IN DEFENSE OF UTOPIANISM

...It must rediscover deep human reasons why people should support it and advocate them vigorously if it is not to concede the terrain of the next generation's politics as it has the terrain of the present...

...Consider the trajectory of left energy since its rebirth in the 1960s...

...Saint-Simon viewed his doctrines as a general science that would encompass all the existing sciences...

...There follows the inevitable technological metaphor: "The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc...

...There was a time when a critique of the electoral road to socialism would inevitably turn into a defense of Leninist vanguardism...

...Futurology, in modern capitalism, is a term that conjures up images of technology, not social relations, and for that the left must take its share of the blame...

...Under similar circumstances, in the early 19th century, a Robert Owen or Henri de Saint-Simon would have sat down at the drawing board and started to sketch out a more sensible alternative...

...His exemplary life illustrates the power of the socialist movement in developing human potential...

...At a time when American politics has shifted to the right, the effort to stop that movement becomes overwhelming...

...By modernizing the state apparatus, the socialist project prepared the groundwork for a newly integrated state of capitalist power...

...Socialism, without the self-confidence of its own project, not only seems unable to come to power but, just as tragically, seems unable to know what to do when it does...

...There were results: an occasional socialist mayor, a well-organized labor union, links to minority constituencies...

...This leads Marx and Engels to a most peculiar criticism of utopian socialists: "In the formulation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class...

...And socialist politicians have no answers because socialist theorists are not asking questions...

...All three utopian socialists, then, could not understand the dynamics of revolutionary agency: One thing is common to all three...

...On his deathbed, Saint-Simon gathered his followers and said, "The pear is ripe, you must pluck it...

...Voters in advanced capitalist societies seek overwhelmingly to offer their support to the Frank Marquart 1899 - 1984 Frank Marquart was on the first editorial board of Dissent and in its early years an important contributor...

...Capital has become so internationalized that the prospect of a capital strike—once a dreaded weapon pulled out when circumstances demanded—is now built into rules of global capital flow...

...The problem is that cumulative particulars do not make a universal whole...

...This particularism lives on in many forms...

...International conditions are at the heart of any effort to revive the universality inherent in 19th-century utopian socialism...

...In the steel town where he was raised, all immigrants were Hunkies regardless of their nationality...

...In order to win political acceptance, socialist parties broke down universal conceptions of citizenship in favor of the representation of various constituencies— one after the other...

...If, for example, economic growth and national security have become the only issues that dominate politics, it is because intellectuals have not developed a credible case for the advantages to be gained from steadystate economics or partial disarmament...

...States find the funds to pay for social welfare from surpluses generated through economic expansion...

...The utopian socialists actually possessed a foreshadowing of the atmosphere of nuclear problems...

...Justifying such particular needs is a direct road to irrelevance...

...Under late-20th-century conditions, the utopian socialists' search for a universalistic language, which Marx and Engels had viewed as a sign of immaturity, could be transformed into a sign of strength...

...Saint-Simon's followers, especially Barthelemy Prosper ' These quotations are from Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 19...

...While socialist parties and activist unions often speak otherwise to mobilize the faithful (in Europe, not here), they have come to recognize that what their members need are jobs and rising incomes, obtainable only when the economy expands...

...Socialists arrived at the position of honoring what they attack owing to their complete assimilation of a materialist conception of the good society...

...True, Americans love their cars, even if they are not especially fond of those who build them...

...The British Labour party lost to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand's French Socialist party won unprecedented power, and neither is in especially good shape...

...A rededication to idealism may not help write a Labour party manifesto or instruct French Socialists what to do when in power, but it would excite the imagination...

...Its tasks, in short, are numbing in their difficulty, but therefore vital in their importance...

...For then the political contest becomes a set of competing claims over whether capital or unions can do the most for the largest number of people, and once it is expressed in this fashion, the obvious answer is capital...

...When he died, it was not only the old-timers who mourned him—the Wobblies, trade unionists, anarchists, and socialists— but many young people and all who had been touched by his noble spirit...

...Within the peace movement, especially in the United States, are activists so deeply burned by America's role in Vietnam (and now its performance in Central America) that they have come to the position that since the U.S...

...In the name of the interests of the working class, almost as much realpolitik has been justified as in the name of national security...

...Yet are Marx and Engels fair to the utopian socialists...

...It hardly matters...

...Businessmen, after all, have only their own profits to worry about, while labor needs profits for a much larger constituency...

...But when they win, their prospects include strikes by capital so potent that they must renege on their promises...

...Both have had their successes, but both have now failed...

...Citizenship was made universal, perhaps the greatest historical accomplishment of social democracy...

...The result is that they too support, either directly or through selective indignation, one side in the cold war...

...Instead of leading a campaign for further mobilization, the left becomes an arbiter who decides whose claims are just, balancing this against that, trading off instead of fighting for gains...

...Being so far behind Europe was, in a way, a blessing in disguise, for the dilemmas that were arising there were barely perceived here...

...but that formula is hardly credible at a time when the industrial working class has shrunk and when majorities view the interests of workers as contrary to their vision of a good society...

...Under conditions far more catastrophic than those envisioned by Marx and Engels, whose general optimism and faith in progress seem anachronistic in the nuclear age, it becomes difficult to argue that the pear needs to ripen further before it will fall to the ground by itself...

...Fourier was the least "scientific" of the three, but even he, in his plans for highly organized phalansteries, called on the spirit of scientific endeavor...

...It is something of an honor to be singled out for criticism, and Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon would certainly be more obscure had they not been so prominently displayed in one of the world's all-time best-sellers...

...Academic Marxism, having no answers to the socialist impasse, has occupied itself with literary texts and social-science theory...

...Marx," Frank and Fritzie Manuel have concluded in their book (p...

...The net effect of the left strategy of gradual incorporation is that it establishes rivalry between the "ins" and the "outs": between labor and minorities, working men and working women, social security claimants and labor force entrants...

...In fact, in order to truly represent the interests of the proletariat, its representatives must actively work against substantial change...

...But once the field of politics is narrowed down to a struggle over interests, the proletariat has less to offer than the bourgeoisie...

...Utopian socialists, concede Marx and Engels, had some good ideas: "They attack every principle of existing society...

...These political dilemmas suggest that even if the world were not in a global recession, limits to welfare state expansion would still exist...

...Fourier's writings pn sex were so much in advance of their time that many of them were not published until the 1960s...

...Its success in West Germany has at least subliminal nationalistic urges, and it faces divisions as serious and damaging as any other political tendency...

...For in order to represent the "interests" of the proletariat, or of anyone else, one must first accept the legitimacy of the political order that defines that interest—in this case, the state...

...But the left must do more than register its opposition...

...3 My purpose is not to romanticize new social movements like the Green party...

...Fourier spoke of an ecart absolu, a rejection of all previous knowledge...

...The left must translate the longing for national security into a nonmilitaristic urge based on a viable theory of how to get along with other societies, even antagonistic ones...

...Desperate for growth, socialists in power need the support of capital before they can inflate the economy...

...Shift the axis away from economics, and the designation of which of these traditions is most reactionary reverses itself...

...Issues of modern concern— such as ecological destruction, nuclear war, problems of biology and reproduction—are issues that appeal to people beyond class lines and other divisions...

...As dominant classes utilize the language of economic growth to promise utopia, socialist and social democratic parties become the last defenders of traditions against the ruthless changes sponsored by the forces of order...

...True, Marxism once suggested that the interests of the workers would become the interests of all...

...He fought injustice wherever he found it, and had absolute integrity...

...The economic limitations faced by the left are related to its political conception of representation...

...The price that the left paid for the dominance of these two traditions has been the suppression of a third—one that, ironically, was fatally wounded by Marx and Engels themselves...

...The accumulation of maximum state power made a good deal of sense as a socialist strategy in the first part of this century...

...Support for the welfare state assumed a Marshallian conception of citizenship...

...The word is "interests...

...Quoted in Frank and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 646...

...Owenism called itself "the new science of society...

...For a century this difference mattered...

...The road to parliamentary socialism, on which socialists of all tendencies have been traveling for at least half a century, seems either blocked or endless...

...He helped organize the first effective auto worker unions in Detroit...

...What at one time was a strongly internationalist movement wound up taking sides in the cold war...

...Placed in the awkward position of arguing against their own existence, socialist governments have invented the strategy of demonstrating their timorousness by putting themselves in power, where they will be visible to all...

...This has heaped error upon error, until it has literally overwhelmed us with confusion...

...Historically, what has 325 made the left "left" was the fact that in order to win any gains at all, it was forced to mobilize energy that would expand the realm of political action...

...There is nothing inherently wrong with this, for particular interests deserve representation in anyone's social scheme...

...But once we understand them, once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends...

...Certainly, they were correct to stress the contradictions in the utopians' thoughts, to dismiss their naivete, to accentuate their conservatism, and note their peculiarities...

...With these discoveries socialism became a science...

...713), "came early to utopia, and the longing never abated, though 327 the language of the utopia changed at various stages of his life...

...For over a century the left has been waiting for the material conditions to be ripe enough to usher in, by one means or another, the socialist vision...

...Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced...

...The Western peace movements offer a direct path to a new strategy building upon what people hold in common, not what drives them apart...

...Academic journals are as boring and predictable when written along Marxist lines as when they were dominated by Parsonianism...

...II o one depicted the meaning of modern capitalism more brilliantly than Marx and Engels...

...Standing above the fray, unparalyzed by constituency politics because it represents only one constituency, the capitalist party appears more unified, speaking for the national interest, especially when compared to the fractiousness of the left...

...Quote from the Manifesto...

...Once the unions were established, he championed their original ideas despite mounting bureaucracy, educated the young and, whether it was in Detroit or in New Mexico, represented the oppressed, whether blacks, Chicanos, Indians, women, or the elderly...

...It must find a language of fairness and social justice that cannot be undermined by the appeal of greed or individualism...

...He was the epitome of the libertarian socialist, nonsectarian, always putting his own life on the line for the ideal that he held dear...

...however unfortunate it may be, it can be utilized if, like fire, it works in the service of humanity...

...The former spoke of the centralization of power in the firm, the latter of the centralization of power in the state...

...The present socialist impasse is due to the fact that now it matters much less...

...It would be difficult to make the claim that people are happy with huge defense budgets and international capital mobility...

...In this new mine he exploited only the material vein, I exploit the industrial...

...Just as they are too quick to dismiss modernizing technology in favor of nostalgia, the utopian socialists do not recognize the historically progressive role played by proletarianization...

...To the left devolved the responsibility for broadening, mobilizing, activating...

...When an issue such as the nuclear freeze does penetrate the national consciousness, precisely because it offers hope, it cuts through all mush like a knife, forcing politicians to endorse it against their clear inclinations...

...A more compelling argument for asserting the universal over the particular would be difficult to develop...

...The sin of utopianism, in the view of Marx and Engels, is its deliberate refusal to enter into a Faustian pact with emerging technological and social realities...

...That unity, of course, is illusory and can turn into fierce squabbling when the right comes to power...

...It must think through whether there are alternatives to bureaucracy as a form of delivering social services...

...To make a science of socialism," Engels wrote, "it had first to be placed upon a real basis...

...they support such programs only because everything else seems worse...

...Marx and Engels had argued that the liberation of the particular would cause the liberation of all...

...for destabilization of one set of rules could, and most likely would, lead to a worse set in another reshuffling...

...The trouble with utopian socialism, from this point of view, was that it came about too early...

...For all their other differences, both Leninism (soviets plus electrification) and social democracy shared an emphasis on the expansion of economic output...

...There has arisen a peace movement in the West, one that needs to be an essential ingredient of any utopian project...

...For a generation, the seeming security of nuclear weapons helped stifle creative thought...

...The welfare state broadened the realm of politics, incorporating into the state and its activities large majorities that were once left to decide their fates for themselves...

...An excerpt from the book appeared in the Spring 1983 Dissent...

...The price citizens pay to achieve the outputs that the modern state can offer is less of a say over the inputs that make up its character...

...The new science of society, the Owenites claimed, was "the science that determined...

...Some social democrats, whose detestation of communism is enormous, have come to the position that the national interests of the United States as a global power take preference over universal claims, and thus they find themselves in sympathy with the Reagan administration...

...The Second International broke apart because the socialist parties of Europe put considerations of their own nation-states ahead of international solidarity...

...The more outrageous capitalism becomes, the less visionary, in turn, becomes socialism...

...326 ONE FINAL AREA that can be used to illustrate my theme that the absence of universalizing notions has caused significant harm to socialist movements lies in the realm of foreign policy...

...My theory is the continuation of Newton's on attraction...

...happiness or misery . . . by circumstances over which each individual has hitherto had little control...

...Nonetheless, there are times when the universal language of hope or despair bursts into a political force that compels attention...

...Admittedly, the effort to transform utopian longings into a political language with mass appeal is not going to help elect candidates over the next decade...

...The French Socialist party in power is, if anything, somewhat more chauvinistic than the government it replaced...

...From the standpoint of its particular, constituency, the bill makes a certain sense...

...Thatcher and Reagan must surely understand that when the long-term costs of their disastrous experiments are paid, it will be their political opponents who will be in power to pay them...

...But beneath the economic difficulties facing modern welfare states are political problems equally as serious...

...Active social forces," Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, "work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them...

...In order to accommodate new interests without threatening the old ones, the capitalist state had evolved by linking particular interest groups, government bureaus, and legislators into a pattern of mutual reenforcement...

...This book proved extremely stimulating in the presentation of this argument...

...I refer to utopian socialism, now needed more than ever...

...The stimuli for the new movements, Rudolf Bahro has suggested, are those "in which people are affected less in terms of their class membership than as concrete individuals...

...What I can never understand is why others practice realpolitik for free, taking upon themselves the task of defending the narrow interests of a state that could not care less for or about them...

...But from the point of view of transforming the social terrain, it is a disaster...

...Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once...

...and Owen's followers, as Barbara Taylor has pointed out in her book, were revolutionaries on the woman question (as it was called at the time...

...Yet since the modern state has become so tied to the modern economy, a price was inevitably paid to achieve those benefits...

...That the left will downplay its economic objectives on those rare occasions when it comes to power seems only a matter of time, not temperament...

...Injustice, one can only conclude, must be seen in context...

...There is a realm of politics, in other words, that looms behind elections, and that, in the long run, influences what those who contest elections have to say...

...The three utopian socialists singled out by them were hardly hostile to science...

...The irony is that because capital is responsible for most ecological damage, environmentalism—which should be a conservative ideology—most often links itself to the parties of the left...

...321 By polarizing utopianism against science, Marx and Engels misstated the differences between these two traditions...

...In fact, representation of interests leads, as political scientists would put it, to interest representation...

...As if this were not enough, socialism in theory is becoming as barren as socialism in practice...

...French engineering and public works owe their origins to his disciples...

...Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class...

...Now the perceived danger has sparked a renewed effort to take back fate...

...Such nationalism was condemned by the future leaders of the Russian Revolution, but they, too, would later find the appeal of nationalism too compelling to resist...

...Marx and Engels gave utopianism a raw deal, thereby depriving the dominant radical tradition of the 20th century of a spirit that it craves...

...This crisis is rarely fiscal, but usually political...

...The sudden popularity of Norman 0. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse 20 years ago inspired one such moment, and the eruption of the Green party in West Germany at the present time signals another...

...The possibility of extermination breeds utopian thought, or it breeds no thought at all...

...No political movement that puts the particular interests of any nation-state ahead of its concern for peace can speak so forcefully...

...There seems to be nothing incompatible between Marxism and the quest for rigorous hypotheses that can be tested by methods acceptable to the National Science Foundation...

...Marx and Engels tied oppression to membership in a class...

...Capital, in short, is becoming the only interest group in capitalist society...

...Economies expand when businessmen have confidence, and since most businessmen are so insecure that the mere mention of socialism is enough to send them into the Manhattan real estate market, socialist politicians find that they themselves stand in the way of the realization of their own goals...

...A left strategy aimed at increasing social welfare, necessary as it was, contributed to the impoverishment of public life that is so much a feature of contemporary states...

...Those were the only two alternatives: social democracy or insurrectionary socialism...

...Socialist and social democratic parties, in other words, already fighting among the groups within, are further divided between those who have won access to the state and those who see themselves in a post-access position...

...328...

...If, through political action, the recipients of those benefits demand programs that capital deems too high to pay, expansion is endangered and what the popular press calls a fiscal crisis results...

...The commitment to a course of growth and economic expansion was unquestionably political in origin, tied to the struggle for votes in a liberal democratic political system...

...What seemed childish then cannot be completely dismissed now...

...Left parties work at cross-purposes, mobilizing power on the one hand, seeking limits to that power on the other...

...The decomposition of the 19th-century socialist project is far more advanced in Europe than in the United States...

...The idea seemed to be that as each previously underrepresented group was mobilized to demand its rights in the state, the total effort would lead to the representation of all...

...Still, New Leftists found that the dead end was reached before it became clear what road they were traveling...

...The same political party that represents those who seek to expand the state also comes to represent those who seek to limit the state...

...Yet a defense of utopian socialism need not be a defense of the utopian socialists...

...The alternative is a left that either defeats itself or wins only to carry out the political project of its antagonists...

...By following the logic of interest, Marxism became a particularism...

...Still, social democracy lost its universalism early on and has never regained it fully...

...Socialism can no longer assume that progress will drop benefits into its lap...

...O V ne can view a rededication to a utopian project either as a rejection of Marxism or as a return to Marxism in its original form...

...IF NOT SCIENCE OR MODERNITY, then what was the characteristic distinguishing utopian socialism from Marxist socialism...

...IV Throughout Europe and North America, the welfare state seems to have peaked in the face of tax revolts and more aggressive capitalist politics...

...There followed a critique of capitalism emphasizing the irrationality of capitalist accumulation, not capitalist accumulation per se...

...The left's problems are further compounded...

...They argue that the best case for socialism is that it will most protect capitalism...

...My point is simply that the discourse raised by Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (London: Heretic Books, 1982), p. 117...

...The political movement that can speak to this concern has enormous potential strength...

...It makes less sense now, and that is a major reason why socialist movements are in such need of new ideas...

...This is the realm that socialists must reclaim...

...He died on September 5, 1984, at the age of 85...

...Like Bertolt Brecht, who refused to condemn the Nazi-Soviet Pact on the grounds that the Russians needed time to prepare their defenses, the left finds itself too often in the dubious business of explaining why nation-states need to take certain actions...

...To transform the irrational into the rational, the left stood for planning, centralization, proletarianization, integration, coordination—in short, for big instead of small, the public instead of the private, power instead of diffusion, nationalism and internationalism in preference to localism, and uniformity in favor of diversity...

...Enfantin, led a sexual cult...

...As partisans, they undermine claims to speak for the universal interest of all people threatened by nuclear war...

...The embittered tenant farmer deprived of his livelihood by the Enclosure Acts is supposed to feel better because his transformation into a worker will aid the cause of socialist revolution...

...What is Fourierism...

...The proletariat is not a collection of people but a force, and its oppression consists, not in the way its members are treated as individuals, but in the way history has decided its fate as a class...

...The new social movements and their interpreters argue the exact opposite: only through the assertion of universal needs can the particular find its expression...

...The political brokers that emerged from the 1960s learned their pragmatism and organizational skills well, often better than those they opposed...

...This creates the precondition for a movement that expresses its disgust with realpolitik, its preference for the needs of people over the dictates of states, its internationalism, its concern with survival...

...Desperate for acceptance, they find themselves called on, at such times, to deflate the economy...

...John Grey, an Edinburgh Owenite, summed up the managerial vision of the founder of the sect when he wrote: We have hitherto . . . conducted our affairs by chance...

...This instrumental, technological .neutrality has a social dimension...

...The next thing was to work out all its details and relations...

...Yet for all that, the spirit of the Second International lives on—in reverse...

...It has not tied itself to specific constituencies...

...Lately, this pattern has moderated, as evidenced by the Socialist International's stance in Central America...

...Now that the future, so to speak, has arrived, the historic dynamic is transformed...

...Yet since a utopia of commodities, however imperfect, is to be preferred to no utopia at all, the left has, astonishingly, ceded vision to the capitalist class...

...Both capitalism and socialism were strategies of accumulation...

...What does matter is both the seriousness of the latecapitalist death wish and the corresponding impotence of late-socialist strategy...

...Nor is it correct to view the difference between utopian socialism and Marxist socialism as the difference between modernity and what Marx and Engels dismissed as the "reactionary character" of Owen and like-minded French adventurers...

...It has spoken to universal needs...

...At the beginning of this century, the British social theorist T. H. Marshall noted that membership in the political community had become defined by the outputs that individuals received from government programs...

...True, one can choose between Althusserian scientism and Frankfurt School hermeneutics, but both are dead languages...

...Visions, like plants, die if unattended...

...Like capitalist goods themselves, this universalism has built-in obsolescence, offering the promise of happiness but resulting in frustration and malaise...

...Having carried out its historical task, it has little choice but to turn the state back to capital, which uses the new state apparatus for its own purposes...

...But it is also true that anger over the level of traffic jams, air pollution, and deteriorating mass transit is enormous...

...It must consider if both free-trade liberalism and xenophobic protectionism can be avoided in favor of some kind of dynamic self-sufficiency...

...While criticizing the depletion of the environment through exploitation, environmental movements also generally move on to challenge the whole pattern of concentrated private power working to the advantage of already mobilized constituencies...

...I can understand why realpolitik is attractive to those in power: they are well rewarded for their ability to twist reality around to suit the particular needs of those who pay them...

...The gamble taken by Marx and Engels was that the representation of the interests of a particular class would lead to revolution...

...the difference between a conflagration, and fire in the service of man...

...When socialists take clear stands on matters as emotional as national security, they risk disaffection and public repudiation, leading to defeat...

...323 antinuclear, feminist, environmental, and other such groups constitutes the universal vocabulary that traditional socialist parties need to overcome heir particularist limits...

...He described himself as a scissorbill with the "usual prejudices of a semiliterate American"—antiSemitic, antiblack, and antiradical...

...This, no doubt, is the result of its aggressive recognition of its political role but also of the increasing particularism and pragmatism of representatives of the working class...

...While different constituencies fight for access to the state, other groups arise in late capitalism proclaiming that the entire historical pattern of political mobilization and expansion must be curtailed...

...This does not, however, prevent American socialists from looking abroad with envy...

...But their impressive energy kept below the conscious level what the purpose of it all was supposed to be...

...Either way, the only ingenuity allowed them lies in how they will present their case to capital—a case that may not constitute a threat to its demands...

...By standing resolutely for the welfare state over the determined opposition of capital, the left created for itself strong constituencies that kept it at or near the apex of political power for a considerable period of time...

...In the face of capital's economic power, left forces could offer the benefits from efforts of state-building...

...This movement has done exactly what the organized left has so often failed to do...

...Multiply the number of socialist mayors by 5,000, assume that the entire labor movement shifted to the left, and then add the triumph of Marxism in the political science and sociology departments of all the Ivy League universities—surely an agenda beyond hopes of accomplishment—and consider 320 how far from socialism the United States would still be...

...A generation of more than the usual size, embittered by Vietnam and revelations of American hypocrisy, has now had the opportunity to enter and transform institutional life...

...It has won support for its consistency and its idealism...

...He became a pioneer labor educator, a great-souled humanist, and a most effective organizer for the auto workers even before the UAW...

...Part of the task of a socialist movement is to carry forward the early 20th-century effort toward political expansion...

...Many New Leftists, repelled by sectarianism and anxious to overcome their isolation, have turned to pragmatism and electoral politics...

...For Marx and Engels, the self-designation "science" meant a proper understanding of the revolutionary role of the proletariat...

...Energy that once went into creating visions was sublimated into doorbell ringing...

...Under such conditions, particularism degenerates into self-defense and narrow appeals— hardly an inspiring formula...

...Marxism is as much a formula 322 for constituency-oriented politics in the 20th century as it was a formula for revolutionary transformation in the 19th...

...Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them" (my emphasis...

...Yet in a capitalist world, where scarcity is so important a concept that capital goes to great lengths to create it artificially if necessary, the possession of access to government becomes a resource on the part of those who have it, valuable only if it can be used against those who do not...

...Marxism, as recently as 20 years ago, was a vibrant alternative to the intellectual bankruptcy of equilibrium models of society...

...Three areas where universal themes are essential to socialist practice can illustrate the point: the realm of economic planning, the nature of constituencies, and issues of foreign policy...

...he wrote...

...The fear of nuclear war has given rise to sentiment that views the entire nation-state system as responsible for the precarious existence of humanity...

...I personally find that the same distrust of academic complacency that once attracted me to Marxism now turns me against it—or at least against the form of Marxism that works its way into graduate-school syllabi...

...government is anti-Soviet, they must not be...

...It is quite clear that this state of things had to end...

...There are obvious class interests involved in ecological issues, which disproportionately attract those who have made it and repel those who have not...

...There remain, even at this late date, significant constituencies so mistreated by historical circumstance that their incorporation into welfare state politics has never been complete: minorities, women, immigrants, young people, and various categories of what the Italians call immarginatti...

...This last statement contains a word that, in my opinion, crystallizes the difference between these different schools of socialism...

...Great advantages were obtained by the left's adoption of a materialist strategy, for it enabled socialists to speak for the future against the conservatism of bourgeois obstructionism...

...Two "scientific" discoveries provided that reality...

...Marquart was forced to leave school at the age of 14 to work to help support his German immigrant family...

...His introduction to socialism changed him as it has changed millions throughout the world...

...To be sure, Owen particularly was attracted to physiocratic doctrines, but the other two were prophets of industrialisth, not critics...

...Yet the net effect of these successes was to give the New Left all the conservatism of constituency politics with little of the power that is its reward...

...The universality envisioned by the utopian socialists is turned into its opposite: rivalry, parochialism, self-interest...

...To crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories...

...While unions are increasingly perceived as concerned only with their narrow self-interest, the vitally important business of moving people from one place to another is left to those with the power to alter the public's needs to their own tastes and then to win public support for their efforts...

...Yet if citizenship was expanded quantitatively, it increasingly seems to have been narrowed qualitatively...

...Social democrats, however, were not the only forces on the left that were willing to substitute particular national interests for universal longings...

...While socialists increasingly concern themselves with 324 the particular needs of the working class, capital, through its commodities, speaks to the universalism that the left dropped...

...Adequate social welfare funding, in other words, is tied fairly directly to political quiescence...

...Yet for all their antagonism toward capitalism, their sympathy for modernism, as Marshall Berman suggested in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Simon & Schuster, 1982), is striking...

...And when discussion turned from matters of economics to questions of family life, the position of women, and sexual repression, utopian socialism was far more "modern" than the Victorian morality of Marxism...

...Realpolitik and an effort to change the terms of opposition discourse cannot go together...

...A particularly relevant American example of how the left project has been stood on its head concerns the efforts of the United Auto Workers, one of the more progressive unions, to win passage of a domestic content bill that would attempt to insure jobs for American workers...

...Since the left, unlike capital, still believes in the notion that people should be responsible for their actions, it becomes the locus for all the contradictions in the society, leaving the capitalist party free to do whatever it likes...

...One was the materialistic conception of history, the other the secret of surplus value...

...Once the proletariat becomes the dominant class, its revolutionary consciousness will work out in practice what the utopian socialists were unable to do with the power of their brains...

...So long as growth is the first priority of politics, it follows that in order to represent adequately the interests of the working class, one must do everything in one's power to guarantee the security and longevity of the capitalist class...

...Moreover, there is a universal appeal in many more traditional issues—such as prosperity, national security, or fairness...

...Working in Detroit as a factory hand, he was jolted out of the mindlessness of his work-numbed existence by meeting socialists who talked to him on the job...

...Without that effort, political life would have been stagnant, staying in the restricted universe of the 18th century...

...Not only does it verge on xenophobia in its suspicion of foreign workers, it commits the left to the building of more automobiles, as if the exacerbation of one of the most frustrating features of American life should be the goal of opposition movements...

...Ill 0 ne could hardly overstate the alacrity with which the Socialist government in France was forced to abandon even a moderate commitment to economic expansion in favor of an austerity that should have pleased, but did not, the most pecuniary of international bankers...

...Stan Ovshinsky q most unimaginative and cautious of politicians, only to lament, when asked, the lack of ideas and courage in their policy-makers...

...Interest-group politics is always liberal politics, for one interest obtains its desires by bargaining with others...

...That the UAW does not even think along these lines is a sign of how much the left project has deteriorated since then...