociologist Alain Touraine has said that these changes would result in a "utopian communist" movement and that the French revolt of May 1968 was one of the first expressions of this new revolutionary trend...
...years of publication are omitted unless they vary from dates given in titles]), p. 28...
...A qualitative increase in the rate of social spending can be channeled through the most diverse kinds of organizations: through departments of national, regional, and local government, public corporations, cooperatives, private nonprofit institutions, neighboorhood associations, and so on...
...In the United States (and in all the advanced capitalist countries, for that matter) there is neither political support nor administrative feasibility for the sudden decisive nationalization of an entire economy...
...The establishment of the conditions for cooperative production, Marx thundered, had to do with a revolution in the present mode of production and not with the founding of cooperatives through government aid...
...or consciously chosen and shaped by a free political and social movement...
...In education, housing, and agriculture, in welfare and every other area of social life, it is therefore necessary to attack the systematic concentration of economic power in order to achieve serious reform...
...Marx's prediction has been corroborated under Communism...
...And above this ridge, new peaks will arise...
...In Lange's model, a Central Planning Board would require all managers to follow certain rules: that the costs of production be minimized...
...They are, after all, principled pinch-pennies with regard to federal spending, i.e...
...It is precisely the autonomy of the New York Port Authority, its independence from democratic control, that has allowed it to use its resources for creative antisocial purposes...
...If one had talked to a person who had only known that desert and told him that in the city there are public water fountains and that children are even sometimes allowed to turn on the fire hydrants in the summer and to frolic in the water, he would be sure that you were crazy...
...11° In the Middle Ages the working year was only 150-200 days...
...The answer is to be found in the class character of American society and in the commercial logic which both derives from it and pervades governmental decisions...
...TVA, Annual Report, 1968 (Washington, D.C.: GPO...
...Frederick A. Hayek has said, 259 MICHAEL HARRINGTON So long as the management is supposed to serve the interests of the stockholders it is reasonable to leave the control of its actions to the stockholders...
...Emphasis added...
...111...
...Salt is a classic example...
...to set wage levels...
...The voting rights of all speculative, short-term shareholders could be abolished...
...One of the reasons for this state of affairs is that profitability is defined in private, nonsocial terms so that, for instance, the housing of the rich is rebuilt in every generation while slums fester...
...neither, for that matter, is democracy...
...The citizen faced with shoddy public transportation or the private automobile was hardly exercising an exhilarating discretion when he chose the latter...
...Nevertheless, even if we do assume that the cyclical crisis of capitalism has been mastered, it has been succeeded by an even more bizarre problem: affluence itself becomes increasingly counterproductive...
...Milton Eisenhower: that after the most prosperous decade in the nation's history, it is in imminent danger of building a hate-ridden, strife-torn anti-utopia...
...Therefore, even if the percentage of blue-collar workers is declining and that of 273 MICHAEL HARRINGTON "professional, technical, and kindred workers" is on the increase, it is the working people with their own, stable institutions who must be the decisive component in a socialist majority...
...I •think not...
...Trained as "gentlemen" in an age that needs technicians, they become, in Walter Lippmann's phrase, "derelicts from progress...
...the worker, who through technology produces as if he were a thou283 MICHAEL HARRINGTON sand men, is paid as an individual...
...This is the key to that paradox presented by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence under Dr...
...But the decisive technology of the contemporary economy is industrial, and the center of power is therefore urban...
...288 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA Perhaps the most monstrous perversion of the word "socialism" was perpetrated by the Nazis, whose name was an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' party...
...This is one of the most important areas of socialized effort since, either through public schools or aid to private education, the state supplies the modern economy with "its decisive factor of production, which is trained manpower...
...The technical complexity and planning and associated scale of operation," Galbraith concludes, "that took power from the capitalist entrepreneur and lodged it with the technostructure, removed it also from the reach of socialist control...
...it is the sign of socialism that it is a democratic mass movement deciding, and working to fulfill, its own aims...
...He believed, after all, that the state would become unnecessary and "wither away...
...Stalin wiped out an entire generation of Marxist revolutionaries, erected a totalitarian state, and called it "socialist...
...See his book Winds of Change, 1914-1918 [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], p. 232...
...In the bitter struggles that have occurred since Marx first formulated his position, the working-class movement, upon which he rested his main hopes, has indeed made significant modifications in the structure of such capitalist institutions as the factory and the state...
...For they assume that the change of ownership will take place with the capitalist psychology intact, so that the urge to maximize profit and/or power and the pervasive egotism of economic man will still be the rule of life...
...and thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain...
...one has more children than the other...
...The basic transition taking place, he holds, is not from poverty to abundance, but from the "open society" with an 'input' of material from mines and ores and fossil fuels and with pollutable reservoirs as recipients of `outputs'--to a closed society in which there are no longer any 300 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA mines or pollutable reservoirs and in which, therefore, all materials have to be recycled...
...For in order to engage in regional planning and to aid in the construction of new cities and towns, the geography of employment has to be publicly determined...
...And, in one of his most mature and specific statements about the socialist future, in the third volume of Das Kapital, he spoke of how the "associated producers" would assert their "community control" (gemeinschaftliche Kontrolle) over the economy, i.e...
...Once it was land, then capital...
...Our unprecedented, man-made environments produce new kinds of people...
...In the realm of intelligence there are no comparative statistics but the qualitative growth in the number of scientists, and educated people generally, must mean that some of man's genetic potential has been saved from the savage fate scarcity and starvation used to visit upon it...
...Ibid., pp...
...aesthetic socialism as in the anti-commercialism of William Morris...
...it is cited here to show that socially-conscious motivations are becoming more and more important...
...Nevertheless, it is urgent to realize that there is occurring a vast expansion of jobs both distant from actual production and often demanding high levels of education and skill...
...However, when Willy Brandt required the support of the Free Democrats in order to form a government, he agreed, as a price of coalition, not to push this reform...
...That is why it is so important to define the limits of neocapitalist planning and to contrast them sharply with the socialist proposals in the same area...
...According to the thesis about the inherent greediness of men, the people who subscribe should use their rights more than the citizen who pays a higher cost...
...And in Europe, where per capita wealth is inferior to that in the United States, this is still more true...
...A. Ribicoff, "The Competent City," Address, January 23, 1967, Congressional Record, 113, no...
...With his development, man expands the realm of material necessity and his own needs...
...And there is only one way for the people to "own" the state which owns the means of production: through the exercise of their democratic right to determine its policies and personnel...
...Social being, Marx had said, 271 MICHAEL HARRINGTON determines social consciousness...
...g AMBIGUITIES ABOUT THE MEANING of socialism go back to the very origins of the movement...
...Socialism should therefore work toward making more and more goods and services free: medicine, housing, transportation, a healthy diet, etc...
...Nixon criticizes the proposals for new towns and cities as inadequate, it is obvious that he and his conservative colleagues are not about to propose such a basic revision in the uses of the national wealth...
...Then, after having described the social classes and strata which need such innovations and can become politically conscious of this fact, we come to an ultimate vision of socialism...
...Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, (New York: Young Socialist Alliance, 1967), p. 13...
...It was, he wrote, "the highest development of capitalism . . . a necessary transition stage for the transformation of capitalist property into the property of the producers...
...H. S. Crossman, The Politics of Socialism [New York: Atheneum, 1965], p. 110...
...The workers are confronted by the old, and basic, problem of not having enough...
...A third of the English corporatoins, Sidney Webb wrote in the original Fabian Essays, are joint stock companies "whose stockholders could be expropriated by the community with no more dislocation of the industries carried on by them than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange...
...Galbraith, The New Industrial State, p. 399...
...94 Even some Communist writers acknowledged this development...
...Labour MP David Marquand believes it is "arguable" that in England in the thirties conservatives like Macmillan did more than the socialists to popularize the idea of economic planning...
...a requirement that big companies open up their books and justify any increase in prices before an independent board...
...Yet a good deal of the consumers' desires are in fact engineered, and even when that is not the case, his freedom is circumscribed by the possibilities open to him...
...Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai, passim...
...Pechman, "The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay," Public Interest, pp...
...This plea obviously assumes that the stock market performs important and creative economic functions and that it is peopled by "the nation's most productive citizens...
...but if the socialized industry is granted the right 264 MICHAEL HARRINGTON to independent action, it will probably follow its own purposes rather than those of the national plan...
...Through vigorous and radical reforms it is possible to offset—though not to remove—this inherent tendency within capitalist society to distribute public benefits according to the inequalities of private wealth...
...Oeuvres, 3:373 ff...
...But this reform might even be assimilated to an Adam Smithian model of the economy...
...Inflation had made money so tight that giant blue-chip corporations were doing something out of the ordinary: they were actually trying to raise money in Wall Street...
...Competition, he said, will not disappear under socialism...
...Yet this does not mean that the government should simply "take over" the giant enterprises...
...And "the old crap" is precisely that pervasive venality that is to be found in any form of class society, capitalist or Communist...
...in a given instance considers them only as workers, abstracting from all else...
...We assumed it would have the obvious effect of producing chronic, and even mass, unemployment...
...New York: Doubleday, 1965], p. 101...
...Paul Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed...
...More generally, as the example of the New York Port Authority suggests, it is quite possible for a publicly-owned enterprise to behave in the same aggressive, self-interested way as a private corporation...
...100 The Affluent, Radical Young as a New Force THIS NEW PHASE, Keniston argues, has been the basis of New Left currents in the advanced nations during the sixties...
...governments covet it...
...In any case, a socialist movement could take the opportunity provided by such a process to promote as much diversity as possible within the forms of social property...
...It was first pointed out by that great antisocialist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and it has since gained in relevance...
...It would then be seen as a new section of the working class, rather than as a new class...
...But, to cite a fact some of the interpreters of this trend forget, the number of the workers is also on the increase...
...There are, of course, enormous differences among and within these categories: a typist is by no means part of the same social stratum as a corporation vice-president or a nuclear physicist...
...Manpower Report of the President, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 26...
...Lyndon Johnson stated the problem well enough in his 1967 message on "Protecting Our National Heritage" but, like his successor, he could not bring himself to urge the radical measures necessary to deal with it...
...Marx, as I noted earlier, had understood that the joint stock company— the first institutional expression of the separation of ownership from control —contained an anticapitalist premise insofar as it made economic functions independent of capital itself...
...London: Allen & Unwin, n.d...
...There is so much work that needs to be done within this country and internationally that the next several generations, at least, must put the "socialized individual" to work meeting basic needs...
...VIII YOU MAY ASK: granted that basic new departures in economic and political policy are desperately needed, where can we find the political support for these measures...
...102...
...welfare statism as a variety of socialism...
...THE SECOND MAJOR REASON why American society cannot deal with its crises is that we need national economic and social planning on a scale that our present institutional arrangements tend to make impossible...
...Nixon's antipollution proposals were much less bold than his generalities, the Wall Street Journal editorially cautioned him about too sweeping an attack on the internal combustion engine...
...Lange's retrospect was, I think, unfair to his earlier analysis...
...Socialist planning, in short, is not a total panacea...
...It would be, for instance, the proper forum where the broad concept of regional planning would be established...
...I have sketched out the history of the socialist theory of capitalist planning because it is relevant to the definition of socialism itself...
...285 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Men Freed of the Curse of Money THE END OF COMPULSORY LABOR is one socialist ultimate...
...Ibid., p. 33...
...BUT MARX DID CLEARLY ASSERT a basic value judgment that makes it possible to distinguish socialism from other forms of collectivism...
...Arlen J. Large, "Technology in the Mindless Market," Wall Street Journal, October 17, 1969...
...18 "What America needs," they conclude, "is not more mobility but more equality...
...This proposal follows the ingenious Saint-Simonian scheme of abolishing inheritance over three generations and counting on the greed of the first generation to make it indifferent to what happens to its grandchildren...
...Two items in the Wall Street Journal, separated by less than a year's time, illustrate my point...
...on the other hand, I want to suggest the truly radical potential for human change that exists today...
...This would make it clear that many of the transactions on the stock market are nothing but a socially-approved form of gambling—and an enormous waste of resources and energy...
...248 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA Problems of Planning under Socialism THE PRINCIPLE of socialist planning is clear: the people, rather than corporations with government subsidies, should decide priorities...
...23 To deal with a crisis of this magnitude will clearly require a shift of massive resources from the private to the public sector, since the market is not even reaching a majority 247 MICHAEL HARRINGTON of the people...
...Planning under Capitalism—for Whom...
...Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Eric Hobsbawm, ed...
...In a society of maldistributed incomes it is obviously unjust that an elite should enjoy luxuries while a mass are denied necessities...
...But while Mr...
...there was no "inevitable" upward curve of progress...
...17 Jencks and Riesman then raise a basic psychological point...
...Some writers, myself included, responded in the early sixties to the phenomenon of automation with an excessive literal-mindedness...
...He argues that profit-oriented decision is not particularly innovative, and that the more secure and wealthy a company becomes the fewer are its incentives to change...
...we would suggest that, so far, all the evidence is by no means available...
...44-45...
...MEW, 25:453-54...
...And all of these figures are based on reported rather than actual income: they do not take into account the command over resources in expense accounts, pensions, and other perquisites which are confined to the upper reaches of the economy...
...Lange emphasized two important contrasts...
...48 In the 1920s John Maynard Keynes, a principled antisocialist, described the self-socializing tendencies of capitalism as the "euthanasia of the renders...
...Assembling an integrated population and providing its members with decent work, education, and transportation is not something to be accomplished by the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith...
...58a...
...It is important to understand why so many politicians, some conservative and others even fascist, co-opted the socialist vocabulary and aspects of the socialist program...
...The situation is rapidly going to be just as upsetting for graduates in economics, natural science and even physics, for they cannot all find a place in teaching or research...
...There are, as has just been seen, huge and decisive areas of economic life in which private capital will not invest because there is no prospect of sufficient profitability (or, what amounts to the same thing, where antisocial allocations are more profitable than social ones...
...83 Attacking Parasites and Gamblers EFFECTIVE INHERITANCE TAXES would provide another important source of social funds and an opportunity to work toward greater equality...
...There is no class difference since both men are workers, but the unequal individual gifts and accomplishments are tacitly recognized as natural privileges...
...But they do share common interests, and it is the job of socialists in America to persuade them to act upon these interests...
...that it can use retained profits to fund growth and is therefore not subject to the constraints of the money market...
...Instead, all kinds of intermediate strata persisted long after they were scheduled to disappear...
...Today, one is told, the United States is the richest country in the history of mankind, and its remaining problems can be taken care of by pragmatic technicians acting within the framework of the welfare state...
...But the basic source of all this Communist inequality—the persistence of the "old crap"—was that scarcity whose psychological effects Marx analyzed.h Must an analysis then conclude, as Robert Heilbroner has suggested, with an acknowledgment that the socialist aspiration toward equality necessarily and always conflicts with the socialist determination to produce enough for all...
...The working class is by no means "disappearing...
...44 256 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA That is, as will be seen, an overly optimistic assessment of this development, since more than investment must be socialized...
...They were tired of the Talmudic distinctions and the glosses on Marxist scripture...
...But there are obvious risks to this approach...
...They incarnate not merely a new definition of the meaning of age, but the consequences of changes in class structure as well...
...Involved each day with cooperative endeavors in which they debate and discuss and plan, they are open to an appeal to build a more rational, planned order...
...In the very best of societies both the democratic majority and the critical minority must be on the alert...
...It was, for example, a prophetic notion of more dignity 280 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA for human beings which led the British socialists in 1945 to reject a means test for the new social services they were providing...
...Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961], p. 148...
...As an article in Fortune put it, "Kaiser's experience refutes the widely held belief that if medical services are 'free,' or virtually free, the public will stampede to them...
...To avoid these abuses, rights must be unequal, not equal...
...57 But in point of fact, American corporations chafed under the voluntary controls of the KennedyJohnson administrations even though their profits rose by 78.7 percent between 1960 and 1970, and their cash flow (profits plus depreciation) was up by 85 percent in the same period...
...Lassalle, who was even more distant from Proudhon's intentions, was prepared to use the Prussian state in order to get assistance for workers' cooperatives...
...Whenever the injustices and oppressions of Soviet society were attacked, Stalin could reply that this was, after all, only the first and "imperfect" phase of the transition to the millennium...
...Dan Cordtz, "Change Begins in the Doctor's Office," Fortune, January 1970...
...Mankind has lived now for several millennia in the desert...
...259-60...
...In this perspective, "rationality" would lead to sharpened imperialist hostility and to war...
...A seemingly unprofitable venture, such as helping mass transportation, might be more genuinely productive than any seemingly self-supporting service the Port Authority has yet turned its hand to—and ultimately would cost us far less...
...Karl Kautsky, The Labour Revolution, H. J. Stenning, transl...
...MEW, 19:26...
...It behaves exactly like the capitalist enterprises that surround it...
...However, I think both Boulding and Nixon omit some crucial variables-the potential of population policy, unforeseen technological innovation, even the impact of space exploration-and that the main problem in the immediate future is not a deficiency in resources but in creative political intelligence...
...some can be dealt with and eliminated...
...It was with these considerations in mind that Leon Trotsky made a sharp attack on the centralized, fiat planning in the Soviet Union of the early thirties, and insisted that there must be a sound ruble if socialism is to be built...
...Die Neue Zeit, 10, no...
...There are nations in which the overwhelming majority is peasant and yet the society is run in the cities...
...But that does not mean, as some young leftists in recent times have thought, that the welfare state is to be dismissed as a "fraud" that prevents the people from coming to truly radical conclusions...
...Whereupon, the London Economist reported, the steel industry increased its prices in 12 months by 7 percent—as contrasted to a 6 percent rise in the previous 10 years...
...Yet only one week before he thus warned that the society was destroying the very air it breathes, Nixon proposed a budget in which mass transportation (which would cut down "the sheer number of cars" as well as serve a number of other social purposes) received 6 percent of the money assigned to building highways, i.e...
...Without even the flimsy justification of acting in the interests of stockholders—it has none—the Port Authority pursues money, not service, with the arrogance, indifference and contempt for the public welfare characteristic of nineteenth-century robber barons...
...Douglas Jay, Socialism in the New Society (New York: St...
...The gradualism of this strategy is not derived from any abstract principle but from the actual experience of socialist governments over half a century—as well as from a sense of what may be acceptable to the American people...
...PARADOXICALLY, AFFLUENCE MAY YET PROVOKE the workers to political struggle as much as poverty did...
...In short, the Proudhonists lost, but their most distinctive single idea was adopted by the entire Congress...
...101 If these theories are correct—and I think there is substance to them— they describe one of the unexpected consequences of our technological revolution...
...So by the 1890s the German socialists had essentially rejected the formulations made by the First International at the end of the 1860s...
...For, as a White House Conference told President Johnson in 1966, the entire lower half of the American population is excluded from the market for new housing, a market that could not exist without massive federal support...
...The statistics, far from describing a simple division between the rich and the poverty-stricken, show that we have in this country a majority— composed of the poor, the near-poor, more than half the workers and lowermiddle class—which does not even have a "moderate standard of living" as defined by the government.5 When Washington used its powers to improve conditions for a wealthy elite, the poor suffered most because they had the most urgent claim on the funds thus squandered on the upper class...
...For if millions of Americans are to become socialists they will do so because, in the struggle to make that welfare state respond to their immediate needs they will have discovered that they must go beyond it...
...it does not tax the rent middleclass families save by owning their own houses, worth $8 billion a year...
...Nixon is the representative of precisely those special interests, concentrated in the Republican party, which were able to enlist a good part of the welfare state in behalf of their private purposes...
...they come from liberal homes...
...See also C. A. R. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), p. 48...
...A study commissioned by the government and chaired by Milton Eisenhower gave the darkest view of these trends...
...From his thesis about the new men of "post-industrial" society, Bell drew fairly conservative conclusions...
...Why, then, bother with definition at all...
...Bad Godesberg Extraordinary Congress, SPD, 1959, "Protokoll," p. 29...
...The amount of it consumed in good times or in bad is relatively invariant...
...For when Jaures, Bauer, Kautsky, and other social democratic leaders in the early part of the century rejected the anarchist and syndicalist proposals to vest title and control of each enterprise in its own workers, they also suggested a very important reform (for details, see Note g...
...But if it is easy enough to demonstrate that planning within a capitalist context is, at best, utterly and necessarily inadequate, that does not mean socialist planning is without problems...
...Indeed, a majority of the American people lacked the resources of this "moderate" budget...
...In arguing that even in the planned, sociallycontrolled society, work is still unfree as long as it is compulsory, Marx was anticipating that passionate antisocialist, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, "Phew...
...In his analysis of "state socialism" Engels remarked that the Marxists had undoubtedly overemphasized the laissez faire aspects of capitalism and thereby caused some socialists to think that any act of state intervention, or nationalization, was socialistic...
...In a Communist society," he and Engels wrote, "there will be no painters, but only highly developed men who, among other things, paint...
...Yet such exploitation is so obvious that it must collapse...
...A progressive income tax, nationally administered, is the only source of funds for such a gigantic appropriation, and the various regional and local choices—where to build a new city, for instance—have to be integrated into a national plan...
...Ibid., p. 68...
...It cannot be done, to take but one crucial example, if land is left to private speculation...
...It seems to me that it is quite legitimate to take this view of the phenomenon so long as one recognizes the unique characteristics of the new group: a high level of formal education and an issue-orientation...
...There have been demands to do away with IQ tests and standard grading, to assign each racial and ethnic group a quota of admissions in state-supported colleges (the top 10 percent of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and others would have places reserved for them, so there would be competition only within these communities but not among them or with the non-ethnics...
...117...
...How then can we explain why sincere and dedicated men— as those who presided over these disastrous programs often were—would lavish public funds to aggravate social problems...
...There must consequently be a social land bank, a new technology, an industry created to modern scale, and to national and regional plans...
...This would encourage the father, while very high rates on the second transfer, from son to grandson, would give both of them a reason to strive hard...
...August Bebel, Die Frau and der Sozialismus (Stuttgart [Germany]: Dietz Verlag, 1922), p. 369...
...There follows an extraordinary paradox: the richer capitalism becomes, the more self-destructive it is...
...1°7 For there are present tendencies, and there is a certain future socialist potential, toward redefining work along the lines Marx suggested...
...Ibid., pp...
...The Public Interest, Fall 1966...
...64 This initiative touches upon one of the most important aspects of corporate organization...
...ON THE BASIS OF THIS ANALYSIS, a group of intellectuals in the late fifties and early sixties—Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron prominent among them— declared that we were witnessing an "end of ideology...
...For Eisenhower, as for the conservative advocates of planning and state intervention before him, was fearful that the unsolved problems of the society would become so explosive as to threaten the public order—and private property—with violence...
...Douglas Jay, Socialism and the New Society [New York: St...
...we measure them, therefore, by society...
...Marx had glimpsed the coming of automation as early as the late 1850s...
...For in order to assemble the huge areas needed for such extensive projects at a remotely reasonable cost, the public authority would have to use its power of eminent domain and bank land...
...This point is central to John Kenneth Galbraith's critique of socialism in The New Industrial State...
...There are, in short, no "perfect" solutions to these enormous problems, and any intelligent person can foresee difficulties in any proposal...
...These international dimensions of socialism are of the utmost importance and will be treated at length in my forthcoming book, Socialism: Past, Present and Future, which will also contain much of the material presented here...
...Given this decision on the part of the mass democratic socialist movements, is it not mere nostalgia or, worse, dogmatism, to bring up this traditional view of the Left...
...The unwillingness of human beings to work at degrading, routine jobs should be welcomed, both as an advance in the level of men's aspirations and as an opportunity for channeling their talents into socially useful areas...
...The human body has been changing under capitalism: in the United States, Selective Service exams show that height is on the increase in the twentieth century...
...Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm [Stuttgart, Germany: Dietz Verlag, 1892], p. 119...
...Emphasis added.] And then, in rephrasing what would once have been regarded as a classic Marxian critique of capitalism, the Republican President defined the fundamental problem: "Perhaps the most dangerous element in the present situation is that so few people are examining the questions from the viewpoint of the whole society...
...the proposal that unions or guilds, rather than the state, control production (syndicalism and Guild socialism...
...But even in the Czechoslovakian spring of 1968, when portions of a Communist party began to move away from totalitarianism and on to search for "the human face" of socialism, the problem of motivation was important...
...For an analysis of Proudhon's positive proposal, see Lichtheim, Origins of Socialism, p. 97...
...This ultimate vision assumes that the basic material desires of the people have been satisfied and productivity has grown to such an extent that man can free himself from the psychology and economics of scarcity...
...and supplied 72,225 canvassers and 94,457 volunteers on election day...
...For if each use of the word, even the most monstrous, has had a historical function, then the term may be so relative as to be meaningless...
...It will be enough that it is useful and adds, no matter how little, to social wealth...
...As Joan Robinson summed it up, "the shareholders and rentiers indeed make a great negative contribution to industry, for much of the best talent in every generation is engaged, one way or another, in the lucrative business of swapping securities around amongst them and so is kept from constructive activities...
...The leadership of the new society will rest, not with the businessmen or corporations as we have known them . . . but with the research corporation, the industrial laboratories, the experimental stations and the universities...
...and their bitterness with the existing order is partly the result of having been given the leisure and educational opportunity to take a "distinterested" and critical view...
...One of these was the war in Vietnam which "carried out" a policy many of us had proposed—the direct governmental creation of 1 7 million jobs—but did so in a murderous fashion...
...Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills, who have had a great influence on the youthful Left, were thought of as the most stern critics of reformism) Yet, essentially they agreed with those German revisionist social democrats who wrote in their 1959 program, The defenseless proletarian without rights, who used to drive himself through a sixteen-hour day to get a starvation wage, has won the eight-hour day, job security, protection against unemployment, sickness, chronic illness, and provisions for retirement...
...So it is now necessary to look beyond scarcity to the ultimate vision of socialism itself.i In envisaging the transcendent potential of social change I am not, I hope, indulging in holiday rhetoric to console those who spend their lives in mundane struggles—nor am I implying that history will one day enter paradise...
...Moreover—and if this is not an anticipation of automation, what is it?— "men relate more and more to the productive process as watchers and regulators...
...Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, Benjamin Lippincott, ed...
...In his classic scenario, the workers were supposed to become a revolutionary majority of the society...
...In Marx's view history was not predetermined...
...As Alain Touraine summarizes this notion, the workers are "a category in relative decline with particular interests to defend but . . . no longer the rising group that constitutes the privileged adversary of the dominant class...
...Long ago Max Adler, the Austrian socialist theorist, had recognized "a new black-coated proletariat altogether unlike the petit bourgeoisie of Marx's day...
...The maldistribution of income in capitalist society is such that, by letting every citizen cast a dollar ballot in a "consumer democracy," the economy responds to the desires of the rich—who have more dollar "votes" than anyone else—rather than to those of the poor...
...First of all, the good society can be reached only when technology is so developed and all-sided that it can abolish poverty (otherwise we would only socialize hunger and need, which in turn would produce hunger and need, not justice...
...Moreover, in 1969 the TVA proposed an innovation in an important area of social need by coming forth with plans for an integrated new town and by pointing out that its comprehensive structure would make it much easier for the TVA to plan and finance such a project than could a private developer...
...to determine investment policy...
...THERE IS A TREND toward the separation of ownership and control and its bearing on social ownership...
...The Attlee government initiated some measures of this type, and various Italian governments have tried to use such techniques to promote the development of the South...
...The automobile is only one case in point...
...Smith saw three areas in which the state should intervene: to guard against invasion...
...118 If productivity increase eliminated particular jobs, then government action would create an economic environment in which new work would be forthcoming...
...And the surburbs would be ringed by freeways patrolled by lightly armored cars.7a So the government's discriminatory social policies have done much more than to exacerbate inequality...
...But if the management is supposed to serve wider public interest, it becomes a logical consequence of this conception that the appointed representatives of the public interests should control the management...
...Now that rational, plan-oriented managers have taken over from individualistic capitalists, they argued, it is no longer necessary to change the title to property...
...1, 28 So the fundamental tendencies of late-capitalist economies toward bigness and concentration will produce goods whose social costs often exceed their social benefits...
...Galbraith is optimistic on this count...
...It All Must Be Done Democratically THIS ONE CASE COULD BE DUPLICATED in every other area of social need, and , it points up the second socialist proposal for changing our institutional structure: that decisive investments must be democratically planned as well as financially socialized...
...This model has, of course, already been modified: wage levels are fixed through collective bargaining agreements overseen and encouraged by the state...
...He therefore moves from the plane of the pitiful to the plane of the tragic...
...But if the gains are to be permanent, if they are not to be reversed when a period of social innovation is followed by a swing back to capitalist normality, then there must be basic, structural changes...
...In this transformation," Marx said, "it is neither the immediate labor which man himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but the appropriation of his common productivity . . . in a word, the development of the socialized individual, which is the basic source of richness and production...
...But Lenin and Bukharin held that the trustification of the various national capitalisms would only make the international competition among them all the more bitter...
...Therefore, the society must shift resources from the privately profitable sector of the economy to the socially necessary...
...In other words, Marx's insight was partially validated and partially annulled...
...Given this situation, he continued, it was wrong to advocate that the state take over the big factories, if only because the socialists are not, in any case, going to be able to take over the state...
...Yet the various definitions of the term are not simply the result of intellectual "mistakes" but reflect attempts to adapt the emotional and rhetorical resonance of the word to specific historical conditions and, often enough, to an antisocialist purpose...
...42 But precisely this theory of the two stages of socialism was used by Joseph Stalin to justify murder and totalitarianism...
...34 A year later Carl Kaysen, another distinguished liberal economist, challenged Ackley's faith in devastating fashion: The interrelated set of questions involving urban renewal, urban planning and transportation planning raises questions that go right to the heart of the usual value assumptions of the economist...
...Perhaps the most sophisticated exposition of this theme is Rudolf Hilferding's analysis of finance capital in 1909 (Das Finanz Kapital [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1947...
...There would, surely, be a collective payment for these goods but the change in moral atmosphere created by such a new mode of distribution would be profound...
...53 For in Britain, as in America, private economic power seeks to veto democratic majorities and to make the state an instrument of private purposes as far as is possible...
...President Nixon echoed this thesis in his message on the environment in 1970 predicting that in "the longrange future-to 1980, 2000, and beyond-recycling of materials will become increasingly necessary not only for waste disposal but also to conserve resources...
...New York: International Publishers, 1966...
...And then there is a group within the new mass constituency of the collegeeducated which, because it asserts the traditional values of liberal culture in the midst of a technological revolution, is particularly aware of the insanity of production for production's sake and the dehumanization that accompanies it...
...The title of this article—"To Insure Domestic Tranquility"—is revealing...
...The decision to build a supersonic transport has so many consequences (noise, air traffic congestion, airport construction) that even if it were not a government-subsidized project, the public interest would have to be asserted...
...Worse, in carrying out these discriminatory policies, the federal programs did positive harm to those most in need...
...In advocating a vast extension of the social principle in economics, we should pay tribute to Adam Smith for having recognized the principle of social profitability in a great society...
...First, the recent experience of the continental social democrats confirms the tendency of the corporations to try to dominate, rather than obey, the government that is supposed to control them...
...97 As early as the turn of the century, the American Marxist Louis Boudin applied Kautsky's theory of "state socialism" which is discussed in note c to the United States and identified the very beginning of the phenomenon Galbraith described...
...16 The conclusion they come to is much more radical than that offered by people who simply denounce "educational racism"—or even propose separate but inferior college faculties for the children of the poor and the minorities...
...Warren G. Bennis, "Post-Bureaucratic Leadership," Trans-action, July-August 1969...
...They would profoundly improve and humanize the old order but would not yet constitute a new and revolutionary order...
...In one interpretation of socialist history, centralizers with an emphasis on state planning are counterposed to decentralists with a vision of 295 MICHAEL HARRINGTON cooperative production and workers' control...
...For every one of these contrasting, even contradictory versions of socialism bespeak an aspect of a many-sided reality...
...The rapid growth of productive capital [Marx wrote] brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social employments...
...Left to itself, the system creates a welfare state that provides some benefits for all yet favors the rich and discriminates against the deprived...
...It is quite right in arguing that production is not an end in itself— as capitalist society and its ideology of eternally increasing consumption insists...
...See also TVA, "Draft Study, Tellicoe Town" (mimeo...
...that all prices be treated as if they were independent of a planning decision...
...as long ago as 1966, the President's Automation Commission demonstrated that there were then 5 3 million public-service jobs in education, health services, beautification, and the like, that could provide decent employment for people displaced by such mechanization—and for millions of the underemployed and unemployed— which would vastly improve • the quality of the entire society...
...It might...
...In desert societies—including the American Southwest—water is so precious that it is money...
...Under such conditions, the council argued, business should be prepared to take a lower rate of return...
...68 [Emphasis added.] The ambiguity in Galbraith's position is that he never really follows up this insight except in fairly vague references to the gradual withering away of the "functionless stockholder...
...Just before the passage I have quoted on the realm of freedom, he wrote, "The actual wealth of society and the possibility 282 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA of a continued expansion of its process of reproduction do not depend upon the duration of surplus labor, but upon its productivity and the more or less fertile conditions of production under which it is performed...
...Economist, January 31, 1970...
...As the measure of value and means of circulation of products," he wrote in 1924, "money will continue to exist in socialist society until the dawn of that blessed second phase of communism of which we do not yet know whether it will be more than a pious wish similar to that for the Millennial Kingdom...
...it is clear that there is no simple meaningful sense in which the range of decisions can be left to market forces...
...But Nixon could not, of course, hint at why this was so: that the corporations, which had become conscience-stricken about pollution at the precise moment there was a public outcry and the possibility of punitive legislation, had themselves subverted previous efforts to clean up the atmosphere...
...It is not even necessary to become particularly visionary in responding to this, for the theory and practice of recent years has provided a basis for the socialist hope...
...For if this society somehow found a way to deal with poverty, racism, inequality, and unmet social needs, it would still be incapable of dealing with its own prosperity...
...It is also under constant attack by private power industry, which cannot tolerate this demonstration of how a government-chartered enterprise can be more efficient, and produce cheaper power, than the private sector...
...119...
...However this be done, the fundamental purpose of the reform is clear enough...
...John Strachey, the late British socialist theorist, thought that such a process of transforming "the social form taken by accumulation into a consciously set-aside fund" was the "essence of the transition to socialism...
...107...
...In a socialist society, the yield on an investment would be calculated so that actual cost would be known but there would be no automatic assumption that the use guaranteeing the highest return would receive priority...
...Particularly in the area of necessities no one should be required to choose between needs or to sacrifice them in order to get luxuries— and that is what money makes inevitable...
...They therefore have a cohesion, a social weight, in excess of their numbers...
...The National Commission on Urban Problems (chaired by the liberal economist Paul Douglas) recommended that the President and his Economic Advisers, the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury Department, and other major agencies of government be required to state what effect any major change in economic policy [e.g...
...In what follows there will be a "dialectical" tension...
...And these perverse appropriations were not miscalculations or the result of ill will, but expressions of the most basic values of the system itself...
...They were hardly enjoying affluence, yet they certainly exemplified a breakdown of the old market compulsions...
...303...
...Christian socialism...
...But this assumption, he cautions, is "never likely to be fulfilled...
...Now it is not true, as some conservatives think, that the Communist countries are the proof of Dostoevsky's prophecy...
...The increasing investment per worker who tends more and more sophisticated machines enables the individual to produce out of all proportion to his own physical powers...
...31 The day Mr...
...But socialists would now argue that the Smithian proportions have to be reversed since the private economy no longer finds it profitable to meet some of the most basic needs of the society...
...Jencks and Riesman, Academic Revolution, p. 175...
...Berle, Power, p. 211...
...we have come to realize that socialism is not the "inevitable" successor to capitalism and that, indeed, there can be successors at least as inhumane and reactionary as the worst capitalist society...
...Yet education, health, and personal problems are obviously antagonistic to commercialism, for these are spheres in which one should not stint in order to cut costs and increase the return...
...Thus: 242 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA • in 1962 the value of a single tax deduction to the 20 percent of Americans with the highest incomes was worth twice as much as all the monies spent on public housing for the one-fifth who were poorest, 1 and this figure does not even take into account the government support for below-market rates of interest to build suburbia...
...For though Marx clearly opposed the utopias based on small groups of producers and a backward technology, though he quite rightly understood that the hope for socialism lay in the working class winning control over the highly centralized means of capitalist production, in his ultimate image of socialism he had much in common with his factional opponents...
...108...
...In the following attempt to make a rough outline of socialist institutions, the point will be to describe how the contradictions of capitalist society can be resolved so that the needs of the people, as they themselves democratically determine them, are met...
...Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1967...
...And these demands of sophisticated workers in advanced industries did not concern wages as much as the democratization of working conditions...
...121 Socialists should propose to go well beyond such a change and eventually to challenge the principle of money itself...
...The most humane of technocrats cannot cope with the basic causes of these antisocial policies, if only because they are located in an entrenched and possessive sys* This essay is confined to developing the case for socialism in the United States...
...In 1969, Spiro Agnew wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the report of the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy which concluded that the nation should spend public funds in building 10 new cities for 2 million people each and 10 new towns each for 100,000 citizens...
...I will show that our affluence is so misshapen that it does not even meet the needs of the majority of the people...
...The ghettos would become "places of terror with widespread crime, perhaps entirely out of police control during nighttime hours...
...The new middle class or group of propertyless managers, Boudin said, was in favor of regulating the conflicts and crises within capitalism and therefore disposed to state intervention, but it would never accept a radical transformation of the society itself...
...Ibid., p. 202...
...Philosophie de la Misere [Paris: Collections 1018, 1964], pp...
...They assumed that if planning were to be stable, it must be Marxist...
...Manpower Report, 1969, p. 235, Table E-8...
...they sincerely believe that the common good is maximized by keeping the allocation of resources as private as possible...
...Yet long after Stalin died, and more than half a century after the Bolshevik Revolution, the "temporary" institutions of anti-freedom are still basic to Russian society...
...Paul Foot, The Role of Harold Wilson, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 189...
...it is a trend within the system itself and cannot be corrected without sweeping change...
...What really concerns the poor, this argument continues, is not the rise or fall of their relative share of affluence but the steady increase in their absolute standard of living...
...In time, the Marxists became dominant in the SPD and the Lassallian formulation was dropped...
...103...
...It may even be possible that mankind cannot bear too much happiness...
...This decision can be made only by government and must be taken only as a result of a democratic process...
...When he signed the Air Quality Act of 1967, President Johnson pretended that he had been given "new power to stop pollution before it chokes our children and strangles our elderly—before it drives us indoors or into the hospital...
...And while significant reforms—often socialist in inspiration—have modified some of the extreme forms of capitalist injustice, the post-Keynesian welfare state still allows huge corporations to make decisions of fundamental social importance without consulting either those who are affected or those who work for them...
...The Saint-Simonians emphasized rational and centralized planning of investment through a central bank and objected to capitalism because it allowed parasitic coupon-clippers to share in the wealth of the producers...
...Fabianism with its overly-optimistic assumption that all acts 289 MICHAEL HARRINGTON of collectivism are a step toward the good society...
...They can flare into a Jacquerie or even provide the troops for a Mao or a Ho Chi Minh...
...marriages are made and broken because of it...
...287 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Notes a SOCIALISM is one of the most abused words of the modern age...
...On the one hand, the apologists for Communist totalitarianism have made much of the argument that Russia and the other Communist states must be truly socialist since the means of production are nationalized...
...Quoted in Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, p. 56...
...3 Skewed Priorities and Social Consequences IT WOULD BE a mistake to think Washington discriminated only against the poor...
...86 This development, which Marx could hardly have anticipated in detail, can be understood through a Marxist analysis...
...Theodore Roszak argues that this phenomenon is so serious, it marks the appearance of a "counter culture," that is, a radical departure from the mainstream assumptions of the West since the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century...
...But at this point the process takes place only for the profit and enjoyment of the capitalists...
...With the means of scientific manipulation developed since Dostoevsky's time, advanced societies could, in the name of absolute justice, act out the injustices which he perceived but in a far more efficient technological way than he could have foreseen...
...Although public spending on education in the sixties increased at a rate faster than that of the Gross National Product,'2 those Americans in the most desperate straits were not reached...
...Quoted by Georges Lefranc Aubier, in Jaures et le Socialisme des Intellectuels [Paris: Augier-Montaigne, 1968], p. 30...
...209 ff...
...This has not kept socialists from participating in every one of these struggles, nor will it in the future...
...For the socialists in control of the government will follow full-employment policies that will yield a growing fund for social spending and, in any case, the corporate executives will see that it is to their interest to observe the broad priorities established by the state...
...His profoundly democratic realism led him to argue that the good society would be fashioned, not by the dictates of some intellectual's plan, but according to the needs and IV 253 MICHAEL HARRINGTON creativity of the people themselves...
...Housing is a crucial case in point...
...The class struggle within capitalist society, he said, could lead to socialism--or to barbarism...
...Only a vibrant movement of the people can do that...
...Ibid., 3:353...
...And who would want to ride a subway simply because it is free...
...Second, this potential can be realized only if •there is a political movement of conscious and aroused men and women capable of controlling that technology...
...Management and Corporations, 1985, Melvin Anshen and George Bach, eds...
...It has been proposed that the government give itself the right to act as if it were a majority stockholder in all major industries, but without taking legal title...
...1925...
...For Socialization of Investment FIRST OF ALL—and this is urgent, practical politics within the present confines of capitalism as well as a step toward socialism—investment must be socialized...
...And this means, as Marx understood way back in 1845, invidious incentives...
...But it is perhaps even more important to understand the degree to which change affects not simply the structure of the economy but the human spirit as well...
...Andrew Shonfeld, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 115...
...Like a private corporation, the TVA is able to accumulate capital for future investment out of present income...
...162-68...
...but it would not engage in the actual planning of individual projects...
...For there were ambiguities within ambiguities when it came to imagining the just society of the future...
...Taking property as, in A. A. Berle's phrase, a "packet of permissions," 55 what is proposed is not a sudden, wholesale take-over by the state but a process that progressively abolishes all these private permissions and that substitutes democratic decisions for them...
...That, it said, might lead to "severe disruption of many of the nation's largest industries...
...We predict," the article in Fortune reporting on the survey said, "that nothing that has happened since the 1930s will inject more confusion, sow more dissension and conflict and threaten more chaos than the effect of these pressures [for meeting social needs] as they mount in the early years of the 1970s...
...Why does Marx suggest in the German Ideology that communism will eliminate all division of labor...
...Just as in more impoverished countries, the problem was to get the most out of resources that were not sufficient to satisfy the needs of all the people...
...The mature Marxian concept . . . appears idealistic and optimistic " (Herbert Marcuse, in Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm, ed...
...State control or ownership of the means of production where the state is not thoroughly democratic is not socialism and is much further removed from socialism than . . . capitalism...
...Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960–], 2:519...
...How to interpret the facts about this new group is still a highly controversial matter, but the facts themselves are pretty clear...
...For "the Bureau of Public Roads has hardly been noted for its devotion to the natural beauty of the countryside...
...The rational and natural necessity thus appears as a blind average...
...The Manhattan Project, which created the atom bomb, is an obvious example...
...But this supposedly free choice is, as I demonstrated in •the discussion of external diseconomies, quite often engineered by advertising and in some of the most important areas of life—such as the care, maintenance, and creation of cities—and so does not provide tolerable options for the majority of the people...
...The poetic demand to do away with machines, so compelling to young people who have never run them or realized their own dependence upon them, comes to seem extremely reactionary...
...What alternate decisionmechanisms are available...
...It also makes people angry when they compare what they have with the bountiful pretensions of the society...
...In the class theory of laissez faire, ownership allowed a man to utilize existing fixed capital resources...
...I do not mean to suggest that there is a Platonic essence of socialism that can serve as a panacea for all problems...
...In September 1969 the Yankelovich polling organization surveyed a representative sample of the chief executives of the 500 largest corporations and 50 largest banks It concluded that there was a "coming conflict in business discipline" because of the contradiction between social need and private investment...
...Today, however, precisely because capitalism has moderated the tendency toward periodic crises, it throws up a new form of the Marxian contradiction—for private decision-making is no longer capable of regulating a technology whose social consequences become more and more destructive...
...But when the Attlee government nationalized industry in 1945, there were no provisions for workers' control...
...Roszak asks, . . . how ready are the workers to disband whole sectors of the industrial apparatus where this proves necessary in order to achieve ends other than 278 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA efficient productivity and high consumption...
...groups coalesce around problems and reforms when new issues arise.77 In May 1968, in France, adult militancy in the general strike was concentrated in precisely these advanced areas of the economy, and the key demands concerned the organization of work rather than simple wage increases...
...This marks, Galbraith suggests, a major new source of power, since society always pays a particular deference to its most scarce resource...
...The argument over this issue has supplied the Sino-Soviet dispute with many charges and countercharges...
...It has succeeded in sharply reducing the cost of care while improving the service...
...Right can never be higher than the economic level (Gestaltung) and the cultural development of society which determine it...
...and Marx, to complicate matters, borrowed from both lines of though.g As time 262 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA went on, it became clear that the very complexity of a modern economy required that social property function within a context controlled by the state...
...In short, responses to this new social stratum come from every point on the political compass...
...Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 3:222 ff., "The Second International...
...By financ243 MICHAEL HARRINGTON ing the flight of the middle class from the metropolis and helping industry locate in the suburbs, the central city has been allowed to rot—with federal encouragement...
...new groups emerged and, in the period after World War II, the industrial working class became a declining percentage of the population in the advanced nations...
...Under contemporary capitalism, it is assumed that private corporations, by responding to the demands of individual consumers, will channel investments into those projects that actually satisfy popular taste...
...in 1969, the Wall Street Journal reported, the $2.5 billion for urban freeways was a far greater subsidy to car owners who daily fled the central city than was the $175 million subsidy to mass transit, 2 and Richard Nixon's 1970 Budget continued this perverse allocation of resources by providing public transportation with only 6 percent of the funds assigned to highways...
...73 I think not...
...It is a fact that the ruling classes during the thirties believed in and acted upon preposterous, unscientific ideas (they cut expenses and tolerated mass unemployment in a depression) while the masses, for all their lack of formal education, had a superior instinct for what should be done...
...Even so, Dostoevsky did brilliantly intuit the logic and psychology of totalitarianism, the way in which the promise of total cooperation and consensus can become the excuse for total coercion and terror...
...It has, I believe, already provided part of the mass 276 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA basis for the McCarthy and Robert Kennedy campaigns of 1968 and for the movement to end the war in Vietnam...
...But in imagining this future it is obviously not enough to invent "ideal" solutions...
...For, as I noted earlier, Marx himself had understood as early as in the 1840s that the attempt to base socialism on an economy of scarcity would lead to new forms of exploitation and repression, not to socialism...
...Louis Boudin, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1915), pp...
...Indeed, the French Communist party, perhaps the most rigidly Stalinist group in the West, disciplined Roger Garaudy and removed him from the Central Committee for having argued, among other things, that the workers had to make an alliance with the new strata of technicians and intellectuals in industry...
...This problem is not a consequence of wrong-headed choices on the part of muddled executives...
...122 And as long as access to goods and pleasures is rationed according to the possession of money, there is a pervasive venality, an invitation to miserliness and hostility to one's neighbor...
...Through science and its application to industry, one man can do as much as a hundred, or a thousand men used to do...
...The Port Authority in New York, like many of the nationalized industries in Europe, shows that public ownership in and of itself, especially within the framework of an economy still basically capitalist, is no guarantee that a corporation will follow social priorities...
...These new towns would have their own schools, shops, clinics and hospitals, their own light industry and recreational facilities...
...SO AS THE SEVENTIES BEGAN-t0 cite one striking example—the President of the United States told the nation: "Based on present trends it is quite possible 250 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA that by 1980 the increase in the sheer number of cars in densely populated areas will begin outrunning the technological limits of our capacity to reduce pollution from the internal combustion engine...
...Is it not enough," Moore wrote, "for the proletarian revolution to abolish the division of labor between wage workers and capitalists...
...Moreover, if the proletariat failed to develop as Marx believed it would, there may now be a totally unexpected agency of social change emerging in the West...
...For, as Marx documented in his brilliant history of the bourgeois struggle to lengthen the working day and week, the limit that Massachusetts law set upon the labor of children in the nineteenth century defined the normal working day for an adult in the seventeenth century...
...Such parties will not be poisoned by the greed of class or caste.81 268 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA Taxation as Social Policy VII BUT BEFORE TURNING TO THESE EXHILARATING if ultimate possibilities, I must try to complete the description of a more immediate socialist program...
...The 1969 Report of the Council of Economic Advisers provides candid documentation of this pattern...
...London: Allen & Unwin, n. d.], p. 262...
...THE SOCIALIZATION OF PRIVATE WEALTH remains therefore a central goal...
...For the continental social democrats have almost all adopted the idea of a "social market economy" in which the state controls but does not own the decisive means of production...
...But in the particulars of this or that conflict, each increment of progress can be better structured if it is related to the vision of a qualitative change in the human condition...
...75 Among the most cruelly used people in the affluent society there seems to be arising a new sense of dignity (conservatives mistake it for laziness), which refutes the old motivations now that brutal compulsions are no longer in force...
...In France in 1970, the Radical party under the urging of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber adopted a policy "to abolish the hereditary transmission of property in the means of production...
...in the capitalist and communist systems, the subject of free time is subordinated to the same norms and powers that rule the realm of necessity...
...the Owenite stress on cooperation as against competition...
...Housing is only one example of how the welfare state observes the priorities of maldistributed wealth even when it attempts to serve the common good...
...In 1967 Senator Ribicoff noted that the various existing programs don't even reach people with incomes of $8,000 a year.22 And in December 1969, three years of inflation later, Fortune magazine reported that "the shortage of acceptable shelter that has been afflicting the poor and the black is reaching to the white middle class and even to quite affluent families...
...For one thing, all of those "mistaken" interpretations of socialism, the vicious as well as the benevolent, make some historical sense...
...Functionless Stockholders—Who Needs Them...
...If that were made free, there would unquestionably be a large increase in the use 286 WHY WE NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA of transit facilities, since people would be much more likely to visit one another, to go on outings, etc...
...Here, then, are three kinds of programs that move in the direction of a socialist democratization of economic power: • the socialization of investment...
...New York Times, July 22, 1968...
...Nevertheless, Marquand's point introduces an important caveat for any movement attempting democratic planning, and his rule of thumb—that the absolute total of private consumption should rise while its share of the national income falls because more resources are allocated to social purposes—is a good one...
...Hilferding was quite explicit about the ability of a modified capitalist society to plan: "The question arises as to the limits of cartelization...
...after the all-sided development of the individual and his productivity has been roused and when the springs of social wealth flow, only then can society really go beyond the narrow bourgeois vision and inscribe on its banner: from each according to his talents, to each according to his needs...
...to retain profits...
...A socialist formulation of this principle would be along the lines of Jean Jaures' 1896 analysis in the Revue Socialiste...
...In addition, this change in class structure has been mistakenly identified so that both the mass media and the pop sociologists see it primarily as a matter of age...
...Ibid., p. xiii...
...If, as Stans and Nixon himself have insisted, we will need a new city of 250,000 every month between 1970 and 2000, just to house the increase in population, their timid program is doomed to failure even before it begins...
...Man, he said, cannot be so completely refashioned, and those who claim to do so will, in the name of nonviolence and brotherhood, be driven to force and dictatorship...
...As Jerome C. Pickard of the Urban Land Institute has commented, the concentrated character of future urban regional development will place a great strain on regional resources: with water supply, air, and the land itself...
...Quoted in C. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols...
...and it is impossible for a government committed to maximizing the autonomy of those corporations to take the drastic action we require...
...There is, as Nathan Glazer commented on the phenomenon, "a massive change in values which makes various kinds of work which used to support families undesirable to a large number of potential workers today...
...Even under liberal administrations, the government has been much more solicitous about the comfort of the rich than the shelter of the poor...
...And not—the point is crucial—because there is a conspiracy of the affluent, but as a "natural consequence of the division of society into unequal social classes...
...Unlike the inhabitants of the counter culture who usually come from affluent homes and live off the wealth of the society, most people still have unsatisfied material needs...
...He not only argued that the increasing productivity of machine production would make it possible for society progressively to reduce labor time...
...to distribute profits...
...The society would indeed have to spend socially in order to buy back its own incredible output...
...Essays in Persuasion, (London: Macmillan, 1931...
...They must be open and made inviting to people of all races...
...But it was a group of radical priests in France who were most candid...
...Yet the government will fail in its commitments unless it creates a new industry...
...9. National Commision on Urban Problems, Building the American City: Report 1968, p. 153...
...When an impoverished economy is socialized, he said, "want is made general, and with want the need to struggle for necessities must begin again and all of the old crap will be reproduced...
...If the state owns the means of production, we must then ask, who owns the state...
...The welfare state, for all its value, tends to provide benefits in inverse relationship to human need...
...4. White House Conference on Civil Rights, Report and Recommendations of the Council, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 67...
...At this point, let me say, a candid admission is in order...
...They cannot, as under Communism, be the very antithesis of it...
...True, they were saved from unemployment...
...In 1818 Robert Owen was already speculating that "New scientific power will soon render human labour of little avail in the creation of wealth...
...The simple act of making "income" on the tax form equal actual income of the tax payer would be a major contribution to social justice...
...Relating this to a change in motivation, Keynes foresaw a time when society would adopt a scheme of taxation which allows the intelligence and determination and executive skill of the financiers and the entrepreneurs, et hoc genus imne [and all that sort] (who are certainly so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present) to be harnessed to the community on reasonable terms of reward...
...101...
...It was this last fact, and not a quarrel over price theory or the role of the market, that led the Soviets to make their imperialist invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...In practice it is not that simple...
...as the National Commission on Civil Disorders (the "Riot Commission" of 1968) computed the figures, during roughly the same 30-year period the government helped to construct over 10 million housing units for home builders, i.e...
...All commodities cost something to produce and if the individual does not pay for them directly, then some one does indirectly...
...6. National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City: Report, 1968, (Washington, D.C.: GPO), p. 67...
...8° Trotsky made much the same point, though in typically soaring Marxist language...
...Bukharin, incidentally, used Kautsky's theory of "state socialism" to define a form of capitalist exploitation in the course of his analysis...
...If social241 MICHAEL HARRINGTON ists were arrogantly to dismiss these battles as irrelevant, they would play no role when masses of their fellow citizens turned left...
...The Russians pioneered in the establishment of this new class system, and other East Europeans copied their model...
...under totalitarian control (Orwell's fear...
...255 MICHAEL HARRINGTON IN MAKING THIS DISTINCTION between the immediate transition to socialism and the final goal, I am using a necessary if somewhat dangerous idea...
...In order to release these surging forces of production, a new mode of production becomes a practical necessity...
...Charles Schultz, "Budget Alternatives After Vietnam," in Agenda for the Nation, Kermit Gordon, ed...
...In the period before 1914 there was a surge of syndicalist militancy among the workers...
...12° In part at least, this soaring vision is an expression of that dangerous messianism I described earlier...
...they wanted, as the title of one collection put it, to go "Beyond Left and Right...
...Another was the protracted postponement of entry into the labor market on the part of the liberally-educated children of the affluent...
...Dostoevsky argued that messianic socialism, the pretence of a total earthly salvation analogous to Christian redemption, would lead to totalitarianism...
...Socialists, then, must be in the forefront of every fight to defend and extend the welfare state, even as they criticize its inability to solve fundamental problems and even as they propose alternatives to it...
...Gilbert Mathieu, "Revolution ou voeu pieux," Le Monde, February 7, 1970...
...These nontechnicians are the most visible representatives of the "generation gap" that has been so widely discussed in Europe and America...
...Putting a Limit on Profit PROFIT IS ANOTHER FUNCTION OF PROPERTY that must be subjected to social control...
...This means that there will indeed be an ever-present danger of inefficiency, dullness, poor service, and all the rest...
...Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969), p. 149...
...MEW, 25:828...
...The second goal cannot be achieved unless the spirit of the "associationist," cooperative wing of the socialist movement finds new embodiment...
...In areas such as housing and transportation, this program obviously requires much more than simply the spending of money...
...56 The Brooks panel made another important point about technological forecasting: that it must be carried out by an independent agency and not by an interested bureaucracy...
...Industry was quite ready to maximize the advantages of production for the domestic market rather than to become the efficient exporter that the government urged them to be...
...There is some experience to go on...
...Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Contemporary Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Harvest edition, 1967), p. 264...
...Girod de L'Ain, in Le Monde Hebdomadaire [weekly], October 30-November 5, 1969...
...These are particularly associated with giant industries and, as one moderate economist put it, "seem to be far more prevalent than external economies...
...Main Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp...
...See also Daniel Bell, "Notes on Postindustrial Society," Public Interest, Winter 1967, p. 27...
...Even more important, it must be understood that there is no institutional reform which, in and of itself, can "guarantee" genuine popular participation...
...In this way socialization will be part of a historic process rather than a sudden and drastic leap to new forms of property...
...making sure that the sheer number of cars would increase...
...As Theodore Kheel has described the Port Authority: It has preferred to grow huge—and hugely profitable—by catering to motorists...
...David Marquand, "The Politics of Deprivation," Encounter, April 1969...
...The conditions of their working lives make them susceptible to the appeal for democratic planning and a politics of participation...
...For both of these very important trends are part of the history of antisocialist "socialism" which the Manifesto began to chronicle in 1848...
...The privileges conferred upon the new Soviet elite have been institutionalized, and they persist to this day, long after the economic rationalization for them has disappeared...
...112...
...For Marx, the joint stock company which separated management from ownership was a kind of collectivization within capitalism and introduced new elements of rationality into the capitalist process...
...National Committee on Urban Growth Policy, The New City, p. 53...
...The latter Marx saw as a stalemate, "the common ruin of the contending classes," which would keep the contradictions of society from being resolved on a new and higher plane...
...Yet it does emphasize the fact that federal planning and Congressional appropriation could be one way of directing production for use rather than profit...
...Obviously enough," the Journal said, "the tax reformers' chief aim is not more money for Uncle Sam but more 'justice' as among individual taxpayers...
...71 In other words, social property was allowed to be as much like private property as possible...
...33 There, in the example of the automobile, is the essence of the problem: it is foolish to think that giant industries will voluntarily desist from the profitable spoliation of the environment...
...For social reasons, as Jaures suggested, the people could decide in favor of a project with a low return, or even subsidize a loss...
...John Hughes, "The Increase in Inequality," New Statesman (London), November 8, 1968...
...Karl Kautsky, who prided himself on his Marxian orthodoxy, argued that accounting, and even interest, would exist in socialist undertakings, and he opposed the notion that the omnipotent state would simply command the economy to produce this or that good...
...Beyond that there begins the true realm of freedom where the development of man's powers becomes an end in itself, a realm which can only bloom on the basis of the realm of necessity...
...Almost half the liberal arts graduates no longer find posts in teaching and are not prepared for any other activity...
...In California there is a private medical plan run by the Kaiser company...
...But isn't it an act of leftist nostalgia to indict American society in this way...
...Quoted in Kautsky, Labour Revolution, p. 267...
...81-88...
...MEW, 32:553...
...If the notion of planned capitalism was not a shock to the Marxists, the idea that it would be more than a passing phase was...
...But this is to miss the enormous social gain that would occur if society were to make all the fundamentals of life free...
...158 ff...
...Technology also has to be monitored...
...WHAT MARX UNDERSTOOD, however, and Nietzsche did not was that the application of science and technology make it possible—even necessary—to change the very nature of work...
...If the problems outlined at the beginning of this essay are to be recognized...
...Theodore H. White, The Making of a President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 365...
...Conservatives may be forced to recognize the magnitude of the urban crisis, but they cannot solve it within their own economic calculus...
...84 Of all the reforms proposed in this essay, the use of taxes to increase justice and equality should be the most politically promising...
...32 251 MICHAEL HARRINGTON In his 1970 message on the environment, Richard Nixon confirmed that the Wall Street Journal had been right and Johnson wrong...
...And even those who do succeed often require tremendous sacrifice from their family and friends in order to develop their genius...
...For the control of the means of production and of wealth is not simply economic power...
...Martin's Press, 1963), pp...
...There are two fundamental socialist aims: to solve the basic economic problems of humanity and to liberate man By and large the first goal is possible only on the basis of a highly developed, concentrated technology and with national planning...
...So it is that in the sixties a rather optimistic study of social mobility in the United States found that there is an "oversupply" of youth at the bottom of the economic structure: 13 the Manpower Report of the President, 1969, reported that the unprecedented recent boom had clearly revealed "economic expansion alone was insufficient to employ many people who had been bypassed in the general advance because of inexperience, lack of skills, and cultural deprivation...
...nor would totalitarian bureaucrats ruthlessly sacrifice the present needs of the masses in order to build up heavy industry and a war machine, as under Communism...
...Emphasis added...
...b HAROLD MACMILLAN WAS ONE of the first conservatives to come out in favor of planning—and was called a "socialist in disguise...
...Only if it understands that labor is the best-organized and most powerful force for domestic social change and if it works with the unions, can it be part of a new, and perhaps radical, majority...
...A strict system of licensing the permission to build a factory could work toward this end...
...The Action Program of the Dubcek leadership held that overegalitarianism has become one of the chief obstacles of intensive economic development and the improvement of living standards...
...the employment of tax policy as an instrument of social justice...
...Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, and the Guild socialists on the other...
...49 More recently, John Kenneth Galbraith has suggested that the "functionless stockholder" is becoming an anachronism and A. A. Berle, a pioneer in the empirical studies of the ownership-control pattern, echoed Sidney Webb: "Transition from private collectivism to state collectivism is the easiest thing in the world where [as is the case under the corporate system] collectivism is already well organized for production...
...The realm of freedom [Marx held] begins first with the fact that work ceases to be determined by need and external expediency...
...Ibid., p. 53...
...the optimistic generalizations come from men as counterposed as Keynes and Trotsky...
...Federal fiscal policy, the Commission said in summarizing the prevailing reform attitude, could supply the deficiencies in aggregate demand for any rate of technological innovation...
...Fortune, September 1969, p. 95...
...Peasants are dispersed, parochial and pre-modern...
...For Proudhon common ownership would simply "substitute collective man for the individual in social functions, in production, exchange, and the family," and he advocated "a system of free credit that would make a decentralized economy possible...
...Perhaps the most surprising recent addition to this tradition is the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...I quote extensively, not because it comes from Marx, but because I think it remains an accurate perception of the most desirable possibility of social change...
...105 I take this view seriously, even though it expresses the attitude of only a small number of disaffiliated young people...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
