SOCIALISM AND SCARCITY: A GRIM VISION OF THE FUTURE AND HEADING FOR APOCALYPSE?
Clecak, Peter & Eckstein, George
Socialism and Scarcity Though it is the policy of DISSENTnot to review books by its editors, we are printing below two discussions, sent in simultaneously but independently, of Robert...
...This crucial polarity reproduces itself in the stubborn tendency of adults to seek out leaders and to find security in clearly defined patterns of social order...
...Historically, Marxism has suffered from the paradox that, while its aim of transforming society was premised on a fully developed industrial capitalism, this highly productive capitalism was, in turn, able to improve the living standards, working condi38 GEORGE ECKSTEIN tions, and political influence of the workers to such an extent that many of them lost interest, if they ever really had any, in a deep-going structural transformation...
...He has recently published his Selected Poems in English translation...
...Western intellectuals, according to Heilbroner, have the duty to prepare themselves and others for the sacrifices that the future will exact, and to redefine the “legitimate” boundaries of freedom and responsibility...
...Or of John Dos Passos’s collapse into the extremist simplism of Ayn Randism...
...A slender hope for mankind was sustained by the possibility that people in very different circumstances might alter their social systems so as to alleviate internal crises and disintegration, advance humanist values (however circuitously), and reduce international tensions to manageable proportions...
...Forgetting that any single life span enforces narrowness of perspective, some prophets are now turning away from the benign visions of the ’60s to the bleak ones of the OS, from the prospect of a society where computer-directed machines free humanity from the burdens of work to a doom of humankind where excessive use of energy leads to an overheating of the atmosphere...
...The crucial importance of political power and authority organized in bureaucratically modern states leads to a consideration of the humtan propensity for political obedience...
...If there is only “a short period left during which we can safely continue on the present trajectory”--perhaps a generation or two-what can be done in the meantime that will not be subverted by convulsive changes beyond our control...
...vides the space for resolving miajor social Heilbroner previews the conclusion of The problems everywhere, albeit at an uneven Human Prospect by declaring man's outlook rate and with different consequences for variand the hope that can be held for his limits Of industrial activity ifflpOSed by the future prospect seems to be very slim indeed...
...Such dangers inhere in all forms of “futurology...
...Among intellectuals, at the time, this phenomenon used to be called a “Failure of Nerve...
...He is about to undertake a large-scale reexamination of Russian literary culture in the 1920s...
...Using a battery of scientific prognostications, he arrives at the dire prospect of starvation through overpopulation, of exhaustion of resources, of mankind’s ultimate demise within three generations through atomic war or the overheating of the atmosphere...
...they now do not have nor are they likely to develop the strong unity of national purpose that would require...
...Chomsky implies that DISSENThad called for “a United States-Saigon victory” entailing a “murderous assault on the opposition,” thereby sharing responsibility for the massive U.S...
...Technocrats...
...But Heilbroner’s precarious vision of the ’60s did not emphasize a final factor-the limits imposed by the natural environment...
...An examination of nearly every tenet of sians,” Commentary, JUIY 1974, pp...
...Heilbroner designs an argument that, if accepted, implies a reconsideration of the fundamental premises of left-wing (and liberal) political theory and program...
...0 * See B. Bruce-Briggs, “Against the Neo-Malthu- the ecological imperative...
...And since they would be based on “quasi-military” mobilizations, would it not be far more likely that they would enter into disastrous militarypolitical adventures in a new age of imperialism...
...He can offer no more than the hope of a “contingent life sentence,” a painful transition to a problematic future in which he, and most of us, would have no place...
...But the concept of peoplehood has limits: the bonds of identification, which frequently move large groups to concerted action, also serve to exclude others...
...Whioh brings us finally to the question of the future of democratic socialism and whether it has any future at all...
...Thus, there may well be time for effective adjustments-in the social sphere, in developing new resources and technologies, in a move toward what I have called the “New Affluence...
...I would not, however, want to shelve this battered vision or the politics of the long haul just yet, for I see no better immediate alternative than to press ahead, exploring the possibility of a bleak future while pursuing an inconsistent, perhaps futile politics of the democratic Left...
...The Chinese have been especially successful in lessening economic and social inequalities...
...He dredges up a few words from an editorial that appeared in the summer of 1964 in the magazine DISSENT, edited by Irving Howe, one of Chomsky’s blackest of bgtes noires...
...But, then, I fear he is not quite without blame in creating such impressions...
...Thus, there may well be time for effective adjustments-in the social sphere, in developing new resources and technologies, in a move toward what I have called the “New Affluence...
...What tlhe authoritarian systems brought us by way of solutions to yesterday’s problems we all know...
...Might it not then be argued that the quasimilitary devotion and sacrifice of such a task would be vitiated if the masses were exposed to the disagreements and diversions of intellectuals who strayed from, or opposed, the official line...
...But economic gains, especially in an inflationary setting, widen the disparity between expectations and rewards, thereby increasing social discontent...
...Nor has it apparently induced Heilbroner to explore sufficiently the extent to which the present plight of the underdeveloped nations may be caused by temporary social factors...
...I Peter Clecak A Grim Vision of the Future Although it has received considerable attention, Robert Heilbroner’s most recent book may easlily be lost in the glut d social commentary-filed away as this year’s most stylish doomsday tract...
...It is to Heilbroner’s credit that he does not hide his personal dismay about such an authoritarian system and the reduction in personal and intellectual freedom it would engender...
...I don’t at all wish to belittle the seriousness of the problems faced by the newly independent nations-problems that, incidentally, the end of colonialism has aggravated rather than lessened by reducing access to capital investment and adding the burden of disproportionate military expenditures...
...He may contract debts on the strength of his imagination, and that will have an effect, just as mankind has contracted debts on account of its gods...
...It brings into focus a series of urgent questions concerning the theory and politics of the democratic Left...
...A hundred years, as Rudolf Klein points out, allow quite ample time for possible adjustments, especially when one considers that our “ravenous technology is itself largely the product of the past century...
...that they would be directed toward a serious, let alone fair, solution of the problems he sketches seems most unlikely...
...If I wrongly sense in Heilbroner’s psychological argument a certain readiness to bow before the presumed dictates of the future, I gladly apologize...
...HERMAN P. MILLER, who has served as chief of the Population Division at the U.S...
...The second utopian speculation, at present most evident among radicals, proceeds from a facile assumption of the nearly limitless plasticity of “human nature...
...And if the dictatorship is not prescient and omniscient, that is, if it is like all past dictatorships, how are errors to be found out and corrected...
...The latest turn to the apocalyptic style is marked by extreme selectivity in analysis and a relentless extrapolation of observed trends...
...In the United States (and with variations, in other Western nations), democratic socialists-indeed a majority of those on the Left-have held to a politics of gradualism, a combination of socialist education, action within or at the fringes of the Democratic party, single-issue causes, civil rights activity, and the like...
...scene for the Frankfurter Hefte and other West German and Swiss publications and radio networks...
...Rather mension occasions An Inquiry into the Hu-than assuming that economic growth proman Prospect...
...To gauge the adaptive propercan no longer be to remain a Purely employs the concept of ideal types rather 28 PETER CLECAK indeed constitute the most dangerous These factors in the external challenge are and difficult challenge that humanity has ever greatly exacerbated 'by the overarching probfaced...
...As we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance, local disasters . . . may also slow down economic growth and give a necessary impetus to the piecemeal construction of an ecologically and socially viable social system...
...It is a psychological explanation: the feeling of security provided by the knowledge that “Father knows best...
...Under a grant from the Phi Beta Kappa Commission, he is working on Crooked Paths: Images of the American Future, a sequel to Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 19451970, published last fall as a Harper Torchbook...
...For more than a deoade, Heilbroner has been preoccupied with the growing difficulty of imagining the future as other than a continuation of the misery of the past...
...The essay remains for me both fascinating and disturbing...
...scene for the Frankfurter Hefte and other West German and Swiss publications and radio networks...
...In the end, it turns out, he does hedge his bets...
...The main body of the text (defines the external challenge and brings into clearest focus the middle-range prospects for adapting to it...
...Was not Apollo’s oracle a power in Greece...
...Nor has it apparently induced Heilbroner to explore sufficiently the extent to which the present plight of the underdeveloped nations may be caused by temporary social factors...
...If there is only “a short period left during which we can safely continue on the present trajectory”--perhaps a generation or two-what can be done in the meantime that will not be subverted by convulsive changes beyond our control...
...natural environment...
...As we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance, local disasters . . . may also slow down economic growth and give a necessary impetus to the piecemeal construction of an ecologically and socially viable social system...
...B. Bruce-Briggs, in the July 1974 Commentary, makes a number of plausible points in refutation: among them, the sharp drop in the birth rate in industrial nations and in others with rapid economic growth...
...for if the computer has made this game more universal, it has not necessarily made it more reliable...
...For one thing, failure to support the economic aspirations of blue- and wlhitecollar workers would deprive the Left of any political constituency, apart from visionaries, crazies, sectarians, counter-culture types and good-natured though untested upper-middleclass professionals...
...The short-term probThus . . . the answer to whether we can lems of iadustrilal growth-resource availaconceive of the future other than as a con-bility, energy crises, and pollution-are tinuation of the darkness, cruelty, and dis- placed in the larger context of the amount order of the past Seems to me to be no...
...How does he know it would be the “right kind” of authoritarian regime-one that would distribute scarce goods equitably and replace the profit motive by a socially beneficial collective discipline...
...I find this second response tempting but finally inadequate...
...Given the trends already at work in our society (and it is from these that extrapolations must necessarily be made) ;given, further, tlhe fact that the new authoritarian regimes would be arising in conditions of scarcity exacerbated by breakdowns of the industrial systems-is it not then probable that we would see dictatorships arising in the advanced, or now decaying-advanced, countries that would attempt to uphold the status quo by grabbing for themselves a bigger share of crucially scarce goods...
...Others will pass over the argument as an unreliable piece of futurology...
...Thus, in a superficial way, socialism appears to be incompatible with abundance, and could indeed succeed only in agrarian societies where the task was the equitable distribution of scarce products and the development ofresources with scarce capital...
...Still, we ought to remember that large segments of the population have to do a lot of catching up with regard to material goods...
...From ‘his doctoral dissertation, Works (Moscow), 1:1:80...
...Chomsky implies that DISSENThad called for “a United States-Saigon victory” entailing a “murderous assault on the opposition,” thereby sharing responsibility for the massive U.S...
...The point is hardly new...
...Elsewhere, in the technologically advanced countries, the potentialities for growth seemed greater, subject for the first time to crude but conscious processes ddecision-making...
...I found that Chomsky had utterly distorted the plain sense of the editorial, which had explicitly ruled out a U.S...
...If the external challenge can be met, he suggests, the postindustrial future, in its dominant cultural forms, may resemble preindustrial societies: the complex of traits and habits associated with the transformation of the outer world through science and technology may be displaced by a new emphasis on inner states of consciousness, a stratified social order with communally defined roles, and a return to ritual and tradition as sources of vitality and consolation...
...Heilbroner goes on to give a subtle psychological explanation for the enduring strength of tribal and national cohesion...
...It may also be that Heilbroner’s projection of scarcity is less prescient than the Hudson Institute planners’ scenario of plenty...
...but if not, economic improvement of the lives of people in the short run required no elaborate justification...
...Heilbroner makes a seemingly convincing case for this proposition...
...I do not mean to slight the importance of political activity, only to indicate the socioeconomic medium in which it occurs...
...GEORGE ECKSTEIN, who lives in New York, writes on the social, economic, and cultural US...
...Does this not mean the continuance of large bureaucracies, permanently grotesque disparities of income and privilege, more congested environments, and hence less freedom, less democracy (as we have come to think of it...
...It is distressing to see this repeated today, hardly a generation later...
...Acknowledging lation grourth and productivity can lead to the imprecision and theoretical reductiveness Only two outcomes: a de-of the exponential oalculations & neo-Mallevels in m'any regions, Or> more probably, terioration in the quality of life to subhuman thusians, he the rough indicators of the he regards as the central external challenge: a rise of autlhoritarian, even military governments bent on introducing socialist modes of ". , . the inescapable need to limit industrial ties of capitalism and socialism, Heilbroner nomic development in these circumstances internal miatter, for as the condition of bil-than concentrating primarily on isolated examples of either system...
...And the more critical the circumstances, the more does this point hold...
...The primary question, then, is whether this essay should be taken as more than a prophetic warning...
...the possibility of substitutions for scarce materials...
...In a relatively short time, as a result of public alarm, some substantial steps toward environmental protection have already been taken...
...Unfortunately, the same is not yet true about Malthus...
...Or of John Dos Passos’s collapse into the extremist simplism of Ayn Randism...
...In widely differing processes of socialization, infants experience a common period of “omnipotence” followed by a dim realization of “helplessness,” which enforces dependence on parental figures...
...Let us keep in mind that these two periods were also the only ones in recent American history that saw a noticeable shift toward a more equal income distribution...
...CZESLAW MILOSZ, Polish poet and critic, author of The Captive Mind (1953) and The History of Polish Literature (1969), teaches Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Bureau of the Census, teaches economics at Temple University...
...Using a battery of scientific prognostications, he arrives at the dire prospect of starvation through overpopulation, of exhaustion of resources, of mankind’s ultimate demise within three generations through atomic war or the overheating of the atmosphere...
...A number of urgent questions present themselves...
...And the more critical the circumstances, the more does this point hold...
...Heilbroner’s social thought in the ’60s emphasized the tragic dimensions of present and future, even under the best conditions imaginable...
...intervention the followingyear...
...Many scientists, it is true, are rather skeptical about such extrapolations...
...VICTOR ERLICH, Bensinger Professor of Russian Literature at Yale University, is the author of Russian Formalism, of Gogol, and other works on Russian literature...
...It may be that democracy, freedom, justice, cooperation, social order-the good life-can be redefined to fit new circumstances and new attitudes...
...Even the introduction of variaibles cannot take care of all the factors that may 34 have a bearing on future developments, aside from the fact that they often reveal such a wide band of possibilities as to make the predictions meaningless...
...People of one temperament will turn to utopia, people of another to apocalypse: both share faults of method, failures of tact...
...I found that Chomsky had utterly distorted the plain sense of the editorial, which had explicitly ruled out a U.S...
...the increase of known mineral and energy reserves in step with consumption...
...When viewing the human prospect primarily as a struggle for survival, these broad assumptions about political behavior are not, however, wholly negative...
...that they would be directed toward a serious, let alone fair, solution of the problems he sketches seems most unlikely...
...Which does not, of course, eliminate the possibility that certain amenities-safe environment, safe and pleasant working conditions, better health and education, cultural activity (all d which might be called ‘‘the new affluence”)-may come to be considered as desirable as an accumulation of material goods...
...Ultimately, the human prospect (will unfold within the context of nation-states and a general need for political obedience and identification...
...The short-run requirements of revolutionary socialism-an expansion of production to meet the minimal needs of everyone-are greatly enhanced by the disposition to obedience and identification...
...For one thing, failure to support the economic aspirations of blue- and wlhitecollar workers would deprive the Left of any political constituency, apart from visionaries, crazies, sectarians, counter-culture types and good-natured though untested upper-middleclass professionals...
...natural environment...
...Whether or not the technological apocalypse proves illusory, intellectuals must not succumb to an authoritarian social apocalypse...
...25-29...
...That authoritarian dictatorships might arise in the kinds of social circumstances sketched by Heilbroner seems plausible...
...Ultimately, the human prospect (will unfold within the context of nation-states and a general need for political obedience and identification...
...The best hope, he felt, was that forms of industrial socialism might become more democratic...
...If I wrongly sense in Heilbroner’s psychological argument a certain readiness to bow before the presumed dictates of the future, I gladly apologize...
...But it almost certainly contains unfortunate political implications...
...The Public Notice The following paragraph appears in a review by Theodore Draper of Noam Chomsky’s book Peace in the Middle East...
...I Peter Clecak A Grim Vision of the Future Although it has received considerable attention, Robert Heilbroner’s most recent book may easlily be lost in the glut d social commentary-filed away as this year’s most stylish doomsday tract...
...Most people on the Left continue to support economic demands for higher wages, improved working conditions, increased retirement benefits, etc...
...For in the Heilhronerian crisis, the correction of errors would be still more crucial than today: a deluded military dictator, an ideologically obsessed politburo, a rigid technocrat, demanding “quasi-military devotion and sacrifice,” could-could...
...And we wouldn’t even have a Robert Heilbroner to come along with an eloquent book of warning...
...In place of prodigalities of consumption must come new frugal attitudes...
...military victory and had contended that the “only way out” was the most drastic kind of land reform in South Vietnam...
...Let us take one central example...
...HeiEbroner is, of course, self-conscious about the utopian character of this stab in the dark, with its assumption of a violent period followed by the restoration of peace, a return to preindustrial forms, we hope at a higher level...
...Has not Moloch ruled...
...Beginning with an interest in determining the capacity of people to organize social systems so as to insure both material advancement and freedom, he reached the somber conclusion during the 1960s that the main issue is no longer the achievement of happiness on a base of material progress, but survival...
...What makes Heilbroner so certain that an authoritarian regime could mount “the immense task of social reorganization...
...and of heat, emitted to some degree in all industo the question Of whether impends, trial processes, that the biosphere can tolerate...
...In the end, it turns out, he does hedge his bets...
...In the end, then, Heilbroner must not only acknowledge the customary dilemmas of radical critiques-the politically elusive character of utopian visions...
...The mixture of patriotism and revolutionary ideology, no less than the formation of rigid hierarchies legitimized by demigods, has been used to advantage in eliciting the efforts of masses of !people...
...Neither system has a long-term advantage in the transition to a radically different future...
...But, then, I fear he is not quite without blame in creating such impressions...
...Let us take one central example...
...I am in no way qualified-no one but an expert is-to evaluate the scientific evidence for these predictions...
...Indeed, U.S...
...This critical probe lions degenerates, the disparity between wealthy, industrial countries and the poverty involves an interplay of three rough timeof nations under revolutionary regimes raises frames: the short run of a decade (which he the possibility of international wars of reconsiders unpredictable) ; the intermediatedistribution...
...But the early ’30s have shown us (for the industrial mass societies) and the ’60s and ’70s (for the Third World) that this authoritarianism may just as likely take on a fascist or militarist coloring...
...In this sense, all gods, heathen or Christian, have had real existence...
...But Heilbroner’s precarious vision of the ’60s did not emphasize a final factor-the limits imposed by the natural environment...
...But advocacy of a traditional politics uf the democratic Left surely compromises the ethical appeal of anyone who also tries to prepare prosperous fellow citizens-not to mention those less well off-for the sacrifices entailed by the vision and politics of democratic socialism in the light of Heilbroner’s concerns would produce similar puzzles and confusions...
...New Republic, Oct...
...probably would!-make even greater blunders than our parliamentary regimes...
...From ‘his doctoral dissertation, Works (Moscow), 1:1:80...
...Only an authoritarian system will, in his view, be able to call forth the mass consent and to exercise the authority necessary for new values, measures, and sacrifices...
...probably would!-make even greater blunders than our parliamentary regimes...
...and there is a real danger that an unqualified social apocalyptism, especially if coming from relatively affluent segments of the middle class, will be used to deprive the poor of things they deserve and need as much as anyone else...
...But if Heilfbroner is correct in assuming that the American socia...
...An examination of nearly every tenet of sians,” Commentary, JUIY 1974, pp...
...Nelw technologies-not only in cultivation, fertilizers, breeding, pest control, but also in such fields as transport and storage-have reduced the share of those employed in agriculture in the advanced countries since Malthus’s day from 80 percent to between 3.5 and 15 percent today, freeing the majority of the people in the West for the production of other consumer goods that had previously been reserved for a privileged few...
...I would not, however, want to shelve this battered vision or the politics of the long haul just yet, for I see no better immediate alternative than to press ahead, exploring the possibility of a bleak future while pursuing an inconsistent, perhaps futile politics of the democratic Left...
...Even a conservative, business-oriented Administration could not stop the trend toward expanded legislation in this field, and it could only partially slow down enforcement...
...When viewing the human prospect primarily as a struggle for survival, these broad assumptions about political behavior are not, however, wholly negative...
...bs an economic order, capitalism is charouter limits to growth to illuminate what production...
...Others will pass over the argument as an unreliable piece of futurology...
...The issue had nothing to do with the Middle East, but since Chomsky had dragged it in, and it seemed inherently implausible, I went to the trouble of checking it...
...The actual economic gains thus far achieved have been brought about by an expanding total output, not primarily by any significant redistribution of wealth...
...Heilbroner asserts that since “avoidable evil” always remains, there is no excuse for doing nothing, or for pretending that the external challenge does not exist...
...If Heilbroner is right, however, economic gains that fuel social discontent accelerate the drift toward more authoritarian political modes...
...Was not Apollo’s oracle a power in Greece...
...Can we assume, then, that a new era of scarcity will bring new impulses toward this type of authoritarian “socialism...
...Forgetting that any single life span enforces narrowness of perspective, some prophets are now turning away from the benign visions of the ’60s to the bleak ones of the OS, from the prospect of a society where computer-directed machines free humanity from the burdens of work to a doom of humankind where excessive use of energy leads to an overheating of the atmosphere...
...Ruling out the alternative of despair, he adopts a stoic position: to redeem any future, even an unattractive one, from the malaise of the present, he concludes, requires an elemental commitment to preserving the “very will to live...
...36 GEORGE ECKSTEIN Heilbroner is convinced that the democratic capitalist system will be unable to resist the pressures of either an industrial complex founded on unlimited expansion or of a public conditioned toward wasteful consumption...
...As a literary structure, The Human Prospect is compelling...
...The military...
...0 AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS PETER CLECAK teaches in the Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine...
...Given the trends already at work in our society (and it is from these that extrapolations must necessarily be made) ;given, further, tlhe fact that the new authoritarian regimes would be arising in conditions of scarcity exacerbated by breakdowns of the industrial systems-is it not then probable that we would see dictatorships arising in the advanced, or now decaying-advanced, countries that would attempt to uphold the status quo by grabbing for themselves a bigger share of crucially scarce goods...
...and of heat, emitted to some degree in all industo the question Of whether impends, trial processes, that the biosphere can tolerate...
...This seems harmless enough at first glance...
...Granting Heilbroner’s assumption of the need for “welcomed hierarchies of power and strongly felt bonds of peoplehood,” however, it is unlikely that scenarios of liberation from the psychological and political molds of the past are on the agenda, either in such countries as China or in advanced industrial nations...
...But it is one thing to recognize and allow for the part that irrational factors of human nature play in the working of society...
...The consequences of the past, it is true, set a comparatively low ceiling on economic development under revolutionary socialism...
...HERMAN P. MILLER, who has served as chief of the Population Division at the U.S...
...industry may yet discover in pollution control a field of expansion for taking up the slack in space or military expenditure...
...As the negative effects of an unlimited production d goods become more widely recognized, the shift to “service” production, with its lower demand on material and energy resources, may well become more pronounced...
...he must also record his failure to imagine a more attractive world...
...This would be a shame if I am correct in regarding An Inquiry into the Human Prospect as the most important work of one of our leading social critics...
...But it almost certainly contains unfortunate political implications...
...Passing over the unpredictable specific manifestations of politioal behavior, he conducts a speculative probe of two central-and in his view neglected-aspects of political behavior that may be expected to persist...
...Heilbroner designs an argument that, if accepted, implies a reconsideration of the fundamental premises of left-wing (and liberal) political theory and program...
...Most futurologists are not as circumspect as Daniel Bell, who hedges his predictions of abundance with a stress on its likely costs and who points out the social nature of the decisions on the trade-offs involved (e.g., between energy supply and pollution, between working conditions and productivity...
...Most people on the Left continue to support economic demands for higher wages, improved working conditions, increased retirement benefits, etc...
...Most futurologists are not as circumspect as Daniel Bell, who hedges his predictions of abundance with a stress on its likely costs and who points out the social nature of the decisions on the trade-offs involved (e.g., between energy supply and pollution, between working conditions and productivity...
...In place of the long-established encouragement of industrial production must come its careful restriction and longterm diminution within society...
...advanced capitalist nations might be transformed into more just social orders, gradually becoming less dependent upon modes of neo-imperialism...
...The second utopian speculation, at present most evident among radicals, proceeds from a facile assumption of the nearly limitless plasticity of “human nature...
...Population increase has not proceeded by geometric progression, nor has the food supply conformed to the predicted snail’s pace of arithmetic progression...
...In the 1930s, Hendrilk De Man, the Belgian socialist, was already writing with insight about the psychological sources of political obedience and national solidarity...
...Given Heilbroner’s speculations on the nature of political behavior and its implications for the nation-state, such internationalist modes of resolution must be regarded as fantasies of consolation...
...Among his works, available in English, are Toward a Marxist Humanism (1968), The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positive Thought (1968), Marxism and Beyond (1968), and The Devil and Scripture (1974...
...Barrington Moore has made the crucial point that its built-in mechanism for correction is the redeeming feature of even the worst democracy, its absence the greatest flaw of even the most benign authoritarian regime...
...VICTOR ERLICH, Bensinger Professor of Russian Literature at Yale University, is the author of Russian Formalism, of Gogol, and other works on Russian literature...
...Yet if Heilbroner’s pessimistic scenario should come to seem inescapable, a thorough recasting of democratic socialist theory and politics would be in order...
...I don’t at all wish to belittle the seriousness of the problems faced by the newly independent nations-problems that, incidentally, the end of colonialism has aggravated rather than lessened by reducing access to capital investment and adding the burden of disproportionate military expenditures...
...We expect and hope that this discussion will be continued in future issues.-ED...
...ALAN FOX teaches industrial sociology at the University of Oxford, England...
...And it may even be that the impending changes cannot be brought about by the conscious efforts of men, but rather through an even grimmer determinism of a series of limited catastrophes...
...One thinks of James Burnham’s prediction of a fascist-Stalinist world condominium as the outcome of the managerial society...
...the possibility of substitutions for scarce materials...
...A reconsideration may be needed in any case: should such an optimistic speculation as that issued by the Hudson Institute-a global population of 15-20 billion people with an average per capita income of $20,000-prove to be vaguely accurate, it obviously would have to be achieved on the bases of existing socioeconomic systems...
...The trend toward exhaustion of resources may be reversed by technological and social developments, which may make economically feasible access to new deposits, new methods of extraction and reprocessing, and substitution of synthetic materials...
...Elsewhere, in the technologically advanced countries, the potentialities for growth seemed greater, subject for the first time to crude but conscious processes ddecision-making...
...It brings into focus a series of urgent questions concerning the theory and politics of the democratic Left...
...SOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 33 say, two more generations...
...The issue had nothing to do with the Middle East, but since Chomsky had dragged it in, and it seemed inherently implausible, I went to the trouble of checking it...
...At present rates of industrial growth, yes...
...He is the author of Rich Man, Poor Man, an analysis of income distribution in the U.S...
...One hardly kncnvs which to distrust more...
...He is about to undertake a large-scale reexamination of Russian literary culture in the 1920s...
...In older scenarios, such conflicts could be resolved theoretically by assuming that gathering pressures might lead to democratic socialism...
...The Chinese have been especially successful in lessening economic and social inequalities...
...The problem is complicated by other political dimensions: the democratic Left has steadily supported the goals of political freedom through the extension of representative democracy, civil rights, and legal protection of individuals from the harassment of larger collective bodies...
...Toward the end of the decade, however, he became convinced that the “. . . ecological issue . . . 27 may indeed constitute the most dangerous These factors in the external challenge are and difficult challenge that humanity has ever greatly exacerbated 'by the overarching probfaced...
...Heilbroner thus acknowledges the crucial importance of the Chinese experiment without romanticizing it...
...But it is all the argument allows...
...This seems harmless enough at first glance...
...Whether or not the technological apocalypse proves illusory, intellectuals must not succumb to an authoritarian social apocalypse...
...This “outside” factor, in which foreign technology and information revolution outran domestic adaptability, has aggravated the problem of hunger in the poor countries...
...Passing over the unpredictable specific manifestations of politioal behavior, he conducts a speculative probe of two central-and in his view neglected-aspects of political behavior that may be expected to persist...
...Kant‘s critique [of this idea] is of no avail: if a man imagines that he owns 100 dollars, if this intuition is real for him, then the imaginary 100 dollars may have the same value for him as I00 real ones...
...Though an intensely personal statement, The Human Prospect has a public source in the shadowy regions of pessimism that pervade American-and much of Western-culture...
...How does he know it would be the “right kind” of authoritarian regime-one that would distribute scarce goods equitably and replace the profit motive by a socially beneficial collective discipline...
...The base price of such activity, where successful, will surely be spiraling inflation and greater economic instability...
...A large segment of business has come to accept these new concerns as part of the cost of doing business...
...The problem is complicated by other political dimensions: the democratic Left has steadily supported the goals of political freedom through the extension of representative democracy, civil rights, and legal protection of individuals from the harassment of larger collective bodies...
...Politicians...
...we might also remember the at-least-partial reforms achieved since then by imperfect democratic systems...
...It is true that our present economic system of unlimited growth and our ingrained consumption habits (automobile culture...
...Surely this dimension of intellectual inquiry, only touched upon in The Human Prospect, invites further attention...
...What makes Heilbroner so certain that an authoritarian regime could mount “the immense task of social reorganization...
...Such a perspective left very little of earlier radical and progressive visions intact...
...order can at best evolve into a stationary capitalism over the medium range, can we continue to support measures for the economic advancement of nonowning classes 32 PETER CLECAK experiences of this century have, of course, tempered the optimism implicit in suoh a vision, prompting a number d pessimistic revisions, but all were held together by the assumption of long-term economic growth...
...It has helped, of course, that industry could impose most of the costs of these measures onto the public...
...But in either case (and in the areas of speculation in between), democratic socialists may be forced into yet another revision to accommodate new realities...
...I find this second response tempting but finally inadequate...
...The actual economic gains thus far achieved have been brought about by an expanding total output, not primarily by any significant redistribution of wealth...
...Though these systems will doubtless change in unpredictable ways, some of their worst features seem less subject to alteration...
...Heilbroner offers an explanation for the attraction of a Maoist egalitarian system of scarcity whose severe regimentation seems to be supported by belief in a deified revolutionary leader...
...39...
...for if the computer has made this game more universal, it has not necessarily made it more reliable...
...A large segment of business has come to accept these new concerns as part of the cost of doing business...
...Taking a moderate view, one might maintain that, in the long-range perspective of survival, there is no sane alternative to continuing efforts to limit the power and wealth of corporations while also pressing for economic advances for large sectors of the working class...
...The rate of economic expalsion may well slow down or be diverted to channels other than the production of raw materials and energy-consuming goods...
...Though modest by Western standards, the space for growth was sufficient to permit the emergence of functioning social orders along the lines of the Chinese experiment...
...But it is all the argument allows...
...oated uses of energy, the social processes Heilbroner surveys the demogrcaphic out- would approach a natural threshold that, if look for Latin America, Southeast Asia, and passed, might end in the extinction of life...
...during World War I1 can serve as examples...
...tend to inhibit remedial action...
...And if the dictatorship is not prescient and omniscient, that is, if it is like all past dictatorships, how are errors to be found out and corrected...
...The unity of vision, the logic of argument, and perhaps most of all the tension between the author’s articulated values and his perception of the drift of civilization makes the performance rhetorically convincing...
...The editorial patiently explained that its aim was not “a ‘total victory’ which would destroy the Viet Cong in the South” but rather “a political arrangement for the coexistence of South and North Vietnam” and even “a U.S...
...He has recently published his Selected Poems in English translation...
...Among DISSENTreaders, I assume, no argument is needed about Zevi...
...Yet, in passages that remind one a little of Bertolt Brecht’s acceptance a few decades ago of an “Asiatic” authoritarianism he knew would destroy his kind, Heilbroner tends to rationalize the advantages of some version of Maoist society: Only an authoritarian, or possibly only a revolutionary, regime will be capable of mounting the immense task of social reorganization needed to escape catastrophe...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI,the Polish philosopher, now lives in exile and teaches at Oxford University in England...
...For most of these nations, not even a “Chinese” solution is immediately in sight...
...Nor could anything less than an authoritarian system handle the tensions he expects from the clash between the industrial world and have-not nations no longer willing to suffer their inferior status...
...Again, Heilbroner’s projection into the future of Western expansionary trends in the last few decades fails to take into account these developing countertendencies...
...In the 1930s, Hendrilk De Man, the Belgian socialist, was already writing with insight about the psychological sources of political obedience and national solidarity...
...Among his books are A Sociology of Work in Zndustry (197 1 ), Beyond Contract (1974), and Man Mismanagement (1974...
...Does this not mean the continuance of large bureaucracies, permanently grotesque disparities of income and privilege, more congested environments, and hence less freedom, less democracy (as we have come to think of it...
...The intrusion of this additional di- lem of environmental deterioration...
...Intellectuals seem especially prone to these gyrations, often without asking themselves how it is possible to hold, within the space of a decade or so, two utterly contradictory opinions...
...GEORGE ECKSTEIN, who lives in New York, writes on the social, economic, and cultural US...
...CHARLES PERROW teaches sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook...
...Yet, in passages that remind one a little of Bertolt Brecht’s acceptance a few decades ago of an “Asiatic” authoritarianism he knew would destroy his kind, Heilbroner tends to rationalize the advantages of some version of Maoist society: Only an authoritarian, or possibly only a revolutionary, regime will be capable of mounting the immense task of social reorganization needed to escape catastrophe...
...Heilbroner’s social thought in the ’60s emphasized the tragic dimensions of present and future, even under the best conditions imaginable...
...Measured against optimistic visions of the future to which we have been accustomed, this is a pitifully small consolation...
...A hundred years, as Rudolf Klein points out, allow quite ample time for possible adjustments, especially when one considers that our “ravenous technology is itself largely the product of the past century...
...A few aspects of social life, either new or newly noticed, and possibly temporary, are picked out, blown up, followed to an ultimate statistical or logical conclusion, and thereby brought to a cul-de-sac of gloom, )without much attention to complications...
...We expect and hope that this discussion will be continued in future issues.-ED...
...One thinks of James Burnham’s prediction of a fascist-Stalinist world condominium as the outcome of the managerial society...
...Clearly, this book raises some major questions, not only for democratic socialists, but for anyone concerned about the future of the human race...
...Intellectuals...
...One remembers the exaggerated expectations of a few years ago concerning the “cybernetic revolution”-is it merely an accident that some of the people now predicting a collapse of civilization were drawn io that vision...
...It may also be that Heilbroner’s projection of scarcity is less prescient than the Hudson Institute planners’ scenario of plenty...
...In his book, Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Heilbroner singles out three areas for his prediction of doom: overpopulation, waste of natural resources, extravagant use of energy...
...But it is one thing to recognize and allow for the part that irrational factors of human nature play in the working of society...
...For most of these nations, not even a “Chinese” solution is immediately in sight...
...Yet if Heilbroner’s pessimistic scenario should come to seem inescapable, a thorough recasting of democratic socialist theory and politics would be in order...
...In “Final Reflections on the Human Prospect,” a sort of coda, Heilbroner’s exercise in social forecasting does not lead to a death sentence for the human enterprise, but it comes perilously close...
...But here, too, the problems have begun to be recognized, in this country perhaps more than anywhere else...
...For in the Heilhronerian crisis, the correction of errors would be still more crucial than today: a deluded military dictator, an ideologically obsessed politburo, a rigid technocrat, demanding “quasi-military devotion and sacrifice,” could-could...
...Why should these regimes be expected to distribute suoh goods equitably within a given population...
...For more than a deoade, Heilbroner has been preoccupied with the growing difficulty of imagining the future as other than a continuation of the misery of the past...
...The Public Notice The following paragraph appears in a review by Theodore Draper of Noam Chomsky’s book Peace in the Middle East...
...But even accepting for a moment his dark prospect, much will depend on its extent and pace-and Heil’broner agrees that there are tremendous variables for both...
...Acknowledging lation grourth and productivity can lead to the imprecision and theoretical reductiveness Only two outcomes: a de-of the exponential oalculations & neo-Mallevels in m'any regions, Or> more probably, terioration in the quality of life to subhuman thusians, he the rough indicators of the he regards as the central external challenge: a rise of autlhoritarian, even military governments bent on introducing socialist modes of ". , . the inescapable need to limit industrial ties of capitalism and socialism, Heilbroner nomic development in these circumstances internal miatter, for as the condition of bil-than concentrating primarily on isolated examples of either system...
...But advocacy of a traditional politics uf the democratic Left surely compromises the ethical appeal of anyone who also tries to prepare prosperous fellow citizens-not to mention those less well off-for the sacrifices entailed by the vision and politics of democratic socialism in the light of Heilbroner’s concerns would produce similar puzzles and confusions...
...As an example, any sane formula for maintaining a tenuous international orderthe elemental precondition to human survival and economic growth-must allow for the interplay between the current aspirations of people and the technical and political means of satisfying them...
...A slender hope for mankind was sustained by the possibility that people in very different circumstances might alter their social systems so as to alleviate internal crises and disintegration, advance humanist values (however circuitously), and reduce international tensions to manageable proportions...
...His most recent book is The Radical Attack on Business, a 0sympathetic critique of the New Left...
...To gauge the adaptive propercan no longer be to remain a Purely employs the concept of ideal types rather 28 PETER CLECAK ” ons...
...Heilbroner thus acknowledges the crucial importance of the Chinese experiment without romanticizing it...
...Yet the problems are being recognized, and while this does not necesSOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 35 a bearing on future developments, aside from the fact that they often reveal such a wide band of possibilities as to make the predictions meaningless...
...And we wouldn’t even have a Robert Heilbroner to come along with an eloquent book of warning...
...26, 1974): Chomsky’s penchant for playing fast and loose with quotations again betrays him...
...SOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 37 is convinced that the democratic capitalist system will be unable to resist the pressures of either an industrial complex founded on unlimited expansion or of a public conditioned toward wasteful consumption...
...In a relatively short time, as a result of public alarm, some substantial steps toward environmental protection have already been taken...
...The first, advanced by technocrats and echoed by humanists, presupposes the transcendence of the nationstate and the development of a worldwide community based in some projections on abundance, and in others, on scarcity...
...The latest turn to the apocalyptic style is marked by extreme selectivity in analysis and a relentless extrapolation of observed trends...
...Politicians...
...But the painful process Of growth...
...It is true that our present economic system of unlimited growth and our ingrained consumption habits (automobile culture...
...tions possessing scarce resources...
...But, when you think of it, are not precisely such more-or-less sharp convulsions the way in which major social problems are usually “solved...
...Since the terms of the argument preclude any sort of proof, any “answer” ultimately depends upon the degree of congruence between the author’s beliefs and the reader’s...
...And who, one wonders, is to exercise this authority...
...JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL, our Paris correspondent, is a French journalist, novelist, and critic...
...CHARLES PERROW teaches sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook...
...tend to inhibit remedial action...
...New Republic, Oct...
...Without such political control, one suspects, liberation from elemental forms of misery would never have come about...
...0 AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS PETER CLECAK teaches in the Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine...
...Among DISSENTreaders, I assume, no argument is needed about Zevi...
...underdeveloped nations might begin the long road to survival through authoritarian revolutionary governments that minimized the inevitably brutal ascent from economic chaos...
...In his words: This latent function [of willing acquiescence in the exercise of political authority] is to provide a sense of psychological security by recreating the accustomed relationship of sub-and super-ordinationto which our long period of helpless dependency [in the family] has accustomed us...
...This “outside” factor, in which foreign technology and information revolution outran domestic adaptability, has aggravated the problem of hunger in the poor countries...
...Heilbroner goes on to give a subtle psychological explanation for the enduring strength of tribal and national cohesion...
...Such a perspective left very little of earlier radical and progressive visions intact...
...Unfortunately, the same is not yet true about Malthus...
...This, rather than an increase in fertility, seems to have caused larger numbers of people to survive into childbearing age...
...I am in no way qualified-no one but an expert is-to evaluate the scientific evidence for these predictions...
...Prior to The Human Prospect, Heilbroner was perhaps the most articulate public advocate of the view, held with some variations by many on the Left, that begins with an affirmation of basic humanist values-a decent material existence as the condition for pursuing the further goals of personal and intellectual freedom, equality, and a sense of community...
...Historically, Marxism has suffered from the paradox that, while its aim of transforming society was premised on a fully developed industrial capitalism, this highly productive capitalism was, in turn, able to improve the living standards, working condi38 GEORGE ECKSTEIN may also be argued that in a deeply felt emergency, democratic regimes can become at least as capable as authoritarian ones of mobilizing national energies...
...An adjustment by recurrent crises, of course, and not by rational foresight: The outlook is for convulsive changechange forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation...
...military victory and had contended that the “only way out” was the most drastic kind of land reform in South Vietnam...
...Though modest by Western standards, the space for growth was sufficient to permit the emergence of functioning social orders along the lines of the Chinese experiment...
...Ruling out the alternative of despair, he adopts a stoic position: to redeem any future, even an unattractive one, from the malaise of the present, he concludes, requires an elemental commitment to preserving the “very will to live...
...The base price of such activity, where successful, will surely be spiraling inflation and greater economic instability...
...0 addition of Heilbroner’s ecological dimension would leave even less...
...The consequences of the past, it is true, set a comparatively low ceiling on economic development under revolutionary socialism...
...In older scenarios, such conflicts could be resolved theoretically by assuming that gathering pressures might lead to democratic socialism...
...Let us keep in mind that these two periods were also the only ones in recent American history that saw a noticeable shift toward a more equal income distribution...
...Toward the end of the decade, however, he became convinced that the “. . . ecological issue . . . 27 and Scarcity Though it is the policy of DISSENTnot to review books by its editors, we are printing below two discussions, sent in simultaneously but independently, of Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect...
...ALAN FOX teaches industrial sociology at the University of Oxford, England...
...To substantiate this somber assessment, Heilbroner offers some hypotheses about the political dimensions olf “human nature...
...Yet the problems are being recognized, and while this does not necesSOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 35 sarily imply willingness and ability to act, it is a first, small step toward amelioration...
...They range from remedial measures reducing air and Karl Marx on Inflation The ontological proof of the existence of God says: whatever I can really imagine, is a real intuition for me, has an impact on me...
...Even the introduction of variaibles cannot take care of all the factors that may 34 George Eckstein Heading for Apocalypse...
...And even if, in calculating the effects on resources and environment, one adds with Heilbroner the potential consequences of (necessarily slow) industrialization in the Third World, one would have to balance these effects by the softening of the ppulation pressure that this very industrialization woulid entail...
...bs an economic order, capitalism is charouter limits to growth to illuminate what production...
...With regard to natural resources and environmental destruction-major problems of the industrial world-it seems even more hazardous to extrapolate from the extremely rapid change of the last three decades...
...Clearly, this book raises some major questions, not only for democratic socialists, but for anyone concerned about the future of the human race...
...Beginning with an interest in determining the capacity of people to organize social systems so as to insure both material advancement and freedom, he reached the somber conclusion during the 1960s that the main issue is no longer the achievement of happiness on a base of material progress, but survival...
...But the early ’30s have shown us (for the industrial mass societies) and the ’60s and ’70s (for the Third World) that this authoritarianism may just as likely take on a fascist or militarist coloring...
...Among his books are A Sociology of Work in Zndustry (197 1 ), Beyond Contract (1974), and Man Mismanagement (1974...
...If Heilbroner is right, however, economic gains that fuel social discontent accelerate the drift toward more authoritarian political modes...
...Intellectuals seem especially prone to these gyrations, often without asking themselves how it is possible to hold, within the space of a decade or so, two utterly contradictory opinions...
...But here, too, the problems have begun to be recognized, in this country perhaps more than anywhere else...
...It has helped, of course, that industry could impose most of the costs of these measures onto the public...
...As a literary structure, The Human Prospect is compelling...
...People of one temperament will turn to utopia, people of another to apocalypse: both share faults of method, failures of tact...
...It is this last qaque blackmail and, Heilbroner would now add, perspective that brings Heilbroner's version economic forms of blackmail by poor na-of the middle range into sharp relief...
...36 GEORGE ECKSTEIN imply willingness and ability to act, it is a first, small step toward amelioration...
...This, rather than an increase in fertility, seems to have caused larger numbers of people to survive into childbearing age...
...The primary question, then, is whether this essay should be taken as more than a prophetic warning...
...In the end, then, Heilbroner must not only acknowledge the customary dilemmas of radical critiques-the politically elusive character of utopian visions...
...Those who bring a closed leftist mythology to The Human Prospect will quickly dismiss it as “incorrect,” one more pessimistic reflection of a culture in decline...
...Prior to The Human Prospect, Heilbroner was perhaps the most articulate public advocate of the view, held with some variations by many on the Left, that begins with an affirmation of basic humanist values-a decent material existence as the condition for pursuing the further goals of personal and intellectual freedom, equality, and a sense of community...
...Is there really no prospect for a democratic way, a democratic social order governed by concern for the welfare and freedom of its citizens...
...Whioh brings us finally to the question of the future of democratic socialism and whether it has any future at all...
...Rather mension occasions An Inquiry into the Hu-than assuming that economic growth proman Prospect...
...Thus, in a superficial way, socialism appears to be incompatible with abundance, and could indeed succeed only in agrarian societies where the task was the equitable distribution of scarce products and the development ofresources with scarce capital...
...0 * See B. Bruce-Briggs, “Against the Neo-Malthu- the ecological imperative...
...This crucial polarity reproduces itself in the stubborn tendency of adults to seek out leaders and to find security in clearly defined patterns of social order...
...If Heilbroner’s apocalyptic outlook is overdrawn, there is no reason to despair...
...But would it not be wrong to extrapolate the current gap between population growth and productivity increase, without taking into account the likelihood that it will be narrowed at both ends-the birthrate flattening out for demographic reasons and being reduced by industrialization (the most effective known inducement to birth control), and labor productivity slowly rising with new agricultural techniques and industrialization...
...But it must be remembered that these efforts have {been undertaken within the framework of an ex30 PETER CLECAK In either eventuality it seems beyond dispute that the present orientation of society must change...
...In widely differing processes of socialization, infants experience a common period of “omnipotence” followed by a dim realization of “helplessness,” which enforces dependence on parental figures...
...Here the timetable for doomsday becomes of decisive importance...
...Once on the road to authoritarianism, the latter prospect seems by far the more probable...
...This vision was problematic, an attempt to discern the most hopeful outlines of a future within obvious, if not precisely measurable, limits: there were limits to human will, limits on the capacities of both capitalism and socialism, and limitations on the future imposed by the cruel legacy of the past...
...it is another, to succumb to them oneself...
...If Malthus’s poor record as a prophet has not prevented his periodic resurrection, one is surprised that his failure to allow for changes in social mores and for the introduction of new technology has not discredited him for an economist of Heilbroner’s stature...
...Bureau of the Census, teaches economics at Temple University...
...Again, Heilbroner’s projection into the future of Western expansionary trends in the last few decades fails to take into account these developing countertendencies...
...Heilbroner offers an explanation for the attraction of a Maoist egalitarian system of scarcity whose severe regimentation seems to be supported by belief in a deified revolutionary leader...
...The dangers in the current wave of apocalyptic writing can be illustrated by the provocative treatise of a man whose lucidity and concern I greatly respect and who avoids most of the oversimplifications of other prophets of disaster-Robert Heilbroner...
...HeiEbroner is, of course, self-conscious about the utopian character of this stab in the dark, with its assumption of a violent period followed by the restoration of peace, a return to preindustrial forms, we hope at a higher level...
...For another, the economic programs of the democratic Left may contribute only marginally to the emergence of a less democratic political order, which in any case would be necessary for the transition to a stationary capitalism...
...After having painted a prospect of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, atomic war between haves and have-nots, extinction through heat death, he concedes the possibility of a “periodic adjustment to the dictates of nature and technology...
...An adjustment by recurrent crises, of course, and not by rational foresight: The outlook is for convulsive changechange forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation...
...But if Heilfbroner is correct in assuming that the American socia...
...For another, the economic programs of the democratic Left may contribute only marginally to the emergence of a less democratic political order, which in any case would be necessary for the transition to a stationary capitalism...
...Caution is called for even more when we include the elusive and complex social factors in our equations: the vast array of social actions, reactions, and interactions, often unknown or unknowable...
...Among intellectuals, at the time, this phenomenon used to be called a “Failure of Nerve...
...Those who bring a closed leftist mythology to The Human Prospect will quickly dismiss it as “incorrect,” one more pessimistic reflection of a culture in decline...
...I admire the certitude with which some strands in a very complex skein of interacting physical and social phenomena are extrapolated into an indefinite future...
...One remembers the exaggerated expectations of a few years ago concerning the “cybernetic revolution”-is it merely an accident that some of the people now predicting a collapse of civilization were drawn io that vision...
...Along with a “hunger for obedience,” Heilbroner emphasizes a “fantasy of identification”-especially national identification-that also begins in the general conditioning processes of early childhood...
...It is distressing to see this repeated today, hardly a generation later...
...Indeed, might not the people of such a threatened society look upon the “self-indulgence” of unfettered intellectual expression with much the same mixed feelings that we hold with respect to the ways of a vanished aristocracy...
...And it may even be that the impending changes cannot be brought about by the conscious efforts of men, but rather through an even grimmer determinism of a series of limited catastrophes...
...The unity of vision, the logic of argument, and perhaps most of all the tension between the author’s articulated values and his perception of the drift of civilization makes the performance rhetorically convincing...
...The rate of economic expalsion may well slow down or be diverted to channels other than the production of raw materials and energy-consuming goods...
...But it must be remembered that these efforts have {been undertaken within the framework of an ex30 PETER CLECAK tremely rigid political hierarchy...
...The fallibility of previous apocalyptic predictions might make us cautious, be they based on such cablbalistic calculations as those of Sabbatai Zevi or such “scientific” calculations as those of Malthus...
...But the painful process Of growth...
...advanced capitalist nations might be transformed into more just social orders, gradually becoming less dependent upon modes of neo-imperialism...
...CZESLAW MILOSZ, Polish poet and critic, author of The Captive Mind (1953) and The History of Polish Literature (1969), teaches Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley...
...He can offer no more than the hope of a “contingent life sentence,” a painful transition to a problematic future in which he, and most of us, would have no place...
...JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL, our Paris correspondent, is a French journalist, novelist, and critic...
...The essay remains for me both fascinating and disturbing...
...This idyll is presented with little enthusiasm, for obvious reasons: “many of these possible attributes of a postindustrial society are deeply repugnant . . .” to Heilbroner’s “twentieth-century temper” as well as incompatible with his “most treasured privileges”-the “. . . freedom to order one’s life as one pleases . . .” and to indulge in “the most extravagant and heretical thoughts...
...Even allowing for new techsome observatiods on the dynamics of PO-nologies, fresh sources and more sophistilitical behavior...
...Heilbroner asserts that since “avoidable evil” always remains, there is no excuse for doing nothing, or for pretending that the external challenge does not exist...
...Considering the degree of adaptability the industrial societies by and large have shown in recent decades, even under stress, and the amount of public control their economies have accepted, however reluctantly, there seems room for at least a moderate optimism regarding a continued, if not uninterrupted, movement in the Western world toward some version of social democracy...
...Even allowing for new techsome observatiods on the dynamics of PO-nologies, fresh sources and more sophistilitical behavior...
...His “iron law” that population increase would outrun food supplies within decades, based on erroneous interpretations of some trends in his time, has been spectacularly disproved by history...
...His most recent book is The Radical Attack on Business, a 0sympathetic critique of the New Left...
...industry may yet discover in pollution control a field of expansion for taking up the slack in space or military expenditure...
...Technocrats...
...25-29...
...Conceding that crude versions of this hypothesis serve to justify reactionary ideologies, Heilbroner observes that “it would be foolish . . . not to admit that tendencies toward authoritarian rule seem to be a chronic feature of political life” everywhere...
...The short-term probThus . . . the answer to whether we can lems of iadustrilal growth-resource availaconceive of the future other than as a con-bility, energy crises, and pollution-are tinuation of the darkness, cruelty, and dis- placed in the larger context of the amount order of the past Seems to me to be no...
...But economic gains, especially in an inflationary setting, widen the disparity between expectations and rewards, thereby increasing social discontent...
...If the external challenge can be met, he suggests, the postindustrial future, in its dominant cultural forms, may resemble preindustrial societies: the complex of traits and habits associated with the transformation of the outer world through science and technology may be displaced by a new emphasis on inner states of consciousness, a stratified social order with communally defined roles, and a return to ritual and tradition as sources of vitality and consolation...
...Given Heilbroner’s speculations on the nature of political behavior and its implications for the nation-state, such internationalist modes of resolution must be regarded as fantasies of consolation...
...The argument for this conclusion is decep- the amount of energy expended within, say, tively simple: delineating the external ohal- 150 years, would begin to raise temperatures lenges of the interactive effects of pop-by several degrees, precipitating serious cliulation growth, war, and environmental matic disturbances and raising the imperative deterioration, Heilbroner then estimates the of leveling off, indeed, of cutting back levels human capacity for response by offering of production...
...He is the author of Rich Man, Poor Man, an analysis of income distribution in the U.S...
...After having painted a prospect of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, atomic war between haves and have-nots, extinction through heat death, he concedes the possibility of a “periodic adjustment to the dictates of nature and technology...
...Neither system has a long-term advantage in the transition to a radically different future...
...A few aspects of social life, either new or newly noticed, and possibly temporary, are picked out, blown up, followed to an ultimate statistical or logical conclusion, and thereby brought to a cul-de-sac of gloom, )without much attention to complications...
...Might it not then be argued that the quasimilitary devotion and sacrifice of such a task would be vitiated if the masses were exposed to the disagreements and diversions of intellectuals who strayed from, or opposed, the official line...
...Such dangers inhere in all forms of “futurology...
...Though an intensely personal statement, The Human Prospect has a public source in the shadowy regions of pessimism that pervade American-and much of Western-culture...
...Africa, concluding that despite programs of birth control and the Malthusian checks Of ButHeilbroner does not wish to project a . . . is painful, difficult, .perhaps desperate, ous people, Heilbroner calls attention to the famine and the race between Popu-science-fiction apocalypse...
...oated uses of energy, the social processes Heilbroner surveys the demogrcaphic out- would approach a natural threshold that, if look for Latin America, Southeast Asia, and passed, might end in the extinction of life...
...Conceding that crude versions of this hypothesis serve to justify reactionary ideologies, Heilbroner observes that “it would be foolish . . . not to admit that tendencies toward authoritarian rule seem to be a chronic feature of political life” everywhere...
...Measured against optimistic visions of the future to which we have been accustomed, this is a pitifully small consolation...
...He may contract debts on the strength of his imagination, and that will have an effect, just as mankind has contracted debts on account of its gods...
...They range from remedial measures reducing air and Karl Marx on Inflation The ontological proof of the existence of God says: whatever I can really imagine, is a real intuition for me, has an impact on me...
...Heilbroner makes a seemingly convincing case for this proposition...
...With regard to natural resources and environmental destruction-major problems of the industrial world-it seems even more hazardous to extrapolate from the extremely rapid change of the last three decades...
...Intellectuals...
...Many scientists, it is true, are rather skeptical about such extrapolations...
...during World War I1 can serve as examples...
...But the concept of peoplehood has limits: the bonds of identification, which frequently move large groups to concerted action, also serve to exclude others...
...One hardly kncnvs which to distrust more...
...I ‘would still hold with Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom, 1941) that such a flight into an illusory security represents an abdication of responsibility and that it played an important part in the erection of a total and, in the end, totally destructive system...
...If Heilbroner’s apocalyptic outlook is overdrawn, there is no reason to despair...
...As the negative effects of an unlimited production d goods become more widely recognized, the shift to “service” production, with its lower demand on material and energy resources, may well become more pronounced...
...The editorial patiently explained that its aim was not “a ‘total victory’ which would destroy the Viet Cong in the South” but rather “a political arrangement for the coexistence of South and North Vietnam” and even “a U.S...
...It is this last qaque blackmail and, Heilbroner would now add, perspective that brings Heilbroner's version economic forms of blackmail by poor na-of the middle range into sharp relief...
...But in either case (and in the areas of speculation in between), democratic socialists may be forced into yet another revision to accommodate new realities...
...Why should these regimes be expected to distribute suoh goods equitably within a given population...
...Under a grant from the Phi Beta Kappa Commission, he is working on Crooked Paths: Images of the American Future, a sequel to Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 19451970, published last fall as a Harper Torchbook...
...He dredges up a few words from an editorial that appeared in the summer of 1964 in the magazine DISSENT, edited by Irving Howe, one of Chomsky’s blackest of bgtes noires...
...The best hope, he felt, was that forms of industrial socialism might become more democratic...
...The first, advanced by technocrats and echoed by humanists, presupposes the transcendence of the nationstate and the development of a worldwide community based in some projections on abundance, and in others, on scarcity...
...tions possessing scarce resources...
...water pollution to such preventive ones as the banning of noxious ohemicals in agricultural pest control...
...Along with a “hunger for obedience,” Heilbroner emphasizes a “fantasy of identification”-especially national identification-that also begins in the general conditioning processes of early childhood...
...water pollution to such preventive ones as the banning of noxious ohemicals in agricultural pest control...
...Since the terms of the argument preclude any sort of proof, any “answer” ultimately depends upon the degree of congruence between the author’s beliefs and the reader’s...
...Still, we ought to remember that large segments of the population have to do a lot of catching up with regard to material goods...
...The short-run requirements of revolutionary socialism-an expansion of production to meet the minimal needs of everyone-are greatly enhanced by the disposition to obedience and identification...
...Operating differently in various parts of the world, the safety valve of potential growth lent substance to at least some elements of the humanist vision...
...America under the New Deal, Britain and to some extent the U.S...
...The threat of holooaust engendered by the superpowers becomes less period d perhaps a and the imminent than the possibility of nuclear longer range beyond...
...The chastenSOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 31 rigid political hierarchy...
...But even accepting for a moment his dark prospect, much will depend on its extent and pace-and Heil’broner agrees that there are tremendous variables for both...
...promise to und2zrite developmental aid for both countries.’’ The attack on DISSENTis a case history of ideological blindness to the printed page...
...But, when you think of it, are not precisely such more-or-less sharp convulsions the way in which major social problems are usually “solved...
...Considering the degree of adaptability the industrial societies by and large have shown in recent decades, even under stress, and the amount of public control their economies have accepted, however reluctantly, there seems room for at least a moderate optimism regarding a continued, if not uninterrupted, movement in the Western world toward some version of social democracy...
...Socialism and Scarcity Though it is the policy of DISSENTnot to review books by its editors, we are printing below two discussions, sent in simultaneously but independently, of Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect...
...0 addition of Heilbroner’s ecological dimension would leave even less...
...Indeed, might not the people of such a threatened society look upon the “self-indulgence” of unfettered intellectual expression with much the same mixed feelings that we hold with respect to the ways of a vanished aristocracy...
...Once on the road to authoritarianism, the latter prospect seems by far the more probable...
...Only an authoritarian system will, in his view, be able to call forth the mass consent and to exercise the authority necessary for new values, measures, and sacrifices...
...It is a psychological explanation: the feeling of security provided by the knowledge that “Father knows best...
...SOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 37 It may also be argued that in a deeply felt emergency, democratic regimes can become at least as capable as authoritarian ones of mobilizing national energies...
...39 and political influence of the workers to such an extent that many of them lost interest, if they ever really had any, in a deep-going structural transformation...
...In this sense, all gods, heathen or Christian, have had real existence...
...26, 1974): Chomsky’s penchant for playing fast and loose with quotations again betrays him...
...It may be that democracy, freedom, justice, cooperation, social order-the good life-can be redefined to fit new circumstances and new attitudes...
...Indeed, U.S...
...And even if, in calculating the effects on resources and environment, one adds with Heilbroner the potential consequences of (necessarily slow) industrialization in the Third World, one would have to balance these effects by the softening of the ppulation pressure that this very industrialization woulid entail...
...America under the New Deal, Britain and to some extent the U.S...
...And since they would be based on “quasi-military” mobilizations, would it not be far more likely that they would enter into disastrous militarypolitical adventures in a new age of imperialism...
...And who, one wonders, is to exercise this authority...
...As an example, any sane formula for maintaining a tenuous international orderthe elemental precondition to human survival and economic growth-must allow for the interplay between the current aspirations of people and the technical and political means of satisfying them...
...Population increase has not proceeded by geometric progression, nor has the food supply conformed to the predicted snail’s pace of arithmetic progression...
...Granting Heilbroner’s assumption of the need for “welcomed hierarchies of power and strongly felt bonds of peoplehood,” however, it is unlikely that scenarios of liberation from the psychological and political molds of the past are on the agenda, either in such countries as China or in advanced industrial nations...
...At present rates of industrial growth, yes...
...Even a conservative, business-oriented Administration could not stop the trend toward expanded legislation in this field, and it could only partially slow down enforcement...
...In his words: This latent function [of willing acquiescence in the exercise of political authority] is to provide a sense of psychological security by recreating the accustomed relationship of sub-and super-ordinationto which our long period of helpless dependency [in the family] has accustomed us...
...The argument for this conclusion is decep- the amount of energy expended within, say, tively simple: delineating the external ohal- 150 years, would begin to raise temperatures lenges of the interactive effects of pop-by several degrees, precipitating serious cliulation growth, war, and environmental matic disturbances and raising the imperative deterioration, Heilbroner then estimates the of leveling off, indeed, of cutting back levels human capacity for response by offering of production...
...A new millennium is looming into sight, and with it come, as they did a thousand years ago, moods of apocalypse...
...By drawing out some of the contradictory implications of these assumptions, Heilbroner clears the way for a final assessment that closes off two utopian modes of “resolving” global problems...
...I ‘would still hold with Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom, 1941) that such a flight into an illusory security represents an abdication of responsibility and that it played an important part in the erection of a total and, in the end, totally destructive system...
...To substantiate this somber assessment, Heilbroner offers some hypotheses about the political dimensions olf “human nature...
...Operating differently in various parts of the world, the safety valve of potential growth lent substance to at least some elements of the humanist vision...
...The military...
...His “iron law” that population increase would outrun food supplies within decades, based on erroneous interpretations of some trends in his time, has been spectacularly disproved by history...
...In “Final Reflections on the Human Prospect,” a sort of coda, Heilbroner’s exercise in social forecasting does not lead to a death sentence for the human enterprise, but it comes perilously close...
...That authoritarian dictatorships might arise in the kinds of social circumstances sketched by Heilbroner seems plausible...
...Surely this dimension of intellectual inquiry, only touched upon in The Human Prospect, invites further attention...
...the increase of known mineral and energy reserves in step with consumption...
...The fallibility of previous apocalyptic predictions might make us cautious, be they based on such cablbalistic calculations as those of Sabbatai Zevi or such “scientific” calculations as those of Malthus...
...In either eventuality it seems beyond dispute that the present orientation of society must change...
...vides the space for resolving miajor social Heilbroner previews the conclusion of The problems everywhere, albeit at an uneven Human Prospect by declaring man's outlook rate and with different consequences for variand the hope that can be held for his limits Of industrial activity ifflpOSed by the future prospect seems to be very slim indeed...
...If Malthus’s poor record as a prophet has not prevented his periodic resurrection, one is surprised that his failure to allow for changes in social mores and for the introduction of new technology has not discredited him for an economist of Heilbroner’s stature...
...The trend toward exhaustion of resources may be reversed by technological and social developments, which may make economically feasible access to new deposits, new methods of extraction and reprocessing, and substitution of synthetic materials...
...they now do not have nor are they likely to develop the strong unity of national purpose that would require...
...In his book, Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Heilbroner singles out three areas for his prediction of doom: overpopulation, waste of natural resources, extravagant use of energy...
...By drawing out some of the contradictory implications of these assumptions, Heilbroner clears the way for a final assessment that closes off two utopian modes of “resolving” global problems...
...Taking a moderate view, one might maintain that, in the long-range perspective of survival, there is no sane alternative to continuing efforts to limit the power and wealth of corporations while also pressing for economic advances for large sectors of the working class...
...Among his works, available in English, are Toward a Marxist Humanism (1968), The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positive Thought (1968), Marxism and Beyond (1968), and The Devil and Scripture (1974...
...Is there really no prospect for a democratic way, a democratic social order governed by concern for the welfare and freedom of its citizens...
...SOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 33 II George Eckstein Heading for Apocalypse...
...Barrington Moore has made the crucial point that its built-in mechanism for correction is the redeeming feature of even the worst democracy, its absence the greatest flaw of even the most benign authoritarian regime...
...Can we assume, then, that a new era of scarcity will bring new impulses toward this type of authoritarian “socialism...
...The chastenSOCIALISM AND SCARCITY 31 ing experiences of this century have, of course, tempered the optimism implicit in suoh a vision, prompting a number d pessimistic revisions, but all were held together by the assumption of long-term economic growth...
...promise to und2zrite developmental aid for both countries.’’ The attack on DISSENTis a case history of ideological blindness to the printed page...
...Western intellectuals, according to Heilbroner, have the duty to prepare themselves and others for the sacrifices that the future will exact, and to redefine the “legitimate” boundaries of freedom and responsibility...
...I admire the certitude with which some strands in a very complex skein of interacting physical and social phenomena are extrapolated into an indefinite future...
...The threat of holooaust engendered by the superpowers becomes less period d perhaps a and the imminent than the possibility of nuclear longer range beyond...
...This idyll is presented with little enthusiasm, for obvious reasons: “many of these possible attributes of a postindustrial society are deeply repugnant . . .” to Heilbroner’s “twentieth-century temper” as well as incompatible with his “most treasured privileges”-the “. . . freedom to order one’s life as one pleases . . .” and to indulge in “the most extravagant and heretical thoughts...
...Kant‘s critique [of this idea] is of no avail: if a man imagines that he owns 100 dollars, if this intuition is real for him, then the imaginary 100 dollars may have the same value for him as I00 real ones...
...Nelw technologies-not only in cultivation, fertilizers, breeding, pest control, but also in such fields as transport and storage-have reduced the share of those employed in agriculture in the advanced countries since Malthus’s day from 80 percent to between 3.5 and 15 percent today, freeing the majority of the people in the West for the production of other consumer goods that had previously been reserved for a privileged few...
...There are ingenuous reasons for exaggerated conclusions-what matters most is the emotional thrust to apocalypse...
...Has not Moloch ruled...
...But would it not be wrong to extrapolate the current gap between population growth and productivity increase, without taking into account the likelihood that it will be narrowed at both ends-the birthrate flattening out for demographic reasons and being reduced by industrialization (the most effective known inducement to birth control), and labor productivity slowly rising with new agricultural techniques and industrialization...
...B. Bruce-Briggs, in the July 1974 Commentary, makes a number of plausible points in refutation: among them, the sharp drop in the birth rate in industrial nations and in others with rapid economic growth...
...we might also remember the at-least-partial reforms achieved since then by imperfect democratic systems...
...He might, for instance, have considered the large part played by the recent and rapid introduction of modern medical technology and public health organization into preindustrial societies...
...Without such political control, one suspects, liberation from elemental forms of misery would never have come about...
...underdeveloped nations might begin the long road to survival through authoritarian revolutionary governments that minimized the inevitably brutal ascent from economic chaos...
...and there is a real danger that an unqualified social apocalyptism, especially if coming from relatively affluent segments of the middle class, will be used to deprive the poor of things they deserve and need as much as anyone else...
...He might, for instance, have considered the large part played by the recent and rapid introduction of modern medical technology and public health organization into preindustrial societies...
...intervention the followingyear...
...But if we accept Heilbroner’s assessment of the ecological imperatives, what becomes of the politics of the long haul...
...I do not mean to slight the importance of political activity, only to indicate the socioeconomic medium in which it occurs...
...Nor could anything less than an authoritarian system handle the tensions he expects from the clash between the industrial world and have-not nations no longer willing to suffer their inferior status...
...he must also record his failure to imagine a more attractive world...
...it is another, to succumb to them oneself...
...The main body of the text (defines the external challenge and brings into clearest focus the middle-range prospects for adapting to it...
...This critical probe lions degenerates, the disparity between wealthy, industrial countries and the poverty involves an interplay of three rough timeof nations under revolutionary regimes raises frames: the short run of a decade (which he the possibility of international wars of reconsiders unpredictable) ; the intermediatedistribution...
...It is to Heilbroner’s credit that he does not hide his personal dismay about such an authoritarian system and the reduction in personal and intellectual freedom it would engender...
...What tlhe authoritarian systems brought us by way of solutions to yesterday’s problems we all know...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI,the Polish philosopher, now lives in exile and teaches at Oxford University in England...
...In place of prodigalities of consumption must come new frugal attitudes...
...Africa, concluding that despite programs of birth control and the Malthusian checks Of ButHeilbroner does not wish to project a . . . is painful, difficult, .perhaps desperate, ous people, Heilbroner calls attention to the famine and the race between Popu-science-fiction apocalypse...
...Here the timetable for doomsday becomes of decisive importance...
...The dangers in the current wave of apocalyptic writing can be illustrated by the provocative treatise of a man whose lucidity and concern I greatly respect and who avoids most of the oversimplifications of other prophets of disaster-Robert Heilbroner...
...Which does not, of course, eliminate the possibility that certain amenities-safe environment, safe and pleasant working conditions, better health and education, cultural activity (all d which might be called ‘‘the new affluence”)-may come to be considered as desirable as an accumulation of material goods...
...order can at best evolve into a stationary capitalism over the medium range, can we continue to support measures for the economic advancement of nonowning classes 32 PETER CLECAK over, say, two more generations...
...A new millennium is looming into sight, and with it come, as they did a thousand years ago, moods of apocalypse...
...Though these systems will doubtless change in unpredictable ways, some of their worst features seem less subject to alteration...
...The mixture of patriotism and revolutionary ideology, no less than the formation of rigid hierarchies legitimized by demigods, has been used to advantage in eliciting the efforts of masses of !people...
...There are ingenuous reasons for exaggerated conclusions-what matters most is the emotional thrust to apocalypse...
...but if not, economic improvement of the lives of people in the short run required no elaborate justification...
...This vision was problematic, an attempt to discern the most hopeful outlines of a future within obvious, if not precisely measurable, limits: there were limits to human will, limits on the capacities of both capitalism and socialism, and limitations on the future imposed by the cruel legacy of the past...
...In place of the long-established encouragement of industrial production must come its careful restriction and longterm diminution within society...
...A reconsideration may be needed in any case: should such an optimistic speculation as that issued by the Hudson Institute-a global population of 15-20 billion people with an average per capita income of $20,000-prove to be vaguely accurate, it obviously would have to be achieved on the bases of existing socioeconomic systems...
...Caution is called for even more when we include the elusive and complex social factors in our equations: the vast array of social actions, reactions, and interactions, often unknown or unknowable...
...A number of urgent questions present themselves...
...But if we accept Heilbroner’s assessment of the ecological imperatives, what becomes of the politics of the long haul...
...This would be a shame if I am correct in regarding An Inquiry into the Human Prospect as the most important work of one of our leading social critics...
...The point is hardly new...
...In the United States (and with variations, in other Western nations), democratic socialists-indeed a majority of those on the Left-have held to a politics of gradualism, a combination of socialist education, action within or at the fringes of the Democratic party, single-issue causes, civil rights activity, and the like...
...The intrusion of this additional di- lem of environmental deterioration...
...The crucial importance of political power and authority organized in bureaucratically modern states leads to a consideration of the humtan propensity for political obedience...
Vol. 22 • January 1975 • No. 1
