SOCIALISM AND THE GIFT RELATIONSHIP
Walzer, Michael
A few years ago, the New York Times carried a long article on the decline of philanthropy and volunteer service in the more advanced welfare states of Western Europe.' In such countries as...
...Or, it is another example of the gift relationship...
...The welfare state would surely be a disaster if the seeming omnicompetence of its officials led to a reduction in amateur helping and caretaking...
...The state, they felt, should take what was needed...
...Indeed, we have no other way to register the intensity of our commitments...
...It is probably fair to say that if one eliminates the first, the second won't survive for long...
...It would certainly be best if there were more than one committee...
...Since its officials must in any case make a selection, we have to expect that they will look for a range of opinions and styles that includes just enough of whatever seems "interesting" and even provocative to appease liberal consciences, and as little as possible of whatever seems radical, critical, unsafe for common eyes...
...They have no taxing power...
...It has not developed as far, for one thing, and it has tended to grow alongside of rather than to replace private charities...
...The gift relationship has flourished in many different cultures and under a wide range of economic conditions: in the primitive societies that anthropologists study, in Old Testament Israel, ancient China, 440 classical Greece and Rome, feudal Europe, and so on...
...I doubt that there ever were such neighborhoods...
...But there is another scale on which to measure the deep relations that make for a decent society...
...But it would be a sorry socialism if the gift relationship were ruled out and dissent made to hang entirely upon one or another kind of official subsidy...
...They are quite right to be so...
...For welfare officials can produce at best clean, well-lighted places—hospitals, day-care centers, old-age homes, and so on—intelligently managed, free from corruption and brutality...
...Its policy is nothing if not simple: the Administration has drastically cut governmental spending on welfare...
...Chosen how and by whom...
...But it is no affront to democracy (or equality) if a particular community, because of the philanthropic activity of its citizens, has better hospitals or more hospital visitors or a more humane program of outpatient care than a number of other communities...
...A PLURALIST WELFARE STATE need not be what it has been in the United States until now—a shoddy welfare state (and the pluralism an excuse for the shoddiness...
...The gift relation is one of the fundamental forms of social decency...
...They could choose organizations that were not directly involved in helping others, like the army (though the army, at least when it is a defending army, is certainly a public service), or they could choose organizations that were directly involved, like hospitals or old-age homes...
...The socialized economy would be their mutual aid program...
...They are really dissidents, and their opinions don't reflect those of any wellestablished group...
...But it is crucial to their election that candidates win the political and financial backing of some significant number of the people they want to represent...
...Of course, we also have to expect, along with the necessary development of the public sector, certain tendencies toward governmental overreach...
...How should we respond to their decline or their likely future decline...
...Titmuss would still want to claim, I expect, that the gift relation is better, and not only because a tax on blood would represent, within our cultural world, too great an attack on bodily integrity...
...That means that there has to be a place, even within a program of public provision, even when welfare is conceived as a matter of justice, for what Richard Titmuss calls, in his book of that name, "the gift relationship...
...Here is a new argument for market socialism and also for the maintenance, especially in the fields of politics and culture, of a petty-bourgeois economy...
...At least, that has been the moral effort of the left...
...That the state should be the only patron is a very bad idea...
...Equal access to the media: the principle is attractive, but it does have to be mediated by a committee, since there will never be paper or printing presses or distribution facilities enough for all the men and women ready and waiting to publish a magazine or to fill it with material...
...But they also require high levels of participation in small groups and local arrangements...
...And then, their independence will be a function of the kind of help they receive...
...The welfare state is not best understood as a bureaucratic substitute for older and better forms of neighborliness and mutuality...
...In fact, it is never unnecessary...
...So equality redeems charity...
...Only government officials could help them with the promptness and consistency to which they were, as citizens, entitled...
...They would function, that is, like philanthropic organizations, collecting money and then providing what can plausibly be called disinterested (if not necessarily warmhearted) services...
...They don't and they can't be directed by my own interests...
...We don't pay for articles, and that undoubtedly is the most important of the contributions we receive, possible only because almost all of our writers and editors earn their living elsewhere...
...it has cut taxes, and it has exhorted men and women, and companies and corporations, to increase their charitable contributions...
...Who decides...
...Would they (collectively) have paid for it...
...There would even be groups, like the American Jewish Committee today, ready to give to the editors they selected the freedom to defend positions that many of their members disliked...
...It has as much to do with compassion and solidarity as with justice...
...Why should we become the defenders of the bureaucratic state...
...Such people deserve our gratitude...
...it is the others, Maus's "rich almoners," who give charity its bad name on the left...
...their glory requires the dependency of the poor...
...Men and women might be paid some small amount of money to work on a parttime basis in an old-age home, say, or to help in the home of a disabled person...
...There is no reason why it cannot flourish also under conditions of socialist equality...
...Donors act out of a desire to help their fellow citizens, and they do help, and undoubtedly they feel some pride in having helped...
...438 The effort to mobilize followers, to collect time and money, isn't merely instrumental to the campaign, so that a benevolent government might help us dispense with it and get on to the important things...
...Imagine that same million dollars in the hands of a thousand different people—the distributed profits, say, of a local factory—and one could hardly collect a tenth of it for (any) charitable purpose...
...And that requires a society far livelier than the standard version of the welfare state, less routinized, full of energy and experiment, where men and women organize in a hundred different ways to help themselves and one another...
...The state cannot express such concerns or commitments...
...433 The argument is skillful and passionate...
...In a society more egalitarian than our own, one would have to search out a somewhat larger number of individuals...
...The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Pantheon, 1971...
...At least, it is no affront if the conditions that prevail are really a function of the focused energy and not of the available resources of the citizens...
...Imagine a tax on blood, a legal requirement that every citizen contribute so many pints each year...
...But can pluralism be sustained in a society that does not permit great accumulations of wealth...
...The conservative critique of the welfare state, insofar as it isn't merely an ideological cover for the dismantling of the welfare state, touches on points of interest to socialists too...
...It is the campaign...
...But if we are concerned with the political uses of wealth, it would be far better to redistribute the wealth than to ban private gifts...
...But now the old pattern was under attack...
...And in addition to all the making of money and the giving of it, there is a great deal of keeping...
...The claim that private resources must supplement public resources, that gifts must supplement grants, is serious...
...All these are products and services that we buy like any other consumer, without regard to our political views—though friendly printers sometimes give us a "price...
...It is impossible, indeed, in totalitarian states, where even donations of time and energy are suspect...
...Nor is there ever audience enough...
...5 Titmuss studied the different procedures through which countries collect blood for hospital use, focusing chiefly on purchase and donation, the market on the one hand and a kind of popular philanthropy on the other...
...The distributive criteria might be complex: popularity (predicted readership) would have to be taken into account, but the committee could also concern itself with diversity, geographical distribution, the relative competence of the would-be editors, the coherence, forcefulness, and originality of their proposals, and so on...
...I have stressed the contributions of ordinary men and women...
...And both of these depend upon the gift relationship and then upon the existence of groups capable of establishing and sustaining that relationship...
...They paid their taxes and they were done...
...Notes 1 New York Times July 2, 1978...
...The work would still be amateur work, and it would still represent a charitable donation, but the service would be open to people at different income levels...
...Our tiny staff receives subsistence wages (or less), a practice, as I said in the first part of this essay, that is common on the left generally, though it is certainly easier for young activists than for older ones...
...both management and caretaking were increasingly professionalized...
...Running for office shouldn't be a matter of buying media time and advertising one's positions (or oneself), but rather of hard work in wards and precincts, close ties to unions and interest groups, years of arguing, explaining, taking positions...
...nor does it make for deference and dependency among those in need...
...Some 400 readers make contributions, plus all the editors...
...part in managing philanthropic organizations, while the actual caretaking and the face-toface relations with the poor, the sick, the old, and the very young were sustained by women...
...but they too were fully prepared, the tax rate being what it was, to give less to charity...
...II: Politics and Private Gifts How would a group of political dissidents in a socialist society go about publishing a magazine called Dissent...
...And I suspect that an independent shopkeeper is more likely than a state official to find a little room for Dissent...
...It is certainly true that whatever variety exists among political magazines today is due chiefly to the fact that there are wealthy men and women, with different political commitments, willing to spend (and lose) their money...
...if they can't do that, they don't deserve to be helped...
...How is ordinary life managed, shaped, enabled, and controlled...
...the state would have to step in with its taxing power and all its rules and regulations...
...For private philanthropy had always eluded governmental coordination, and volunteers worked at jobs from which other people, who needed the work more, might well make a living...
...And the connected activities of fund-raising and decision-making involve ordinary citizens in work that parallels and supplements the work of officials and generally increases the level of socially useful activity...
...In the production of articles and essays, as of poems and novels, supply always outruns demand...
...Like any wealthy philanthropist, welfare officials can create a client population of men and women whom they sustain, so to speak, in their helplessness...
...Socialism ought to multiply the number of such groups and widen the constituencies upon which they draw...
...1) A program of national service would mix coercion and voluntary work...
...The great majority of citizens are capable of giving blood...
...This, the Reaganites argue, is the American way...
...The petty-bourgeois economy is the natural habitat of the little magazine...
...Dissent was founded by a group of friends, none of them wealthy, who contributed the money themselves or solicited a small circle of comrades and political allies...
...The expression has to be private, whether at the individual or group level...
...democracy requires larger subsidies more widely distributed...
...Maybe so, though there is at at least an equal danger, as in Orwell's 1984, that state stores would do the same thing...
...How could their rights be made to wait upon the vagaries and perennial inadequacies of private giving...
...That the state should be a patron of politics and the arts is entirely sensible...
...The movements and parties of the left have been the primary locus of selfhelp and mutual aid in the modern world...
...And that means, once again, to turn from state subsidies to private gifts...
...One can imagine the accumulation of money through fund-raising campaigns on a far broader scale than is possible today, with more citizens contributing precisely because they know that they can't depend upon a few rich almoners...
...This would greatly improve the supply, since it would increase the number of donors and enable medical authorities to choose among them, collecting blood only from the healthiest citizens, much as we conscript only the able-bodied for military service...
...For the gift is crucial to democratic politics...
...Work in hospitals and schools represented a kind of extramural domesticity, and it was most readily undertaken by housewives who had help in the house, or grown-up children, and time on their hands...
...Conceivably, the state can spin off groups of this sort, particularly at the local level...
...Anything more than that, men and women must provide for themselves and one another...
...I say this with some hesitation...
...And the argument against charity is indeed connected to the argument against beggary...
...A few petty princes will do us no harm, and their gifts can do much good...
...And, most important, a welfare state 435 in which large numbers of ordinary citizens participate is less likely to isolate its clients...
...Independence is born in political action, when previously silent men and women organize and speak out for themselves and one another...
...It has been true of many cultures, otherwise very different, that men and women of great wealth win glory for themselves by great gifts...
...The best among the poor are never grateful" for charity, Wilde writes, and then goes on: They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious...
...the rest has been raised, as our readers know well, through an appeal for funds every two years...
...It does not represent an exercise of power by men and women who happen to be rich in disease-free blood...
...One can imagine a fairly large number of citizens engaged in this kind of service...
...This would eliminate the power of individual and corporate wealth (though only in elections, not yet in the political process as a whole) and make it possible for a larger number of candidates to compete for office...
...But it might have been even more useful for socialist theory than it is, had Titmuss attempted a second comparison—for which, however, he could have found no practical examples...
...So we are told, at any rate...
...I may have a special concern with schools or hospitals or a special commitment to a religious or ethnic group...
...And it forces us immediately to confront the neoconservative argument that a free politics and culture requires capitalism, that private wealth is freedom's crucial resource...
...This argument works as well for money as for blood, whenever the capacity to contribute is widely shared and philanthropic organizations are not radically dependent upon the largesse of a few powerful families...
...Just as the state from its origins had provided military security, enlisting an army of soldiers, so now the welfare state should pro431 vide social security, enlisting an army of caretakers...
...it takes the form of cash contributions over and above taxes and of voluntary labor...
...We aim at greater equality, not absolute equality, and it is the first of these, not the second, that serves to redeem charitable giving and voluntary work...
...Nor is there likely to be a great upsurge in volunteer work, even among loyal Republicans...
...it is, first, an augmentation of the old forms, and then a whole set of new arrangements, made necessary by new social conditions...
...Socialism is something else...
...But it is important that there also be at least a possibility of success...
...Associations of all sorts would fill the breach...
...It will make welfare less bureaucratic, more intimate and neighborly...
...For it is his purpose to argue that there is a virtue in private giving, and he would rightly doubt that this virtue could be duplicated by public taking, even if the taking were mandated by a democratic decision...
...When we defend the welfare state against its contemporary enemies, then, we must remember that the public provision of basic services, while always important, is not the only aim of a socialist politics...
...it can only make way for them...
...It's not the case that if government funds are unavailable, we must turn immediately to a small number of immensely wealthy individuals...
...The contributions came not only from the very rich but also from large numbers of ordinary citizens...
...Their favorite proposal is that the state undertake entire financial responsibility for elections and election campaigns...
...We have our own reasons for disliking the stark juxtaposition of public officials and public wards, even when the officials treat the wards "justly...
...Who is passive, deferential, hurt...
...That awful sameness in everything from the design of buildings to the endless regulations, the product of bureaucratic rigidity and caution, may to some extent be avoided...
...Necessary but not sufficient: unless the arrangements generate in turn a neighborliness and mutuality appropriate to the new conditions...
...Many people are going to be hurt, then, and so there is a battle here that should not be shirked...
...Socialist answers to these questions require, indeed, a certain social framework, a certain kind of state...
...Some "welfare" measures will still be necessary because of the sheer size of the modern electorate and the high costs (and therefore the limited accessibility) of the mass media...
...And we have brought out a number of collections of articles with commercial publishers, all of which have made some money, never very much...
...The old idea was this: first we would abolish poverty, and then the formerly poor, all the relieved and rescued men and women, would simply participate as citizens in the everyday politics of the community...
...They had always depended heavily on private contributions and unpaid help...
...It is necessary first of all to acknowledge the possibility of failure...
...The neoconservatives are wrong (again), but their argument is worth worrying about...
...These too have been present under a wide range of economic conditions...
...The basic parameters of the healthcare system, say, must be worked out politically and then generalized across the country...
...How would the campaign for a new hospital fare, for example, if so-and-so, a man of enormous wealth, did not give a million dollars for the maternity ward or the intensive-care unit (named after himself...
...One can imagine intermediate groups, like the modern corporation, or, for that matter, a factory commune or a trade union, whose members decide to contribute significant funds to local charities...
...Volunteer workers had historically come from the middle and upper classes and had repeated the conventional pattern of middleand upper-class life...
...But Wilde also has some understanding for the vision of moral integrity, of human wholeness and strength, that sustains socialist politics...
...And yet it is not right that the expression of political views in a democracy should reflect the range of opinions among a tiny class of powerful individuals...
...It is one of the purposes of the welfare state, second only to the relief of poverty and pain, to overcome these vices...
...So magazines will flourish as organizational forums, just as they sometimes do today, but against the background of a livelier politics and culture: with more readers, in the strong sense of that word...
...Without that, private giving and doing are more likely to degrade than to benefit the people at whom they are aimed...
...Which ones...
...A great deal of tax money has been filtered through organizations that are privately run and (in part) privately financed...
...This last idea was, of course, confirmed and reiterated by state officials, welfare bureaucrats, the leaders of civil service unions...
...and so they must provide these people with some reason, some significant and durable reason, to contribute...
...These represent what we might think of as individually focused energy...
...Among wealthy men and women, there are always some who give their gifts readily and modestly...
...So private resources must be available not only at 439 the group but also at the individual level...
...For military security and social security alike required largescale organization, central planning, and democratic (coercive) control...
...Cultural and political freedom requires the dispersion of wealth and power...
...This is a lot of money, and yet the government's share of the welfare budget is vastly greater—and as a proportion of the whole it has been growing steadily...
...Who acts...
...Political parties are like philanthropic organizations: they are instruments for collecting time and money...
...How will we finance this crucial activity...
...Socialists should not rejoice, then, in the decline of private giving and doing...
...But what about a group of friends who want to start a magazine and can't find organizational support...
...This is at once a motive for making money and for giving it away...
...Similar arrangements sometimes exist in private philanthropic organizations, and they would be entirely suitable in the public sector...
...The left, like the church, has had its tithe...
...Still, without private wealth of some sort there can't be private gifts, and there can't be large gifts of the sort that make for the stability and even the independence of private philanthropies without large accumulations of wealth...
...Now these are exactly the right sorts of reasons for supporting a state-financed system of health care: to rule out the prerogatives of wealth and to make necessary care available to everyone...
...The particular question raises a more general one about the economic support of political and cultural activity...
...In the United States, the welfare state has developed rather differently...
...Here we must count on the commitment of individual citizens to one another...
...But even on the most optimistic view of the welfare state, even if we assume that poverty has been abolished, it will still be the case that people experience fear and want and that they need help—because they are sick or old or alone, or in a hundred different sorts of trouble...
...All in all, publishing Dissent isn't easy, but with a little help from our friends, we keep going...
...And isn't everyday human welfare also a cause...
...a very small number are welltodo, and without their gifts the magazine probably could not survive...
...If we can't redistribute wealth, then we will need to limit the size of political gifts (and to do so more effectively than we do today...
...The government will have to guarantee television time, for example, to a range of candidates—or better, of parties, though it's not easy in either case to say just how this should be accomplished...
...But then, someone will argue, they will display only magazines devoted to jogging, hi-fi sets, and naked bodies...
...Begging is a performance extracted from the poor by the charitable, and the performance is degrading, an especially painful example of the power of money...
...How do we finance it now...
...In such societies the prerequisites of voluntary giving and doing don't exist...
...But the price we pay for the "princely gift" is the power of princes...
...And if work of the latter sort were organized locally, they might well find themselves helping people they knew, building or strengthening social ties within a familiar world...
...But (as the example of China's "democratic wall" suggests) there are dangers in that arrangement, and the dangers persist even if one tries to free the selection process from immediate political control...
...The struggle against poverty and illness is an activity in which many citizens, poor and not-so-poor and well-to-do alike, ill and not-so-ill and healthy alike, ought to participate...
...But none of this generates any special self-importance, for the help is widely available...
...As conscript soldiers create a citizens' army, so conscript social workers would create a lay welfare state...
...For all our pluralism, then, the longterm trends in this country are not so different from those in the more centralized and advanced states of Western Europe...
...State subsidies, like foundation grants, can be helpful but only alongside the more dispersed resources of editors and friends, and only within the context of a market economy where products and services can be freely purchased (that is, where they don't have to be applied for...
...more women were working...
...the royal court once played a similar role, though on behalf of a very narrow social circle...
...The act of giving is good in itself...
...The effect of the reforms already adopted has indeed been to multiply the number of candidates, but the advantage of that for democratic politics isn't easy to see...
...Such people would not be volunteers in the strict sense, but they would certainly be amateurs, having chosen work they wanted to do or thought worth doing, learning as they worked, and simultaneously seconding and qualifying the efforts of professional men and women...
...I don't find anything objectionable in that, though it is obviously necessary here to strike a careful balance...
...There must be typesetters, printers, and binders willing to help in the publication of opinions they dislike . . . for money...
...After all, a great deal of socialist activity has been paid for by private contributions or made possible by voluntary labor for the cause...
...There are, first, two sorts of mixed forms...
...The bigger it grew, however, the greater its costs would be, and the more money we would have to raise...
...The old animus against charity is set forth very nicely in a few sentences in Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism...
...Their independence would consist in freedom from fear and want...
...And often enough, they can't or they don't do that...
...We can only vote once, and that one vote counts as much for a candidate about whom we have deep misgivings as it does for a candidate we thoroughly admire...
...American philanthropy, as currently organized, is radically dependent upon what I once heard a successful fund-raiser call "the princely gift...
...Some selection process is necessary, and so it matters a great deal who makes the selection...
...Here is an unexceptionable, indeed a highly desirable, form of charity...
...The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, Richard Eliman, ed...
...And the payment might take the edge off the donation, undercutting any pretension to high-mindedness on the one side, any feeling of subjection on the other...
...Another example of supply-side economics: more private wealth is supposed to produce more charity...
...How likely is it to finance the production of dissidence...
...All this requires in turn more than one directing center and more than one source of funds...
...Mutual aid makes for social integration...
...How much of that support a candidate can win is almost as important as how many votes he can win in determining his right, and also his ability, to govern...
...But the mere replacement of private charity by public provision doesn't have this effect...
...The vices of dependency are reciprocal: deference, passivity, humility on the one hand, arrogance and self-importance on the other...
...But it does suggest reasons for leaving room within and around the institutions of the welfare state for private philanthropy...
...My taxes pay for the whole range of welfare services, and particular allocations are determined by a complex political process...
...Come back now to the question of starting and supporting a radical magazine...
...New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 63...
...And if the gift is crucial to welfare, it is even more crucial to politics (and culture too)—as I will now try to argue...
...And they have been supported, as I've said, by the dues and the donated time and energy of their members, even when their members were desperately poor and without adequate resources for health care, housing, education, and so on...
...One can imagine, in sum, a more democratic pluralism, a "mobilization of altruistic capacities" for the sake not of one-sided giving and glorying but of mutual aid.' Nor is it necessary, as I have argued elsewhere, that a socialist society set its face entirely against entrepreneurial activity and individual money-making...
...But what number...
...The claim that therefore capitalism is necessary—as if wealth and power were widely dispersed today—is ideological...
...they are effectively state subsidiaries (and they are increasingly reliant on the same sort of professionals who run the state services...
...Some 300,000 "nonprofit" organizations exist in this country today, providing religious and educational as well as welfare services...
...But the bulk of them will have to be, as all political parties have to be, voluntary associations...
...There ought to be more men and women with political competence and a sense of their own effectiveness: more citizens, in the strong sense of that word...
...A large number of privately run services, like most of our private universities, are no longer capable of financing their own operations...
...All this together represents a kind of selflessness, or at least of unselfishness, that welfare-as-justice seems to rule out, to make unnecessary...
...It's not impossible that there could be a culture so rich and a democracy so lively that its people, through their government, would patronize works that raised the deepest questions about human life...
...But there was, if one goes back far enough, a domestic economy that more easily integrated old people and partially disabled people than the modern economy does...
...There has been less concern with overall coordination or blanket coverage...
...Consider now some possible forms of mutual help under modern conditions...
...As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.' There is a special rebelliousness here, which 432 doesn't have much to do (as the last sentence suggests) with political action...
...For political magazines do not make money, not at least until they reach a readership in the hundreds of thousands...
...Imagine the left in power, its leaders our officials: what forms might self-help and mutual aid take then...
...there is no reason why it shouldn't be...
...One can imagine tax money, in greater amounts than at present, filtered through private organizations...
...The Gift, Ian Cunnison, trans...
...441...
...Yes...
...A range of intermediate groups—political parties, unions, churches, ethnic associations—provide the most likely set of alternative patrons...
...I suppose that the income of this group is rather higher than the national average...
...Now, however, the citizens had decided that welfare was a matter of justice, not charity, the business of the state, not of individuals...
...Neoconservative writers indulge themselves and delude their readers with sentimental memories of neighborhoods that were once models of mutual aid...
...Nor does the wounding work only one way...
...But we would be happier, of course, if Dissent did not remain a little magazine but grew big, finding more and more readers...
...old patterns are likely to survive...
...Very occasionally, we have gotten small amounts of money, for special projects, from labor unions and private foundations...
...But that is why dissent and Dissent are necessary, and why we must make sure that there will always be men and women capable of bearing their costs...
...One can imagine a committee giving out magazines to would-be editors much as fellowships are awarded to artists, writers, and scholars...
...We might do without angels if we had enough resourceful men and women...
...2) The paid volunteer represents a second mixed form, familiar to us in the political life of the left, where young activists often work for subsistence wages, in effect donating to the movement the money their skills would earn on the outside...
...His book is a defense of donation (he would actually ban the sale of blood) because it is more efficient, producing better, cleaner blood, and also, and more important, because it expresses and enhances a spirit of communal altruism...
...it is one way of expressing the political emotion that Aristotle called "friendship...
...But time and money are measurable in pieces, and so we can measure out our support...
...The quoted phrase is from Social Work, Welfare and the State, Noel Parry, Michael Rustin, and Carole Satyamurti, eds...
...By itself, however, relief doesn't produce independence...
...Socialists often write as if they hope to see the end of every sort of market relation...
...and there were, above all, fewer people—the old and the sick died sooner...
...there were more extended families and less geographic mobility, so that people needed less help than they do today...
...Settling the big problems, even if that were possible, is never enough, for men and women are made and destroyed by the way we deal and help them to deal with the small problems, the intimate difficulties of everyday life...
...Not every group of friends can have a magazine...
...There has to be a decent level of public provision...
...But now the Reagan administration, encouraged by neoconservative intellectuals, has set itself to reverse these trends...
...Charity wounds him who receives," writes Marcel Maus in his classic essay The Gift, "and our whole moral effort is directed toward suppressing the unconscious harmful patronage of the rich almoner...
...As in the case of welfare and philanthropy, the usual socialist response is too quick and unconsidered...
...The welfare-state model is currently most popular among reformers who work in the field of electoral politics...
...It is necessary nonetheless, for the state is more likely than any private group of citizens to maintain an effective program of relief...
...The argument requires one further step...
...What should socialists think about philanthropy and volunteer service...
...3) But there will still be room, I think, for the unmixed forms of giving and volunteering...
...Nor did the poor themselves, once they began to find a political voice, have much use for amateurs...
...In any case, the idea would be to provide subsistence support for a variety of magazines, so that editors and writers with different points of view and journalistic styles would have the same opportunity to compete for readers...
...the state welfare services did not look like amateur callings...
...Once again: a lay people's welfare state, a reduction in the power of professionals, a diffusion of authority...
...Gifts might well be smaller, but there would be more people able to give...
...in 1979, these groups managed to raise $36 billion in individual contributions (corporations and foundations added another $5 billion...
...This is an important argument, but it has both an ideological and a serious form...
...New York Times, July 6, 1981...
...If money can be raised, there must be a market where it can be spent...
...London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 168...
...It is not crucial to his recovery that a man with heart disease earn the money to pay his doctor: he has to be helped whether he can earn the money or not...
...And just as private wars had been eliminated, so now private charitable campaigns should be eliminated...
...Here, we might say, is a place for "socialist emulation...
...and to work without pay for the state, which commanded such vast resources and hired such an extraordinary number of people, seemed in any case gratuitous...
...But it remains an open question whether this sort of thing can be incorporated into the welfare state, once there is a welfare state...
...If we imagine a society of free citizens, relatively equal or at least not radically unequal in the resources they command, there is every reason to expect a great deal of privately initiated, privately supported political and cultural activity...
...But politics is different...
...We aim also at the abolition of dependency in all its forms...
...I assume that dissent would still be difficult...
...Two things are required: a world of craftsmen and skilled workers, organized perhaps into cooperatives but ready to enter into commercial relations—so that they won't have to vote on the contents of the magazines they print...
...It is not now an argument against taxation, for the most basic welfare services can only be provided as they should be if the provision is collective and coercive...
...If socialism requires a lay welfare state, so it requires a citizens' politics...
...Worrying is one of the functions of this and future Dissents, and it will still be necessary under socialism...
...The rich undoubtedly thought taxes too high and preferred charitable giving, which they could set at any level they liked...
...And a world of free entrepreneurs, the owners of bookstores and newsstands, similarly ready to display any magazine that might sell a few copies...
...the poor are still deferential, passive, and humble (or "the best of them" are caught up in a diffuse rebelliousness), while public officials take on the arrogance and self-importance of their private predecessors...
...It seems safest to make sure that alternative patrons are available...
...In the sphere of politics, in contrast, say, to medicine, our slogan should properly be: work, not welfare...
...What we do to staff members and writers might be called exploitation...
...The most common answer is constructed along what can be called the welfarestate model...
...And that leaves too much for elected officials to do, just as a welfare state without philanthropic organizations leaves too much for bureaucrats to do...
...I have long thought that a mistaken vision, and the mistake seems especially clear when one focuses on the smallscale, everyday politics and culture of a socialist society...
...It's not necessary that everyone run for office or even that everyone be able to run for office...
...But I think the questions are not so easy...
...The gifts they bring, over and above what they are bound to give, represent an enhancement of both democracy and socialism, without which neither one would be as attractive as we have imagined it to be...
...But these are not, at present, the decisive contributions that enable private philanthropies to keep going...
...Over the years since then, the magazine has earned roughly half of what it costs...
...The public financing of candidates would also undermine the importance of parties...
...In the welfare state model, government officials or the "experts" they appoint play that part because the state owns the media...
...What is missing is all the messy activity, all the individually focused, uncoordinated energy of ordinary men and women...
...And having themselves served, they might no longer feel degraded if, later on, they needed to seek out the services of others...
...Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over their private lives...
...Men played the larger This essay—the first Stanley Plastrik Lecture—was read by Michael Walzer, on March 25 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, under the auspices of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...but it doesn't follow that, if individuals can't accumulate wealth, only the state can do so...
...We have to pay for paper, typesetting, printing, binding, handling and mailing, and newsstand distribution...
...How would things be different in a socialist society...
...Everyone at a certain age would have to serve (for two years, 434 say), but they would choose what they would do from a wide range of possibilities...
...In fact, what we require is a radical increase in all such activities...
...But the picture of a politics without gifts, where governmentsupported candidates appear one after another on the television screen, dressed up by their government-paid public-relations experts —this is the political equivalent of a clean, well-lighted welfare state...
...But if we allow a great deal of leeway for contribution and voluntarism, the overall shape of the welfare state won't be determined by a single democratic political process, and it won't be the same in every city and town...
...Without a rich backer, how would a larger Dissent keep going...
...What can they do...
...There is no reason for the state to provide a shortcut through all this...
...A politics without parties will tend to be a politics without reasons or, at least, without reasons that effectively engage the attention of large numbers of citizens...
...A few years ago, the New York Times carried a long article on the decline of philanthropy and volunteer service in the more advanced welfare states of Western Europe.' In such countries as Sweden, Denmark, and West Germany, philanthropic organizations of all sorts—orphanages, homes for unwed mothers, legal aid societies, hospital and prison visitors, and so on—were in deep trouble...
...While making demands on the general community, they have constituted communities in themselves, self-sufficient and self-sustaining...
...Indeed, philanthropy has probably never been organized in any other way...
...Once we guarantee a decent level, however, pluralism and the philanthropy that sustains it can make for stronger, more various, more broadly based, and more effective welfare programs...
...Insofar as these vices have been overcome, it's not been in the welfare state so much as in the movements and parties that fight to create the welfare state...
...Perhaps the group of editors will include men and women with the necessary skills and with access to the necessary machines...
...They take their money for authority...
...In the past, charity has been much disliked and commonly denounced on the left: it is a bourgeois form of noblesse oblige, a way of adjusting to, without removing, the inequities of a class society, indeed, a way of displaying and intensifying those inequities...
...New York: Random House, 1969), p. 258...
...The problem with charity is that it breeds dependency...
...We have most often thought of socialism (not wrongly) in terms of public enterprise and 436 large-scale organization...
...So charity depends upon inequality (and voluntary labor depends, similarly, upon the existence of a well-to-do and leisured class...
...After all, it was an official committee that selected plays for the Athenian drama festivals...
...The goal of a socialist welfare state must be the opposite of this, not to end the need for help, for there is no end to that, but to involve the needy in mutual help...
...Experiments are easier within a decentralized system, run in part by private citizens...
...Our costs are determined in large part by the postal rates and the market...
...they are sustained by the voluntary contributions of their members and supporters...
...So princes must be courted, flattered, pandered to, and pleased...
...what it didn't take belonged to them and could legitimately and without qualms be spent on themselves...
...Nor is it conceivable that if there were no such class, there would be no political magazines...
...The state would provide a supply of paper, access to printing houses and distribu437 tion centers, and subsidized mailing for a number of magazines...
...It will also make for less welfare: no one knowledgeable about such matters seriously expects individual and corporate giving to increase enough to replace or even come near replacing the loss of government money (and, anyway, lower tax rates will probably reduce rather than increase charitable giving, since they significantly raise the cost of charity...
...But if it doesn't, then the cash nexus is a crucial complement to the gift relationship...
...But there are also questions of political and moral theory—and of strategy too, for it can't be doubted that Reagan has seized upon deeply felt problems of the welfare system...
...Would even the Athenians, however, have permitted Socrates to edit a magazine...
...But it isn't blood or money, it is time and energy that constitute the most valuable gifts that citizens can make to one another...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
