EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY-NEW PROBLEMS, NEW PROSPECTS: CAN SOCIALISM COPE WITH THE CRISIS OF VALUES ?

...The experiential critics, whose indictments I shall examine in a moment, are a mixed group, not all on the left, a group whose members often disagree with each other...

...Private commercial television, supported by advertising, in general trivializes culture, homogenizes it, and commercializes it...

...But, for those above a subsistence level, the relationship does not hold—at least the studies on subjective well-being find that the relation between income and life satisfaction among the better off is quite tenuous...

...We cannot state with any conviction or clarity the answer to the question, Who am I? (7) In modernity, we cannot relate easily or lovingly to one another...

...Further, while these three capitalist values represent important elements in any reasonable value arsenal, they do not help answer the indictments of the experiential critics...

...The economic pattern," says Joseph Schumpeter, "is the matrix of logic...

...They are conservators of value...

...Bureaucratic socialism offers no relief from extrinsic rewards, but the professionalization of work, where the rewards lie partially in fulfilling internalized standards, offers some clues...

...5) Partly as a triumph of this instrumental calculus, our pleasure, play, psychologically free time have all been banished from the kingdom of modernity...

...This means, contrary to the arguments of the existentialists, that without social support, only the strongest, best educated, unusual person can, out of his own experience, forge a set of purposes and values that give orientation, justify sacrifice, and produce commitment...

...Can a commercial society generate values and commitments, a sense of some heroic purpose to life, a transcendental vision (for some, anyway) of larger purpose, an amelioration of the dailyness of life...

...The severities of this idea have been greatly mitigated by the welfare state, but, as conceived, this applies only to economic welfare, not to those other aspects of being that lend dignity and purpose to life...

...I may be efficient—but who am I? How can I inform my life by the principles of free contract...

...286 This culture and these institutions are themselves the sources of value loss, the erosion of the kinds of experience the experiential critics reveal to be sadly missing...

...finds an answer...

...The capitalist posture is one of social irresponsibility, as reflected in the idea 287 of individualism mentioned above...

...At the same time, the idea of governmentmanaged experience (as contrasted, for example, to government-managed incomes policies) is frightening and, to tell the truth, initially unattractive...

...But the institutional critics are stronger in their treatment of equity problems...

...In this sense, a market society tends to subtract pleasure from some activities...

...8) Modernity—because of its competitiveness, its role and status conflicts, its stimulus and decision overloads, its insecurities— is uniquely marked by strain and anxiety...

...The difference between the two systems of thought might be captured, not by the old cliche regarding individualism versus collectivism, but by a difference in emphasis: the capitalist system may be thought to rely upon the individual, while the socialist system cares about the individual...

...That is, to some degree, the support and creation of culture must be provided by agencies that are independent of market pressures, as well as independent of political pressures...

...In one study, standard of living is a less important source of a sense of well-being than noneconomic activities and less important than family felicity.' In another, it ranks behind interesting work, friendship, a sense of competence and appreciation on the job, as well as good family relations.' Further, in a third study, this very sense of well-being is strongly linked to a sense of purpose and commitment...

...Rather, says von Mises, economics is about "rational action...

...The Experiential Criticism THE INDICTMENT is leveled at modern industrialized society, sometimes specifically capitalist, sometimes couched so as to embrace Communist and mixed societies as well...

...We have little experience in conscious social determination of these cultural values, but they are crucial to the experiential critique and, to that extent, crucial to the case for democratic socialism...

...not, therefore, on the failure of the unself-reliant individual...

...Attention to economic problems, to productivity and income distribution, does not guarantee the solution to experiential problems...

...it does not, therefore, apply to many work activities where the problem lies more in job enrichment or work redesign...

...1) Modern society has lost its capacity to develop in its members some sense of purpose that transcends their immediate interests and goals, thus denying them a source of meaning in their lives other than immediate, philosophically and humanly trivial, pleasures and instrumentalities...

...As Mumford says, we are "unlovable and incapable of surrendering to love...

...It is more than a framework for individual action...

...In the same vein, it is said that modernity degrades its great symbols through which meaning once flowed like blood transfusions the condensation symbols of religion, the symbols of national history and consciousness, the elevating symbols of transcendent vision —thus robbing life of "enchantment...

...as Fromm says, we develop "marketing personalities," selling our protean personalities to the highest bidder...

...And, given equality of opportunity and responsibility for my own fate, what opportunities are worth having and what fate shall I choose...

...If others, in the important economic arena, are substitutable for each other, if they are different only in their productive capacities, society seems to invite us, or at least to train us, to treat each other in this fashion...

...The answer is not wholly clear...

...The fourth reason for believing that the market is a value-destroying institution lies in the comparison between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards...

...They include Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, Philip Slater and Theodore Roszak, Hannah Arendt and Sebastian de Grazia, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, T. W. Adorno, and to some extent Jurgen Habermas...

...they do not help with the problems outlined by the experiential critics...

...The authorities are too distant to be moved by individual petition, bureaucracy is too cumbersome and rule-bound to yield to protest...

...they internalize what was external, and ask of these institutions and practices "How do they feel...

...BEFORE FRAMING a democratic socialist answer, let us imagine two cherished ideals have been achieved: we have won the kind of justice that Rawls has argued for, and we have established, more or less, some minimal socialist ideals...

...599-605...

...And, second, the culture has led those above the subsistence level to believe that increased income will buy Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, and Willard L. Rodgers, The Quality of American Life (New York: Russell Sage, 1976), p. 76...

...the world of work has so permeated our leisure world that there is no real leisure to be found, or, if it is found, it will be harried and harassed, rather than rejuvenating and refreshing...

...There is important and welcome evidence that people in modern Western societies are experiencing a kind of "sociological release," are, indeed, codifying their own experience to create idiosyncratic patterns of thought.5 But even allowing for this long-term and continuing process of individuation, it is true that most people can no more create their own life-giving values than they can create their own religions...

...Without moral elements, symbols fail to enlarge purpose...

...Bureaucracies, human communities (including those within capitalist firms) resist such changes...

...I think it is the case that the commercial culture and the bourgeois society were morally defensible and congenial to a sense of purpose for at least two centuries because they could justifiably focus on institutions and practices, rather than on experiences and their subjective meanings...

...Finally, to return to an earlier theme, the differences between markets and such social organizations as firms, government bureaus, unions, even universities, is the difference between value-eroding and value-creating institutions...

...What is quite clear, however, is that neither the sale of cultural services in the market nor advertising support, two marketoriented devices, serve the interests of high culture, from which high purposes and enduring values flow...

...3) Modern society so attenuates its high culture, so intrudes its mass culture into everyone's (including the intellectual's) consciousness, that civilization itself is eroded...

...it enshrines a false objectivity in people's consciousness, an objectivity that inhibits purposeful thinking and is lifeimpoverishing...

...The change from a focus on institutions and practices to experience, individual purposes, and meanings represents a major reinterpretation of culture, comparable to that in Weber's analysis of the transformation of nonmaterialist Calvinism into the Protestant work ethic, in Durkheim's analysis of the transformation from mechanical to organic solidarity, in the problem Merton diagnoses as the mismatching of ends and means—the social inattention to ethical norms to guide the ends of "success," in Rieffs interpretation of the decline of the "renunciatory ethic" and the rise of the more permissive and remissive Freudian ethic...

...Parsons's universalism has proved its historic force, not in creative acts, as he would have it, but in the destruction of humanism...

...10) The sense of "unfreedom," a stifling sense of constraint, abounds in modern society, due to the multiple technological constraints on unplanned action, the throttling of spontaneity, the bureaucratic rules and procedures, the impersonal controls of the marketplace, the meritocratic standards of human worth...

...privately supported religion thrives where publicly supported religion declines (and is often "unfair" because of its coercive tax on noncommunicants...

...If that is so, is there a socialist answer to the experiential critique...

...This experiential critique (as I shall call it) has multiple targets but two main themes emerge from the discussion: the loss of subjective well-being, and the loss of purpose, value, commitment—in an ambiguous but important word, the loss of meaning informing life's experiences...

...In the end, the central contemporary argument for socialism is not that planned production will make us richer or reduce waste, not that nationalizing the means of production will improve social efficiency (for it may not), not even that socialism is more equitable in its distribution of goods and services (though that is important), but rather that market-oriented societies, having done their productive and destructive work, no longer adequately serve our current needs...

...It is a humane principle, because its focus is on the way the needs of the person reflect the deficiencies of society, rather than on the deficiencies of the individual's character that make him need what he does...

...For all its democratic freedoms of speech and association, modern society is thus experienced as humanly unfree...

...On the first point, capitalism represents a justification for an institutional framework within which each person can pursue whatever values he chooses...

...The second argument for the superiority of socialism as a value-creating system of thought (and practice) has to do with the posture of the two systems toward the individual...

...As reported above, capitalist economics "makes no distinction among ends because it considers them all equally legitimate...

...Values other than rationality can, of course, inform market economics, as Okun reveals in his discussion of Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-off, but they are not inherent in the market economist's discipline...

...3 What has confused us on this point is, first, that for the poor, money does indeed buy a relief from misery, but not happiness, not a positive sense of subjective well-being...

...Economists, the champions and priests of the market, report that their discipline is not about value creation or transmission, which Mancur Olson assigns to sociology, but rather about "the ways in which people strive to obtain whateVer it is they want" (Olson...

...Would not the ethos of such a society, as anthropologists use the term "ethos," tend to erode such a transformation, cheapen its ethics, mock the brave efforts of the culture-producing institutions...

...What the experiential critics see and others do not is that we have often confused external conditions with internal personal meanings, social message sent with personal message received and, above all, circumstantial change with experiential change...

...What the democratic socialists offer, then, is not a monopoly of cultural institutions, but a sense of responsibility for cultural nourishment in all its diverse manifestations...

...Homo Ludens, who survived the Puritans, has been murdered by the Moderns...

...For our purposes the point to be made is that a market society deprives us of the real sources of value, of life satisfaction and purpose, by distracting us with a false promise, a false equation...

...First, on the matter of justice, we note that the contract behind the "veil of ignorance" has been signed, that everyone has agreed that the society he is about to enter will have no more inequality than is compatible with the "difference principle," namely, that only those privileges for the more advantaged will be allowed that improve the position of the least advantaged...

...In these respects, another kind of society, embracing socialist principles, would do a better job...

...But we are beginning to discover empirically, what has been suspected by many all along, that the relationship between money (as income) and many kinds of life satisfaction, including a sense of purpose, is weak...

...But to the extent that the central problems facing modern societies are no longer those of the traditional societies from which we sprang, And are, instead, the uncertain meanings of our experiences, the dominance of the market is no longer justified...

...The contrasting socialist principle is one of solicitude, of shared responsibility for each other's fates, including all those matters that make a person less than he might be...

...Pleasure . . . must in some way yield energy for the economy" (Philip Slater...

...Indeed, since the income distribution of modern societies is generally more equalitarian than that of traditional societies, and since it is precisely the quality of experience in modern society that is the target of the indictment, however valuable equality may be in ethical terms, it does not answer the experiential indictment...

...Caring about the individual means attention to those circumstances of life that impoverish it, regardless of whether this is economic or value impoverishment...

...Using the term "intrinsic rewards" to mean the satisfactions that a person believes he derives from an activity, quite independent of pay or praise many psychological studies now find that extrinsic rewards, especially pay, diminish, rather than complement, the satisfactions that people receive from otherwise enjoyable activities.4 But the market deals only with extrinsic rewards, with pay for service...

...Limiting the Scope of the Self-Regulating Market THE BEGINNING of an answer, I think, lies in the contrast between the market and other forms of organized decision-making...

...These are subjective, psychological themes, contrasting with a larger body of previous criticism dealing with institutions and practices...

...The intelligent concern for the welfare of the individual in a society where more decisions are made by calculated purpose, and fewer by anonymous market forces, would be more felicitous of our human condition...

...Would it follow that men, in their daily lives, were relieved of rolestrain and other sources of anxiety, that they did not manipulate each other, that they had secure identities, and that the prosaic life (in these enlarged bureaucracies...

...Instead, we treat each other as abstractions, or as machines, or as instrumentalities for our own purposes...

...In their historic mission to substitute something better (more efficient, more popular) for something established and traditional—no mean historical task—it has been the business of markets to destroy old values, myths, communities, friendships, religions, symbols...

...The need for such an answer, and the socialist advantage in dealing with the problem, are both increased by the central fact that the quality of experience in a society does not take care of itself...

...but the point is that our attention to frameworks of justice and equality, however important they may be, have distracted us from paying attention to the subjective qualities of living in those frameworks...

...Its central theme, I think, is value loss: the lost capacity for transcendent vision, either secular or religious, the loss of our powers of reflection and perspective regarding ourselves, the loss of socially given meanings, the loss of emotionally charged symbolism, a lost capacity for endowing the self with value...

...While it may be that living economists, as distinct from the aspirations of their interpreters, do not survive the strain of such ascetic pretensions, the institution around which the claims are built, the market, reflects this value-void concept...

...285 (whose experience is most relevant to this discussion) the appraisals of private and public culture-producing institutions reveals a mixed balance of results...

...3 Philip Shaver and Jonathan Freedman, "Your Pursuit of Happiness," Psychology Today, 10 (August 1976), p. 75...

...But they have bite...

...In the West 5 See e.g., Robert E. Lane, "The Effects of the Market Economy on Political Personality," prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2-5, 1976...

...Can an experiential socialism guide, without dictating, the development of these norms and values, avoiding the pathologies, say, of the Chinese cultural revolution...

...First, the discipline that interprets the workings of the market, economics, claims for the market a value-free position...

...9) At the same time, modernity offers to many only the most prosaic life: routine without reason, boredom without relief, experience devoid of enrichment, interpersonal relations without warmth, struggle without purpose...

...private educational institutions seem more immune to these evils, indeed, in many ways they are better custodians of culture than public institutions...

...They need help...

...it is a shared condition within a framework...

...And the principle does not tell us how to develop alternatives to wages in a socialist society, or how to distribute those wages...

...But it points to an inherent feature of the "free labor market" characterized by monetary incentives and rewards that might more easily be avoided by other reward systems, including those characteristic of subsistence agriculture, independent artisans, the professions, various Bobby J. Calder and Barry M. Staw, "Self-Perception of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31 (1975) pp...

...The third reason for thinking of the market as a value-destroying institution lies in the relationship between money and utility...

...and direct private support for the arts (museums, galleries, opera, dance, theater fellowships for writers) seems no better or worse than similar public support—but public support is increasing in most Western countries where the market is found insufficient and philanthropy fails to be adequate...

...Markets provide efficient and responsive allocations of goods and services and must be relied upon for these purposes in a decent socialist society, but they are destructive of social values...

...A socialist society, which employs that market for allocation of goods and services but confines the market to a smaller area of society, minimizes the valuedestroying features of the market...

...Thus, if the self is substitutable for others in the marketplace, a person will have trouble defining his own uniqueness, his identity...

...But such symbolic enrichment may not be able to stand commercialism or withstand the powerful market forces offering daily reinforcement to monetary symbolism, a symbolism to which no such greater purpose easily attaches...

...its philosophy, dominated by science, copes well with explanations (efficient causes) but not purposes (final causes...

...q 288...

...This is for several reasons...

...In short, the modern man might say: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world...

...Values as Social Products THE REDUCTION of the scope and importance of the market would not, by itself, create the lost values, meanings, purposes that form a common theme in the indictments of the experiential critics...

...4) Rational calculation and an emphasis on cognition has (a) fractured the image of man, (b) split mind from emotion and crushed the latter, and (c) weakened the imagination, the creative side of man...

...The reasons for thinking that socialism can do better in value creation and maintenance have to do with (a) the nature of the theories themselves, (b) their postures toward the individual, and (c) the difference between markets and organizations...

...Some mixture of public and private "philanthropy" is necessary...

...If, as Galbraith argues, efficiency is an overrated value in modern society, there would be a gain in this shift of emphasis in any case, but the gain emphasized here is the enlistment of substantive purpose: the question, "Efficiency for what...

...had been banished...

...This is not an accidental feature of the market, for the modern market can work only through price, the monetary unit...

...Thus even if we ignore the market economist's claim of indifference to ends, and uncover the values underlying the single value they profess, rationality, these values are not the right values for this time...

...They erode the sources of value and purpose, trivialize life, complicate the search for identity, and fracture human relations...

...This principle is limited to those cases where the activity itself is enjoyable...

...Some sense that the society itself is purposive, has a rationale, is morally defensible, is probably required...

...The second argument for believing that socialism can handle these problems better than capitalism rests on the Durkheimian premise that meaning and value are social products...

...The theme recurs throughout the 11 points made below, but it is especially the case with the first...

...The indictments are overdrawn, poorly documented, rarely include a comparison with experiences in other societies, sometimes contradict each other, do not specify the incidence or frequency of the pathology, reveal great ignorance of cause-effect relationships, and, such as they are, offer solutions only in the most global, unsatisfactory terms...

...rather than "How are they structured...

...Both are utopian, both are idealistic, but it is possible for capitalist economists to wash their hands of all value questions (other than rationality), while socialist economists cannot...

...I propose to sketch a socialist answer to the problems set forth by these experiential critics, especially the problem of value loss...

...Market rationality has served its historic purpose...

...Democracy, freedom from constraint, freedom of contract, equality of opportunity, the reduction of poverty are all worthy ideals, but, as discussed, they deal with externals...

...281 Let us first examine the indictment of the experiential critics and then seek some initial outline for an adequate socialist answer...

...Without these informing values, the market would not work rationally...

...kinds of self-employment, communal organizations (even after due allowance is made for the mixed motives and satisfactions involved in these cases...

...Second, the principle that facilitates value erosion, the principle of substitutability, is integral to the market system...

...And time set aside for ceremonial or symbolic reverence, as in special holidays, becomes homogenized in economic time budgets so that no time is special: an occasion for celebrating historical continuity, or national beginnings, or heroic sacrifices...

...2 Norman M. Bradburn and David Caplovitz, Reports on Happiness (Chicago: Aldine, 1965...

...Moreover, we do not know that persons living in an equalitarian society are themselves more moral, happier, or more fulfilled, or that daily experiences are enriched with purpose...

...Of course, Rawls did not pretend that it would...

...The consequence is either compulsive 282 striving to relieve these insecurities, or defeated resignation and apathy...

...To be oneself in such a world is not a tautology, but a problem" (Marshall Berman...

...Rawls's kingdom has come to pass and justice has finally been achieved...

...they adopt technological changes more slowly, unless they are faced with competition or outside challenges...

...This is not the case for the socialist, hence he must argue the case differently: efficiency in pursuit of equity...

...Laissez-faire in these respects has not been entirely felicitous, nor yet entirely disastrous...

...They are to be constrasted with such institutional critics on the left as the Webbs, Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, and Thorstein Veblen, or, among contemporary social critics, with Barrington Moore, Kenneth Galbraith, and Michael Harrington...

...In these ways does the principle of substitutability erode the sources of value...

...Weberian rationality has triumphed...

...or "Are they just...

...The institutionalization (in schools, hospitals, senior citizen homes, and so forth) of much of the population contributes to this sense of helplessness—a case, perhaps, of decision-underload...

...11) And finally, in this abbreviated list of indictments, modernity is said to induce a sense of helplessness or powerlessness...

...It rests in fact upon at least the following: efficiency values (implied by rationality), freedom values (especially of contract), and individualistic values, in the sense that each person is held to be responsible for his own life circumstances—broadly speaking, equality of opportunity...

...While it is true that the humanist socialists (including humanist Marxists) have addressed themselves to these questions, 283 sometimes drawing on the utopian socialist tradition, there is still a large gap to be filled...

...Can democratic socialists do better...

...Cold intelligence" has taken over...

...It requires the substitutability of people for each other, things (capital) for people, land for things...

...Money, fungible resources, was, of course, not invented by capitalism, but as Schumpeter points out, the monetary unit was employed by capitalism to facilitate economic rationality, a rationality that, he says, had a "conqueror's career" in almost all other aspects of life...

...But let us look more closely at the claim that market economics is value free...

...alternatively, if the monetary unit becomes a moralized symbol, the moral vision is itself eroded...

...But if we shift our glance from the individual trying to create values and look beyond the institutional support that might nourish those values to the larger society in which these problems are embedded, a major question comes into view...

...It focuses on means, not ends...

...This is Ellul's triumph of technique...

...6) Modernity has deprived its subjects of their sense of identity, thus robbing them of the enjoyment and security of an integrated personality...

...Does this, by itself, help to provide men with purposeful lives, give them norms for guiding those lives, enrich their culture with symbols of great meaning, provide them with secure identities...

...With the new emphasis on the subjective, the nature of experience, and the problem of value-loss, these justifications no longer serve adequately to justify the commercial culture and the institutions of capitalism...

...2) Modern society fails to provide its members with ethical norms or sanctified mores necessary to guide them through the endless choices presented, thus not only failing to help them decide what to do but also failing to help them know what they ought to do or what to expect from others...

...Cassirer argues that it is more important to think of man as animal symbolicum than as animal rationale, because the second depends on the first, and it is through the uses of meaningful symbols in art, science, myth and religion that "we can understand the new way open to man—the way to civilization...

...Moreover, "modern economics makes no distinction among ends because it considers them all equally legitimate" (von Mises...

...Since purposes, values, meanings (emotionally charged symbols) derive their nourishment from the culture of a society, the matter may be put in another form: should the culture of a society be left to market forces, to private enterprise, or should it not be the joint responsibility of public (governmental) and private agencies, the mixed cultural economy...

...Further, under market conditions, geographical places, binding communities together, such objects of reverence as in the concept of "homeland" become merely real estate...

...since there is no easy "exit" from "the system" (in spite of the occasional drop-out) one can only acquiesce and make a separate peace...

...In this respect it is quite unlike other social institutions, such as churches, families, governments...

...But socialism and socialist economics embody substantive principles around which collective purposes and justifications may be built: equality, justice, fraternity...

...Second, imagine that the socialists have come to power and have greatly enlarged the public sector, socialized many industries and brought others under public control, established a planned society, produce for use and not for profit, distribute income more or less according to needs and require effort according to ability...

...Further, in the domain of experience, there is no suggestion of an "unseen hand," no evolutionary mechanism, no dialectic of experience, no cybernetic device that moves society from routine, unfulfilling, daily experiences for a large share of its members toward a more fulfilling, purposeful, felicitous agenda of experience...

...284 some comparable increase in subjective wellbeing...