Roots of the Socialist Dilemma

...For having declared my belief in the legitimacy of the basic institutions of socialism, I must now declare my further conviction that radicalism, insofar as it depends on a commitment to the limitless perfectibility of man, is an inadequate guide either for the construction of the society that those institutions must undergird, or for the definition of the nature of the human beings they must serve...

...But does this not conflict with the vision of socialism as an organic society, one that applies the collective wisdom and judgment of the community in establishing norms of behavior, shared moral standards, a unifying vision of the good life...

...I begin a discussion of these aspects by returning again to the wariness with regard to political behavior that I have already singled 468 out as typically "conservative...

...4 2 Monthly Review, October 1963, cited in HowardSherman, Radical Political Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1972), chap...

...The radical views life as an epic, a quest, to be consummated in the future...

...It would be fatuous to claim that the historical evidence is clearly on the side of radicalism...

...For among those individuals who are, so to speak, the fathers of the socialist faith, there is a visible crise de foi...

...Now what is it that conservatives are wary about...

...Yet, however open to question, this is not where I find the radical belief lacking...

...Not surprisingly, nothing like unanimity marks the present socialist debate as to how to avoid the problems I have mentioned...

...Thus planning may well concentrate on the critical determination of income levels, leaving the socialist factory managers thereafter to compete for the purchasing power whose original distribution has received a conscious social approval...

...This conservative caution goes beyond the obvious warnings with respect to the behavior of the political leaders of socialism...

...Essentially because it maintains that private ownership, under the dynamic conditions of capitalism, constitutes a direct barrier to the widest possible self-direction of man...

...Yet even—or should I say especially—in the midst of the tactical decisions, uncertainties, and compromises that political struggle must bring, socialism needs some sense of its ultimate objectives, some philosophical counterpart of a magnetic North, past which its compass needle may swing but to which it will return...

...The appropriate word for that faith is, of course, radical, in its primary sense of penetrating to the roots...

...Here I con fess to a certain discomfort...

...It will then be seen that we can use the market as a planning mechanism for the attainment of radical goals, provided that we intervene at one critical juncture of the process, namely where incomes are set and demand is initially created...

...But here too I have an answer that may save the day...

...For unless I am mistaken, much of the unease that underlies the socialist mood stems from the unexamined implications of what it takes to be the radical view of man...

...To the radical, intent on perfecting man, norms tend to be hortatory and demanding...

...What are to be the bounds of freedom...

...how to adduce political participation without manipulation —these are problems that confront every advanced society and that have found solutions in none...

...Thus the immediate crisis of socialism appears in a widespread uncertainty 'as how to manage the societies that socialism will inherit or that it is fast at work building...

...Although there are many conservative philosophies, all are marked by an explicit distrust of the motives and capacities of men when they engage in political action...

...But liberate him from what...

...What I want to examine now is the relevance of the radical faith itself to the crisis of socialism...

...I do notquarrel with this contention but only propose to push the idea of "market planning" to its logical conclusion within the framework of a socialist society...

...Such an acquiescence requires more than a pietistic affirmation for socialism...

...Behind the hesitation and ambivalence of its social visions are the conflicts in its conceptions of man himself...

...Mental illness is no longer the occasion for ridicule and punishment...

...For I do not think it is merely a romantic yearning of our age that makes it discover in primitive cultures a wholeness and psychological security whose absence we feel so keenly in our own...

...Our age has encountered with shocking force the problems inherent in two processes of world history—on the one hand, the cumulative addition to our technological capabilities...

...Thus, starting from many different vantage points, these critics concur that something is missing from the traditional definition of socialism as a society that can be characterized simply in terms of the public ownership of the means of production and the presence of planning...

...However purified of apologetics, there remains a tincture of regret in conservatism...

...But in the calmer setting of the Western world, where that most subversive of all activities—reflection—is still tolerated or even encouraged, one discovers a pervasive unease...

...A society in which less than 2 percent of all family units own some 80 percent of its corporate assets is, from the standpoint of a philosophy that seeks the widest possible individual autonomy, as anachronistic and indefensible as the societies of feudalism or antiquity, where tiny fractions of the population enjoyed the privileges of their social orders...

...By all means...

...Is the goal of socialism a society that will encourage the freest expression of individuality in art, in sexual and social relations, in political thought and act...

...We shall return later to the so-called conservative skepticism with regard to political behavior...

...In the present case, as in the former, I wish only to stress the relevance of the "conservative" view of man in locating a psychobiological base that may provide a more secure foundation for socialist thought than that offered by the radical faith in human perfectibility...

...Perhaps even more important is the question that this view raises with respect to the collective morale, the sense of shared well-being that socialism also aims to achieve...

...It is with some misgiving that I offer these counsels as being relevant for socialism toROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST DILEMMA day...

...Its most vulnerable aspect clearly lies in its initial premise: that man is perfectible and capable of moral improvement by conscious design...

...Hence I shall say nothing more about the substance of the contemporary socialist unease insofar as it concerns the search for institutions...

...Less than ten years ago, Paul M. Sweezy, perhaps the leading American Marxian economist, declared that "The differentia specifica of socialism as compared with capitalism is public ownership of the means of production...

...In the hectic atmosphere of the newly founded socialist nations—China, Cuba, Chile, the African socialist states—this crisis is submerged by the struggle to install and manage a new form of society against immense obstacles...

...Now I cannot hope, in this brief space, to elucidate a problem of such vast dimensions and ancient lineage as the question, What is man...

...That is why the radical embraces socialism boldly and eagerly, in contrast to the defensive posture so characteristic of the conservative who chooses those institutions most likely to buffer and dampen the potentially dangerous proclivities of the political animal...

...Here the focus of attention turns away from the problem of individuality and spontaneity to the opposite question of the norms and values that socialism should incorporate...

...But I have no neat formulas or definitions to replace it with...

...It is an uncertainty concerning the nature of the social existence ROBERT L. HEILBRONER to which socialism aspires...

...ROBERT L. HEILBRONER To the extent that radicalism sees in every instance of human misbehavior—in every instance of criminality, laziness, amorality, political disaffection—a social fault, it erects a vision of man that invites an indefinite degree of social correction...

...THIS is a view with profound relevance for the radical reconstruction of society...

...Without that, or some qualified version of it, socialism is nothing but a mockery, a swindle of bureaucrats and intellectuals reaching out for power...

...During the long years in which that effort must be made, considerations such as mine may seem remote, almost diversionary...

...Torture, not too long ago publicly offered for the delectation of the spectator, is now conducted in shame and secrecy...

...I have entirely ignored the practical problems of achieving a socialism that combines the indispensable elements of economic structure we have discussed, along with the political and social essentials of a good society...

...Let me give a few examples of this unease...

...As we ordinarily use both terms, these two words express conflicting judgments regarding the political capabilities of man...

...NOW LET ME ADVANCE a second argument in support of the traditional institutional definition of socialism—an argument that also stems from the radical commitment to individual and collective self-realization...

...The answer lies not in the idea of perfectibility as such but in certain human attributes to which the criterion of perfectibility does not apply and to which the radical creed therefore pays no heed...

...It is the thought that even men who have "everything" cannot be trusted to act well...

...This involves the painful admission that perfectibility is not a process that can proceed indefinitely...

...I am aware of a grain of truth in these charges...

...To the radical it seems to be only a fear that the masses will throw off their habits of subservience and rise against their masters...

...There may be other means of circumventing the bureaucratic incubus of central planning, but that is not my concern here...

...Essentiallythis is a premise beyond empirical demonstration...

...If one member of every pair of identical twins born in the ghetto and the suburbs could be switched at birth, as in fairy stories, does anyone doubt that the subsequent social histories of those twins would reflect their changed environments at least as much as their unchanged endowments...

...In a word, men who are enthralled by the ideology of capitalism do not see, and cannot understand, the difference between the undeniable contribution made to production by the physical artifacts of capital, and the claims made on that production in the name of the private "ownership" of these artifacts...

...Why does socialism insist on the public ownership of productive wealth...

...WHAT IS the weakness of radicalism, then, if we accept its faith in the capacity for human improvement...

...IT MAY WELL BE, as bitter experience has shown, that socialism will destroy this form of privilege only to replace it with another...

...I have kept until the very end the proper word to describe a faith that includes a strong belief in the limited perfectibility of man and a recognition that man is more complex, obscure, and defiant than the idea of perfectibility alone suggests...

...Whatever man's inherent capacity for evil, I feel reasonably secure in believing that the realized and overt expressions of that evil owe more to nurture than to nature...

...We have faced, to a degree never before experienced in history, a wholly unequal contest between our ability to control the physical environment and thus to alter the setting of society, and our inability to control the political and social repercussions to which these environmental changes give rise...

...In a word, the conservative sees that man, at the very center of his being, is "free" in the sense of being unpredictable and untamable...

...Indeed, a telling attack can be mounted against the socialist embrace of planning by conservative economists who point out that the much-maligned market is actually a form of "planning" more conducive to individual autonomy than that of any central planning board...

...It is a statement of faith—as is also the contrary assertion that man possesses a propensity for evil that will express itself despite all efforts to repress or expunge it...

...These considerations make it clear, I trust, that I believe in the relevance and legitimacy of the now much-questioned institutionaldefinition of socialism as a society in which the ownership of productive resources has been removed from private hands and in which rational planning has replaced the blind play of an unsupervised distribution of individual buying power...

...This is not a mere trick of words...

...In direct contrast, radicalism rests its faith precisely in the ability of men and women to put their motives and capabilities to effective and morally laudable political use...

...From allthat is ancient as well as all that is archaic...

...If so, what boundaries should he choose...

...I DO NOT call attention to the specter of unease that is haunting socialism in a mocking vein...

...It is quite enough, however, to maintain that it does not contradict the belief in some degree of moral and social plasticity for man...

...indeed, that is why I have used quotation marks so often around the word "conservatism...

...Since I have used the word "radicalism" to describe the idea of humanity that rests on perfectibility, let me, for the moment, use the word "conservative" to indicate these missing aspects of human experience...

...Until socialists know the nature of the society they seek, it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine the institutional means best suited for the future...

...4 DISSENT, October 1971, p. 461...

...What constraints and boundaries does it ordain for men...

...There have been changes in human behavior in the Western world (where the effort to perfect man has been largely concentrated) whose importance we may overlook in our appalled recognition of the extent to which evil still flourishes...

...Men are dangerous political animals because there is an inner core that remains beyond the reach of reason, deaf to the counsels of morality, indifferent to the best-intentioned policies...

...What is deficient in the radical view...

...Thus even in the throes of political turmoil, I ask whether it can be detrimental for the cause of socialism to consider and reconsider the nature of man...

...Before this technological juggernaut, socialism as well as capitalism have found themselves virtually helpless...

...Thus I do not maintain that socialism fulfills the radical prescription for selfdetermination by the mere act of expropriating the expropriators...

...The rich congratulate themselves on the money they have "made...

...Everywhere we find a chastened awareness that planning is a word far easier to pronounce than to spell out, but a debate still rages as to whether this requires more efficient centralization or a much greater degree of decentralization...

...On the contrary, I believe its present intellectual disarray to be a sign of strength, not of weakness...

...For it locates within man himself an imperative reason for a socialist commitment to the spontaneity and individuality of life...

...1 Yet more recently Sweezy has admitted, "I no longer think this goes to the heart of the matter...

...From everything nonrational as well as everything that is mistaken...

...In lieu of the aristocracy of wealth, socialism may install an oligarchy of the party elite or of planners...

...More than that, I press the question of whether socialism must not reflect on the limitations of the creed of perfectibility, or the elusive core of the individual, or the existential anxieties inextricable from life, as it seeks to build institutions in the name of man...

...This argument concerns the need to replace the market disposition of resources by a planning mechanism of some sort...

...How to humanize production on a vast scale...

...It is here that socialism rests its case for the basic institutional changes it has traditionally sought—the replacement of private by public ROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST DILEMMA command over productive property and the disposition of output...

...It will be said that the need for social change is so overwhelming, at home as well as abroad, that words such as these can only work harm by instilling doubts where there should be resolve—and that for all the disclaimers one may make, conservatism remains and must always remain a view that favors complacency over indignation and that encourages passivity in the face of social evil...

...Is the human being an infinitely plastic creature, capable of "making" himself without any boundaries or constraints other than those he imposes on himself...

...Instead, what I have extracted from conservative thought are assumptions about the nature of man that are in themselves only the constitutive elements of a philosophy, socialist or conservative...

...For behind the uncertainty with which socialism faces these problems is a much more fundamental uncertainty of which socialists themselves are only gradually becoming aware...

...Indeed, it is difficult to believe that thirty years ago socialism was to be found in only one country whose very survival appeared to be gravely threatened...

...Thus, however useful centralized planning may be for forcing economic growth, once beyond the dire needs of an impoverished society, such planning is a dubious instrument of socialism measured by the criteria of radicalism itself...

...Nevertheless, when we look not to its outward manifestations of success but to its inward state of mind, there is no doubt that socialism is in crisis...

...We get a first definition of the idea if we contrast it to what we usually call the "conservative" view of man...

...This declaration of faith should permit me to return to an examination of the radical philosophy itself...

...And the reason for the dissatisfaction is not difficult to discover...

...The difference between the conservative and the radical view of norms derives from a difference in the perspective with which each views the drama of life...

...It is not a crisis of existence, for our age has seen the arrival of socialism on a scale that surpasses the fondest hopes of socialists of the past generation...

...Neither was any serf, peasant, or slave deceived as to the brute realities of the class structure, although he may have resigned himself to it...

...But if there is such an essence, what is it...

...2 Another critic has spelled out the substance of Sweezy's doubts: Classical socialism has...

...on the other, the relatively unchanged level of our social and political capabilities...

...But that is not the only problem...

...Liberate man...

...Now that socialism has ceased to be a mere wishful projection of history it must come to grips with the disconcerting realities and paradoxes of life, and the price of this coming-to-grips is inevitably a mood of sobriety...

...9 Gar Alperovitz, "Notes Toward a Pluralist Commonwealth" (unpublished manuscript, to appear in his forthcoming The Long Revolution...

...But it is not only with regard to freedom that socialism has something to learn from the "conservative" view of human nature...

...This is so because noncapitalist forms of privilege, such as those of bureaucratic preferment or naked political or military power, 466 even when they are more crushing than the privileges of wealth, are nonetheless more transparent and self-evident as privileges...

...Even war itself is now the object of a widespread moral revulsion to a far greater extent than ever in the past...

...For what is attractive to the radical mind in the conception of socialism is above all the idea that a socialist society is best suited for the active development of the human capacity for self-determination...

...What are to be the standards of conduct...

...The aim of a socialist society cannot be a return to primitivism, for that would totally conflict with its faith in the capacity of men to understand and order their own lives...

...Moreover, as our knowledge of Stalinist Russia makes clear, the gulf between the living conditions of these elites and that of the masses may be as great as that between the capitalist rich and the capitalist masses...

...Perhaps it is for that reasonthat radicalism and conservatism, like oil and water, can be shaken up together but cannot really blend...

...As such, these "conservative" norms have an unrecognized—perhaps a surprising—relevance for socialism...

...The problem, however, is that socialists will not find such a lodestone unless they formulate a surer conception of the human being than the one they now entertain...

...Especially in its centralized form, planning has proved inimical to self-determination insofar as it has ignored the preferences by which men express their individuality or has manipulated those preferences as shamelessly as corporate capitalism at its worst...

...But perhaps I can add some measure of clarification to the present socialist crisis by asking socialists to think about the problem itself in a radical way...

...I stress this radical commitment to socialism as a vehicle for human self-direction for a very important purpose...

...But neither can its aim be the relentless pursuit of an ever-receding goal of perfection...

...But if the "conservative" conception is correct in emphasizing elements or layers of the personality that cannot be managed—or that can be invaded only at the cost of destroying the person—then socialism must reconsider its utopian image of what man can be...

...From all faith as well as all fetishism...

...More than that, it requires the admission that perfectibility is a process that socialism does not want to press indefinitely...

...Today at least a third, possibly half, of the world's population lives under regimes that, however subject to political change, appear indissolubly wedded to socialism as an economic system...

...how to organize enormous networks of collective effort without equally enormous networks of bureaucratic controls...

...Now it is no more my intention to discuss the specific nature of these norms than it was to define the boundaries for the expression of the free human personality...

...and that this freedom is not an attribute that is necessarily congenial with social order...

...But my reticence is not only an admission that I do not know how socialism should be structured...

...But I do hold that the abolition of the privileges of wealth associated with capitalism nevertheless constitutes a necessary step for the realization of the socialist ideal...

...What is the "radical" approach to the question of human nature...

...I do not know any other way to describe such an outlook, at once forward-looking and inward-looking, other than to call it radical...

...2 Ibid...

...For the conservative warnings apply equally to those at the top as well as to those at the bottom...

...For it is not really a conservative philosophy that I am recommending for socialism...

...And what is such a philosophy to be called if it is to be placed in the service of socialism...

...q This article is reprinted, with permission, from the Spring issue of Social Research...

...In the end, socialism must seek to build a society that is at least as interested in the celebration and preservation of the timeless rules of cherished lifeways as in the continuous pioneering of ever new modes of social existence...

...Rather, I wish only to make the point that the radical aim of systematically expanding the potentialities of all men requires some form of deliberate intervention into the determination and distribution of society's output...

...For the conception of an unreachable core of behavior comes squarely into conflict with the idea of the limitless perfectibility of man...

...Yet I cannot even read the histori cal record in a wholly pessimistic frame of mind...

...3 Perhaps Irving Howe has expressed the prevailing mood most vividly: The whole tragic experience of our century, I would submit, demonstrates this to be one of the few unalterable commandments of socialism: the participation of the workers, the masses of human beings, as self-conscious men preparing to enter the arena of history...

...But this is too easy a reading of the conservative view...

...Although it was originally propounded as a political rather than economic ideal, it is from this declaration of faith in the selfgoverning potentialities of man that socialism draws its strength...

...Slavery—a condition once taken for granted—has disappeared...

...To put it differently, I see no reason, based in history, to doubt that a society that devoted its full efforts to the cultivation of the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual capabilities of its people could elevate the prevailing Ievel of social decency as much above present-day society as the level of Sweden is elevated above that of the Union of South Africa...

...The issue is so important in the light of the present self-doubting mood of socialism that I must take a moment to review the argument in its support...

...At its core is the advocacy of an ever-expanding exercise of conscious control by the great masses of men over their individual and collective destinies—here is Irving Howe's entrance of the workers into history...

...Until society has consciously broached and answered the question of what is to be a "fair" allocation of the claims of each individual against the community, the radical goal of individual autonomy cannot be achieved...

...For the conservative, intent on reaffirming a persistent elemental nature in man, they tend to be supportive and reassuring...

...It is thus a view of man at once more hopeful and more skeptical than that of the radical—more hopeful in its denial that men can be totally programmed, more skeptical in its denial that this unexpungeable individuality is an attribute that unfailingly redounds to the higher purposes of society...

...Rather, it reflects my belief that the roots of the socialist crisis lie deeper than its current confusion before the challenges of technology, bureaucracy, and democracy...

...The conservative views it as a process of reenactment, of renewal, to be justified in the present...

...More important, I believe that in such a truly radical view of man—a view that embraces both his potential and his condition, his possibilities and his requirements, his open-ended future and his never-discarded past—socialism may discover the guiding principle that it now lacks...

...Perhaps most critical in human terms is state-socialism's dynamic tendency toward hierarchy and centralization, for this reduces individual and social responsibility, thereby destroying the basis both for freedom and for a practice and ethic of voluntary cooperation...

...It is another matter when I turn to the second criticism and consider whether "conservatism" can ever be absorbed within and reconciled to the socialist faith...

...So too there is general agreement that "democracy" is an indispensable condition for socialism, but nothing like 464 agreement as to the limits of dissent to which a socialist critizen may go...

...It is possibly more difficult to retain a belief in the perfectibility of man if one looks to history, where mass murder has reached ROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST DILEMMA a kind of crescendo in the wars of the 20th century...

...From all that is ritual as well as all that is rote...

...In the same way, alienation is an ailment on which all socialists fasten their gaze, but whose prescribed remedies range from a return to the simplicities of small-scale communal life to the final liberation of labor through total mechanization...

...The assurance and clarity that were appropriate for socialism at one stage of its career would only be evidence of its dogmatism or barrenness at another...

...Here also harsh experience has taught us that planning, as such, may not succeed in achieving ROBERT L. HEILBRONER this aim...

...By contrast, what is so inimical to the cause of autonomy within the structure of privileges peculiar to capitalism is that its prerogatives are veiled and masked by the ideology of the market system...

...In the retrospective glance of the future, ours will certainly be known as the period in which socialism ceased to be a mere wish, a vague destination of history, and became a major part of current reality...

...But what is unique about capitalist society is that most men are unaware of the very presence of privilege within it...

...And from this perspective the conservative again sounds warnings for the radical...

...I hope that the present temper of inquiry, self-doubt, and uncertainty does not give way prematurely to a set of intellectual convictions and institutional commitments that socialism (or any other social philosophy) is not in a position to afford...

...The socialist institution of public ownership, despite its immense problems of administration and bureaucracy, destroys this deepseated mystique and thus makes possible an advance toward the radical goal of a society of men who understand and therefore command the conditions of their existence...

...AS A DECLARATION of faith in the human capacity for self-direction, radicalism is, as we all know, a very modern idea, scarcely older than the great political revolutions of 1776 and 1789...

...And finally, it is surely grounds for rueful commentary that the two socialist nations that have consciously sought to curb the bureaucratic phenomenon—Yugoslavia and China—each regard the approach of the other as a betrayal of socialism...

...A recognition of an inviolable inner preserve of the personality informs the radical that when he speaks of the "liberation" of the human spirit, he is not merely projecting an ideal of what man could or should be, but also acquiescing in a realization of what man is...

...However short these traditional aims may fall in bringing about the sufficient conditions for a "humanist" socialism, they are indeed necessary condi tons if socialism is to achieve its radical aim of enlarging the area of human self-deter mination...

...What socialism needs now is a philosophy that searches for elemental moorings along with programmatic change...

...usually resulted merely in state agencies running state industries in an authoritarian economy, leaving unfulfilled a host of such humanist ideals as freedom, democracy, equality and cooperation...

...In the end a socialist society must reconcile itself to an indeterminate space within which men can express their wishes and drives, whether or not these conform to the ideals and goals of socialism itself...

...No feudal lord, no Egyptian noble, no slaveowner was unaware of his privileged status, although he may not have felt in any way defensive about it...

...For with regard to the problem of norms, as with that of individuality, it seems conservatism has something to say that is very different from the standard views of radicalism, and of the utmost importance...

...Or is there an "essence" of man whose primordial and persistent existence can be ignored only at the gravest peril...

...Moreover, much of the rest of society, including many of the poor, agree that the rich have earned their favored place because of the contribution "their" capital has made to production...

...470 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER...

...These questions pose the crucial issue of what kinds of norms and values will best sustain a socialist society in the long run...

...From all that is personal as well as all that is selfish...

...how to spur incentive without catering to greed...