SOCIALISM RECONSIDERED: A VIEW FROM YUGOSLAVIA
Lekachman, Robert
When queried by the New York Times' John Oakes, Milovan Djilas, age 71, readily conceded that "Socialism is not so clear to me today as when I was young." It is an appealing feature of the...
...Branko Horvat combines rare mastery of Marxist and bourgeois social thought...
...Horvat might well have recalled Werner Sombart's 1906 response to the question, Why is there no socialism in America...
...My subsequent offer to resign was decried as blackmail...
...Horvat remains true to the socialist faith...
...Although Horvat takes pains to disclaim belief in historical inevitability, he is far more cheerful about the prospects of progress in his preferred direction than much of the evidence he himself presents appears to this saddened socialist to support...
...He remains cheerful because he believes that human needs rise in step with material progress...
...High unemployment diminishes self-esteem, imperils individual safety as crime rates soar, and focuses attention upon the very struggle for subsistence at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs...
...So much for the lingering influence of Rex Tugwell, Robert Lynd, and a few other dangerous radicals...
...but they rarely appear on best-seller lists...
...It is a great pity that this, the crowning achievement of a creative scholar, does not propel one to confidence in the realization of its civilized aspirations...
...It has won, if not the allegiance, at minimum the acquiescence of a proletariat increasingly garbed in white rather than blue collars...
...Nearly as significant has been adroit manipulation of ideological symbols, above all the portrait of America as the land of unlimited opportunity...
...them transcends the walls of the factory and encompasses everything which is above, far away, outside the power of whoever is speaking...
...dropping them is the first sign that someone really wants to start climbing the ladder...
...Inevitably there are complications...
...For in admirably clear English prose (Horvat's, not a translator's), he has examined, inter alia, contemporary capitalism, Soviet socialism, which he terms "etatism," and his favored alternative, self-governing socialism...
...This indeed is the first generation since the Great Depression of that decade, in which the sons and daughters of the middle class confront the serious prospect of downward occupational, financial, and social mobility...
...His verdict upon the political repression and the * This vulgar legitimation of capitalism explains the intellectually pathetic efforts of George Gilder (Wealth and Poverty) and Michael Novak (The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism) to invent religious justifications for the pursuit of individual profit...
...The words are glorious...
...462...
...Why have not the internal contradictions of capitalism intensified to the point of crisis...
...As Daniel Bell, echoing Joseph Schumpeter, has argued, capitalism as a creed is singularly devoid of spiritual or philosophical sanction...
...Four decades onward, the figures are 56 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic, and a mere 9 percent other...
...On several occasions, the council tried to force me to undertake (or not to undertake) certain action when I knew definitely that this would be harmful to the institution...
...This, concedes Horvat, "was not an isolated episode...
...Them are all those upon whom he depends in an elusive and indefinable way: those from whom he receives this or that: by whom he is ordered about...
...Still, poorer men or women on occasion collect the needed funds to project their name and image to the electorate from friends, fellow unionists, and, less attractively, from interested corporations...
...In other words, the party machinery and its political monopoly must be destroyed...
...Listen: The elimination of political parties does not imply the elimination of politics, just as the eradication of cartels does not kill the economy but renders the market more efficient...
...Soviet striving for legitimacy as the heir of Marx and Engels encounters mounting incredulity among ordinary Russians...
...And—crucial point—ownership should reside in an enterprise's workers, not in the state...
...As veterans of the academy can readily agree, most university teachers are conservative souls...
...At the summit of the hierarchy is human yearning completely to fulfill one's potentialities: "What a man can be, he must be" (emphasis in original...
...By Horvat's telling, for all the legal freedoms enjoyed by Americans (and, once again, neither Horvat nor I deny their importance), they have lost control over their destinies...
...Horvat admits that West Europeans and Scandinavians take better care of their casualties than do Americans...
...It is easy to believe that "this book represents a life's work...
...As the left rallies in this country within the context of continued economic deterioration, our ideas will stand a better chance of influencing progressive Democrats and their allies within the trade union movement...
...First in importance have been rising standards of life and an accompanying wide dispersion of consumer goods...
...Socialism then is above all a matter of individual autonomy, of liberation from all varieties of repression and manipulation by elites...
...Horvat echoes Marx's hope that socialism will at last permit us all to be truly human...
...Let me collect, in concluding this series of ruminations on themes dear to socialists, the reason why I am constrained to register my critical judgment...
...My own City of New York University students, mostly working-class, seek as rapidly as possible to become middle-class accountants, business managers, and, in smaller numbers, doctors and lawyers...
...Even if we set aside the shaky quality of Maslow's research and argument, there is, alas, a glaring weakness in any claim that an upward path from physiological gratification to "selfactualization" is historically preordained or even probable...
...Moreover, afflicted Americans thus far at least seem to be as apathetic or fatalistic about their situation as politically repressed Russians...
...Etatism manipulates its victims by a combination of bureaucracy and outright repression...
...Repetitive business cycles threaten the jobs and incomes of all but the most prosperous...
...Rather little in the last decade 461 and a half conforms to Horvat's vision of the capitalist future...
...Sweden provides ingenious and generous social benefits, distributes income more nearly equally, in all probability, than any other country in either political bloc, and encourages experiments in worker participation more extensive and varied than any place else on the globe except Yugoslavia...
...Sombart, something of a Marxist at the time, pungently identified the culprits as roast beef and apple pie...
...At this decisive juncture, Horvat relies upon the authority of Abraham Maslow, who has argued the case for a hierarchy of human needs...
...We should not, accordingly, yield ourselves to it...
...After I had failed to persuade the council to accept my proposals, I offered to carry out the decision of the majority under the condition that the council assume responsibility for the outcome and that the work community be informed about this in advance...
...How much better if history had allowed revolution to arrive initially in England or Germany, as Marx had hoped...
...To put the issue somewhat differently, genuine socialism requires that working-class consciousness rise to an appropriate level of insight and sophistication...
...Political hierarchies, those of the political parties, rob 456 citizens of their birthright as political animals and alienate them from the processes of formal democracy...
...The masters of multinational corporations figure unflatteringly in the best-selling thrillers of Robert Ludlum...
...Capitalism has done rather better...
...It is never easy to handle unexpected surpluses or unanticipated shortfalls of output...
...they are worse in Ronald Reagan's America...
...He denies that Russian experience discredits the ideal of a better society and refuses to accept Sweden as a fair approximation of socialism...
...Freighted as the text is * The Political Economy of Socialism, by Branko Horvat...
...Lenin used Russian backwardness as justification for the leading role of a revolutionary vanguard, the Communist party, as an essential exercise in the tuition of ideologically retarded workers and utterly benighted peasants...
...Horvat does not disparage bourgeois civil liberties but, like many other critics of market capitalism, he emphasizes their limitations...
...Even should that desirable event occur, Horvat envisions a bewildering variety of coordinating, directing, and adjudicating mechanisms that appear highly likely to reinvigorate Horvat's excoriated bureaucracy...
...If only Lenin had been German, the history of socialism might have taken a sharply different direction...
...A skeptic would be hard-pressed to lengthen it...
...All that need be done is to forbid donations and the selection of candidates by party bosses...
...Imperial Russia required a bourgeois revolution before it could hope to achieve socialism, the very view once briefly held by Trotsky...
...Hence, they must be forbidden [emphasis added...
...He has actively participated in formulating the theory and practice of his country's continuing experiment in worker self-management...
...The Senate is as much a millionaire's club as it was in Thomas Nast's day...
...These lurid tales are understood by their viewers and readers as fables, at most anecdotes about the failings of corporate leaders upon whom we must all rely for jobs and a bountiful cornucopia of processed foods, aids to health and beauty, and the very programs in which they evilly conspire against the public weal...
...What else does Horvat want...
...Capitalism fragments life between work and leisure and turns men and women into passive, manipulated consumers of goods, services, culture, and politicians...
...Then emerge "affective needs of belonging and love...
...At the price of political repression, intrusive bureaucracy, and heavy doses of official propaganda, the Soviet citizen is guaranteed some sort of job, free medical care, and low rent...
...One step higher is the search for individual safety...
...That tuition has been protracted over more than half a century with not the slightest sign that the omnipotent Soviet party ever intends to loosen its grip on the lives of ordinary citizens...
...Why has the state in the Soviet Union so embarrassingly neglected to wither away...
...35.00...
...Our model is increasingly entrepreneurial...
...As for etatist polities, economic malfunctioning and agricultural failure seem, in the Soviet Union at least, only to have tightened party control of culture, politics, and economic activity...
...Their translation in the economic sphere requires universal self-management of offices, factories, university departments, and all the other places in which work is performed...
...Horvat's personal experience of self-management has been discouraging...
...I HAVE THUS FAR neglected the vital political complement to Horvat's economic prospectus...
...What should replace the prohibited parties...
...More than two-thirds of the group are "favorably inclined or neutral toward the present administration...
...Horvat's explanation of that failure is Menshevik...
...These are not happy times for partisans both of socialism and of democracy...
...Despair is an excuse for inaction...
...The latter has betrayed the promises of Marxism in the course of cynical claims to fulfill them...
...White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe...
...In severe episodes like the current minidepression, not even the affluent are exempt from financial damage...
...It is an American tendency, to which I have probably fallen victim, to extrapolate unwisely from immediate circumstances...
...As example, his chart of federal institutions lists six types of linkage—market, administration, economic policy, information and consultation, negotiation and arbitration, and some 30 separate administrative bodies...
...but, if one consequence is predictable, the tension between central planning and local self-determination will be persistent and acute...
...them means the same thing: the management, those who give the orders and make the decisions, employ labour and pay wages, the men and their agents who are in charge—who remain inaccessible even when they cross our field of vision...
...Begin with the Yugoslav experiment with self-management and the generation needed to elevate worker class consciousness postulated by Horvat...
...Horvat, a resident in good standing of his own country, nevertheless is able to treat critically the Yugoslav experiment in a self-managed economy...
...Because Horvat retains the 19th-century optimism of Karl Marx, he fails seriously to contemplate such dreary possibilities of global economic malaise...
...There are limits to what a Yugoslav can write in a society that for all its experiments in self-management is still substantially authoritarian...
...His categories are Marxist, his approach is historical and analytical and his erudition impressive...
...455 This is to say that capitalism has been able to damage, if not quite destroy, the class solidarity essential to the Marxist account of the evolution of capitalism into socialism...
...Periodicals like Dissent stuff the mailboxes of the converted...
...By world-class capitalist criteria, the United States is a backward society, apparently resolved to march even more determinedly to the rear...
...Nevertheless, it is easy to concur in his general conclusion that both capitalism and etatism are gravely flawed social, cultural, political, and even economic arrangements...
...Capitalism wastes resources—idle men and women and shuttered plants, during cyclical downturns...
...Reagan too will pass and the next swing of the political pendulum will probably be in the direction of the left...
...I reiterate the precariousness of the foundation upon which Horvat erects his hopes for the evolution of capitalist and etatist nations in the direction of the highest of human needs—selfactualization...
...Although as members of the labor force many of them belong to unions, their membership tends to be reluctant and their valuation of unions exceedingly low...
...That, of course [l] implies the elimination of political parties...
...If retrogression in the gratification of lower needs occurs, progress toward higher ones may be indefinitely postponed...
...What, finally, is socialism late in this century...
...My own mood —color it indigo—no doubt has influenced the tone of this piece...
...I was told that the council may make any decision whatever and that the director is obliged to carry it out at his own risk...
...671 pp...
...FOR HORVAT, capitalism is defective not only because it debases the culture in which the populace is enmeshed, but also because it is inefficient...
...The latest example of such a reexamination is a major study by Branko Horvat,* Yugoslavia's best-known economist in the Western world...
...On the Soviet bloc, Horvat is even more illuminating...
...Television's laid-off steelworkers, evicted public-housing tenants, terminated welfare clients, and threatened pensioners seldom identify their tormentors, let alone contemplate organized action against them...
...Of course, and here the analogy to Horvat falters, access to the media is a direct function of money...
...Workplace alienation is epitomized for Horvat by the description of life as a milling 457 operator in a tractor factory by the Hungarian poet MiklOs Harasti: In every place of work...
...officials from organizations, politicians, television producers, doctors, policemen or officials at the football ground...
...Why so...
...with scholarly references and statistical evidence, its running refrain is the set of wistful queries that afflict democratic socialists: Why haven't manual workers in advanced bourgeois democracies developed revolutionary consciousness...
...The alumni of this once mildly radical campus as undergraduates were 40 percent Republican, 37 percent Democratic, and 23 percent other...
...He detests the party domination characteristic of etatism and admires parliamentary arrangements, written constitutions (remember when the 1936 Soviet constitution was hailed by naive radicals as the most democratic in the world...
...Books like Charles Lindblom's devastating critique of corporate dominion of American society, Politics and Markets, do get published...
...Alienated from work and politics, they live incomplete existences as manipulated consumers...
...When, as in an occasional Bill Moyers documentary, the plight of recession casualties is effectively portrayed, the most that the program is prepared to do is suggest that some policies of a particular president and Congress are unfair...
...My own Columbia College class has just celebrated its 40th reunion...
...In lesser or greater degrees, these all exist in Western democracies...
...As Arnold Beichman, a member in good standing, argued on the hospitable editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Marxists are in the process of "taking over" social science departments in numerous universities...
...These are initially physiological requirements for water, food, and sex...
...During expansions, it misallocates resources, directing investment without coherent direction toward the trivial and even biologically hurtful...
...As Horvat compares capitalism, American-style, and Soviet etatism, the capitalist citizen enjoys his freedom from political repression at the price of endemic unemployment, cultural degradation, political alienation, and inadequate protection against the disasters of illness, disability, and old age...
...Few analysts of contemporary capitalism and socialism match Horvat's command of diverse materials and his analytical sophistication...
...Its success depends above all upon the willingness of ordinary workers to assume the responsibility Horvat would offer them...
...dreary cultural milieu that drive Russians to drink is scathing...
...Even more nasty is one of the OED's alternatives, "Involving, based or founded on, imaginary or chimerical perfection...
...Since they provide obvious advantages to political leaders, parties are not likely to disappear of their own accord...
...The structure of wages within an enterprise may be subject to selfdetermination but the total must bear a relation to the larger community's resources...
...459 Alternative explanations of this episode are no doubt available from members of Horvat's unit, but his general point, made at considerable length, is that in contemporary Yugoslav experience self-management is severely damaged by time-wasting discussion, violation of organizational principles, misconceptions about the location of authority, misconceived efforts at justice, misplaced solidarity, the impossibility of separating political and administrative action, multiplication of conflicts, misuse of democratic procedures to further private interests and, finally, the twin pitfalls of etatism and inefficiency...
...If their consciousness is so low, what hope for the proletariat...
...Trade unions publish newspapers that their members in large numbers discard unread...
...Horvat deploys an ingenious array of agencies, including a wage arbitration board, a development fund, and assorted financing bodies, to deal with such difficulties...
...The bulk of Horvat's meditation upon such themes is embedded in hundreds of pages of sophisticated inspection of contemporary capitalism and its rival, the politically repressive Soviet bloc...
...Bad enough...
...In other words, not the expropriation of private property but the expropriation of political authority is the necessary and sufficient condition for socialism [emphasis in original...
...His is no recent faith: "Ever since my class left the secondary school of a small provincial town in Croatia to join the partisans in the Yugoslav Revolution, socialism has been my predominant concern...
...As these are gratified, men and women feel "the need for self-respect and for selfesteem...
...Nor will rivalries among worker-controlled units easily yield to sweet-tempered consensus...
...If * A word of caution is here advisable...
...The disappearance of political parties will not leave a political vacuum...
...Under socialism both must be socialized [emphasis added...
...It is an appealing feature of the Yugoslav version of communism that it is possible for good Communists to question the central arrangements of the Yugoslav state and economy...
...Here it is best to cite a long passage that epitomizes Horvat's highly controversial position: The central category of a political system is authority, just as that of an economic system is property...
...Many, notably economists, law school drillmasters, scientists, and business school types are active, appropriately rewarded allies of the corporate community...
...Russian conditions were much less promising, but the Bolsheviks were directed by Lenin...
...With the greatest respect for Horvat's achievement in this treatise, I can only conclude that he is closer to the utopians than to the scientific socialists...
...Hierarchy in factories and offices deprives workers of control over their time and product...
...Quite a list...
...Despite these important distinctions between life in capitalist America and etatist Russia, Horvat identifies important parallels between the two systems...
...For another, the Soviet citizen no more controls his personal and political destiny than do American victims of unemployment and curtailed welfare, Medicaid, and unemployment benefits...
...One, two, or 460 several parties will be replaced by a multiplicity of political associations.* III Ever since Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific dismissed Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier as utopians on the ground that they could criticize capitalism but not sketch a plausible route from it to the society of their dreams, utopian has been a term of invective among Marxists in good standing...
...Inequality takes the shape in the Soviet Union of access to special stores, hospitals, universities, recreation, and housing...
...The best of plans go awry...
...Resources and credit must somehow and by somebody be allocated...
...Will they attend frequent meetings, scrutinize dull reports, surmount the temptations of cronyism in electing managers, forgo immediate wage improvements the better to finance new equipment, and esteem these burdens as an acceptable price for the fulfilling joys of full participation in daily labor...
...Similar caveats apply to Horvat's political remedies...
...What is to be done with the losers...
...One may nevertheless question the design's workability...
...It is, nevertheless, worthwhile to recall less discouraging phenomena...
...None of these intricate relationships need exclude the feasibility at the plant level of minute control by workers over job assignments, schedules, product designs, and supervisor selection...
...and guarantees of individual liberties...
...Mitterrand is bravely conducting a French experiment that combines devolution of central authority, enhanced latitude for trade unions, and substantial redistribution of income and wealth...
...I came to the conclusion that inherited authoritarian attitudes are so deeply ingrained that they are unconsciously carried into selfmanagement...
...Although, as he emphasizes, Yugoslavia has uniquely experienced capitalism (1911-40), etatism (1940-54), and primitive self-management since then, the actual practice of unit autonomy resembles the behavior of the highly educated university group that figures in the following poignant passage...
...A drug-store magnate ambitious to govern a large state need not be deterred by the opposition of his party leaders if he is prepared to advertise himself on television and radio...
...Although I do not seriously quarrel with this bill of particulars, I am inclined to enter one caveat, concerning the firmness of the business grip on public consciousness and behavior...
...At the state level, there is similar proliferation...
...No wonder that, according to Soviet sociologists, approximately the same percentage of Soviet as capitalist parents hope that their children will become neither workers nor peasants...
...these planning and supervisory devices are essential to socialism in a small country, hope is dim for genuine decentralization and vigorous self-management in large and complex polities such as the United States and the Soviet Union...
...To answer these and related questions, it is well to recall the essence of Horvat's indictment of etatism and capitalism: both systems treat human beings as objects...
...Everyone is eager to decide, but no one is willing to assume responsibility...
...Stein misses the significant point...
...I became aware of this fact by studying the behavior of my own council, which consisted of highly educated people...
...According to the Oxford English Dictionary, utopian is defined as "possessing or regarded as having impossibly or extravagantly ideal conditions in respect of politics, customs, social organization, etc...
...Its traditional emphasis upon self-interest as the engine of economic progress leads directly to the speculation that popular attachment to capitalism is no deeper than popular perceptions that one's financial welfare is promoted by uninhibited scramble for individual we_ alth.* One must wonder about the political consequences of slow or zero growth, persistently high unemployment, declining real estate values, diminishing prospects for upward occupational mobility, and rates of business bankruptcy unequaled since the 1930s...
...Parties do not operate in Horvat's country but it is difficult to see how any democratic community, self-managed or otherwise, can resolve unavoidable group, regional, and interest conflicts except through the mechanism of party mediation...
...To a remarkable degree, neoconservatives in the Irving Kristol camp have managed to portray themselves as a valiant minority beleaguered by intellectual paladins of the left safely holed up in universities...
...To my taste, Horvat is somewhat more generous in his assessment of etatist societies and somewhat more critical of Western capitalism than his own data justify...
...We can define political authority . . . as free and equal access to any position of political power...
...In the United States, where the process appears to be most advanced, only half those eligible have bothered to vote in recent presidential contests...
...But these democracies are all defaced by the existence of political parties that Horvat likens to economic cartels...
...In the best of imaginable societies, human groups are likely to entrench themselves and erect barriers to participation in the privileges their situation of power affords them...
...If, further, associations substitute for parties, how real will be the differences in operation and the exercise of power...
...I thought this was a fair deal and was quite surprised when my offer provoked an outburst of discontent...
...The reasons for this success are familiar...
...Things were bad in Veblen's day...
...One can quarrel with Horvat's conclusion that etatsm in spite of enormous flaws, cruelties, and sheer technical incompetence has been comparatively successful in maintaining economic growth and rising living standards...
...As a result, average Soviet incomes probably have been for several years declining, a phenomenon paralleled by recent American experience...
...What distinguishes Dutch or Swedish social democracy from veritable socialism...
...After World War I, Horvat suggests, German conditions for socialist revolution were favorable, but effective leadership was absent...
...A critic might plausibly argue, for example, that the United States already approaches Horvat's aspirations for the dissolution of political parties...
...In 1917, the consciousness of Russia's small industrial proletariat had not ascended to the bourgeois stage, let alone to the next and higher level of socialism...
...Since Horvat relies, like such socialist predecessors as Oskar Lange, upon the market to allocate resources efficiently, losers as well as winners will emerge from socialist competition...
...Americans, even our intellectuals, are immersed in the mass media, above all television...
...Horvat's hope of progress toward better versions of self-management hinges upon a veritable transformation of consciousness likely to occur, if at all, in a generation...
...On the contrary, mounting evidence shows that in the Soviet Union longevity is declining, infant mortality rising, alcoholism at crisis levels, and the agricultural sector an utter mess...
...Above all these are the consequences of the fraternal embrace between the mass media and the possessors of corporate or individual wealth...
...To what model of social and political 458 organization does his vision of socialism correspond...
...The etatism of the Soviet Union, according to Horvat's definition, combines central planning, complicated bureaucracy, class stratification at least as pronounced as its parallel in capitalist societies, substantial inequality of income, and reiterated demands that the Soviet public accept this mixture as genuine socialism...
...On the contrary, it will make possible intensive political participation...
...But Horvat's gravest indictment of capitalism is political...
...For one thing, Soviet workers are as alienated from their jobs as Americans...
...Horvat judges that the Soviet etatist society is, if anything, even more sterile than its capitalist counterpart, because the heavy hand that the cultural bureaucracy places upon films, periodicals, television, theater, and music generates predictably dull and predictable artifacts and, into the bargain, cripples high culture...
...Yet these are not the most important barriers to the success of a self-managed economy...
...Someone must divide a nation's resources between investment and consumption...
...As Benjamin Stein has complained in The View from Sunset Boulevard, individual businessmen are quite often the villains of TV melodramas...
...A certain irony attends Horvat's prospectus for a better world...
...In the end, it requires not the old Marxist standby of capitalist breakdown, but capitalist success...
...Their "scientific socialism" relies upon notions of historical materialism and surplus value...
...Capitalism's upper stratum of the affluent is matched by the privileged bureaucrats of etatism, Djilas's new class...
...In the context of material prosperity the well-nourished and protected inhabitants of consumerland will come to resent with rising passion their passive status as consumers and their powerlessness in offices and factories...
...For any Marxist, there is a special sadness in the dispiriting evolution of Soviet tyranny and its utter departure from the spirit of socialism...
...It is moreover unclear just who is to prohibit political parties and how consistent such a prohibition is with Horvat's usually civil libertarian posture...
...Declining standards of life in both capitalist America and etatist Russia, if long continued, will push workers down the hierarchy of needs rather than upward toward full human potentiality...
...The media not only soften or exclude sharp critics, they also present unemployment, noxious chemical dumps, industrial accidents, unsafe products, and so on as isolated events, innocent of systematic explanation...
...Although Horvat's indictment of capitalism is for the most part familiar, it is instructive both for the skill with which the evidence is marshaled and the Marxist perspective within which he interprets his data...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
