A SEARCH FOR SOCIALISM: AN OLD FRIEND LOOKS AT HENRY PACHTER'S WRITINGS

...New York: Columbia University Press, 1984...

...Last but not least, there is the combination of massive unemployment in the declining industries with massive "labor saving" in 454 the new, high-tech industries, and—most strikingly in the United States—with the development of the principal source of new employment, the service trades, on the basis of substandard wages...

...Pachter would admit it, despite its inherent dangers, only as a last resort for the victims of reactionary or fascist dictatorships, not for the citizens of badly governed democracies...

...To be fair, it had been the awareness of this uncontrolled and unforeseeable dynamism and its dangers, along with the desire for an inherently stable order of human relations, that had led Pachter to his 1964 vision of the socialist goal that I have so harshly described as utopian...

...he no longer repeated the utopian vision...

...the very memory of civil war and persecution convinced people of the need for a peaceful transition to democratic freedom— under a king...

...Pachter, I think, was immunized against that pseudoscientific determinism by his study of history in general and by his teacher Karl Korsch in particular...

...There are, in addition, many serious secondary effects of those changes...

...Henry Pachter did not live to see what has become the most massive wave of social and economic reaction in a long time...

...On the contrary, I am convinced that Pachter's interest in the general history of our time or in the study of the ideas of Karl Marx and of outstanding later Marxists has given rise to thoughts of evident relevance to his socialist concern...

...There Pachter announces that the criterion of a socialist is the assumption that "Man is good...

...for the others, the barest enumeration of factors will do...

...No revolution from below, as distinct from "revolutions" imposed from above, has ever taken place in an advanced industrial country, except the German demirevolution of 1918—and this is no accident: in a modern country, the suffering masses are afraid of an upheaval that might disrupt the complicated mechanism of transport and supplies, of health and public security, and so they prefer to look for major changes organized from above...

...They achieved much more in strengthening the stability of their democracy...

...True, there is no fatal economic law that prevents the development of new solutions for these new economic and social problems...

...But while some partial solutions for real but passing troubles have been found, and may still be found, so far no general solutions are in sight...

...and he recognized both the democratic and the economic and social achievements of the "revisionist" policy—without regarding them either as sufficient from a socialist point of view or as assured for all time...

...We may start with the Nixon shock to the world currency system, arising as a late consequence of the American inflation caused by the Vietnam War...

...We might also start with the growing role of the new industrial countries, a positive development in itself but inevitably upsetting the traditional international division of labor and causing crises for a number of once-leading industries in the "old" industrial countries...

...So are such "Marxological" gems as the striking portraits of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and the subtle analysis of the relation between "Marx and the Jews," which neither attacks nor defends Marx's endlessly debated early pamphlet "Zur Judenfrage," but puts it in the * Socialism in History: Political Essays of Henry Pachter...

...In one of his earlier great essays, included in this collection—"Three Economic Models: Capitalism, the Welfare State, and Socialism," published in the Spring 1964 Dissent—Pachter offers an original vision of the socialist goal: an economic system in which the cost of "fixed capital," of factories, 452 machinery, and so on, only counts when it is newly created but not for purposes of amortization, so that income on dead capital can disappear without economic damage...

...But by the 1920s, when Pachter started to think about those problems, it seemed obvious that this factor did not necessarily assure the revolution in times of crisis—and it was to become even more obvious after Hitler's victory...

...Now while the moral imperative that Pachter shows here as a root of socialist action is not exclusive or sectarian, it is an imperative for an individual who is committed to the movement—an imperative of solidarity...

...and they brought about a normalization of relations with their Eastern neighbors, even while remaining loyal to the alliance of the Western democracies: all these were precisely moral achievements—and by no means easy ones...

...While Pachter was quite right in pointing out, toward the end of his essay, that the welfare state required much more cooperation between the "social partners" than it had in Bernstein's generation, I think he was wrong in suggesting that the German Social Democrats had lost more of "their original moral impetus" after World War II than during the Weimar Republic...

...After making clear that the socialism of the founder of German socialist "revisionism" was not based on an explicit moral philosophy, though a number of moral philosophers supported it, Pachter points out that Bernstein "drew his ethical directives from the life of the party...

...But for Pachter, and for me, that leaves the unsolved question of why this movement did not achieve a decisive socialist transformation of society—and the underlying question of what such a transformation could really be like...

...The real economic achievements of democratic socialist movements in our time have been the achievements of Keynesian economics, which neither abolished capital profits nor economic inequality but, during the quarter-century of 1947-72, brought about a steady high level of employment, an extension of social security, and a rise in the standard of living of the working masses in the industrially advanced democracies unprecedented in the world's history...

...When, in 1959, while still in opposition, the German Social Democrats adopted the Godesberg Program, they did not use Bernstein's formula that "the movement is everything, the goal nothing," which, as Pachter rightly recalls, Bernstein himself corrected as misleading...

...In my view, among the many merits of his editing, the one weakness is that Bronner has insufficiently followed the evolution of Pachter's work in the course of time...

...and he always understood that the real historical insights of Marx did not depend on this philistine interpretation...

...There is the growing tendency in Western industrial countries that had long prospered, thanks to comparatively free trade, to react with protectionist measures to the new competition from latecomers—and to extend this practice to the economic relations between the United States and Western Europe, and even to relations among West Europeans...

...He at once corrects the seeming naivete by stating that the proposition "is neither true nor untrue": it can be validated by those who believe and act on it, or invalidated by the faint-hearted...

...The difference in our respective postwar habitats converged with the differences of our temperaments and of the activities to which we inclined: Henry had not only the erudition but also the temperament of the born scholar, never provoked by different opinions unless his opponent showed manifest insincerity or low motives...

...Socialist critics of our present reactionary wave should not waste their energy on antiquated revolutionary dreams, but work both passionately and patiently for finding constructive economic solutions for our plight, and for winning democratic majorities for them...

...Just as obviously, his was never a "Marxism" of a deterministic "scientific" guarantee of that future, such as many Social Democrats still believed in throughout the first third of our century, and as did many Communists as long as they believed in anything...

...Obviously, it started from Marx—from both his analytical teachings and his vision of the revolutionary future...

...I returned to Germany from Britain, where I survived the later years of Hitler's rule and his entire war, first as a journalist, and later again as a university teacher, and have been an active German Social Democrat since my pre-British underground days...

...That was a hard fact not only because there existed hostile Communist dictatorships or suffering poor Third World countries...

...This comes out very strikingly in the Epilogue to the book we are discussing—an essay entitled "Confessions of an Old-Timer: Aphorisms on Socialism," first published in the Winter 1958 Dissent...

...In doing so, I make no claim that my interpretation of Pachter's views should be more "authentic" than anyone else's...

...A socialist, then, in Pachter's view, is one who is willing to make that effort and to help others make it: this was one great achievement of the movement as he saw it, and to which he felt bound...

...But Pachter had not forgotten that moment—he had rejected it because, in its Communist form, it had turned out to cause more permanent damage to human freedom than any benefit it could offer in the form of improved social security even in the best scenario...

...True, although I studied economics in my youth, I am not a trained economist by modern standards, but I am not sure that Pachter was one either...

...There is the massive increase of indebtedness of a number of countries that had overcommitted their economies to rapid development before the tide turned—notably in Latin America and Eastern Europe...

...The mere fact that I have known Pachter longer than other surviving friends of his American years—only excepting his wife Hedwig—does not legitimate such a claim, and that for two reasons, one general and one particular to my case...

...not only because, in the advanced Western countries, a large part of the major means of production was still owned privately and the public control of the economy severely limited—but because, thanks to all those factors, we had never ceased to live in a world of largely uncontrolled and unforeseeable dynamism...

...Not even in modernized Spain after the death of Franco, with its immense emotional potential accumulated by the masses in many years of suffering, was there an attempt at revolution...

...The particular reason in my case is that since the time when we first met in the Berlin of the '20s as Communist students, we have developed differently— not, I feel, in fundamental political outlook, but geographically, "organizationally," and in the relative weight of our activities...

...they achieved very much more in advancing the rights, the living conditions, and the social security of the workers...

...Such historical essays as Pachter's highly original contribution on "The Problem of Imperialism," his penetrating analysis of the role of propaganda in the fascist technique of conquering power, his fiercely independent effort to do justice to the fate of the Palestinians, and his moving 1965 reflections as he looked back at the Spanish Civil War are by themselves sufficient to make the book fascinating reading...

...Another driving force was needed—not instead of "class interest" but in addition to it: a moral force...

...In these circumstances, the fact that some socialists begin to hanker back to a revolutionary solution at the very moment when socialist movements are weakest may be paradoxical, but it is not really surprising...

...Or we may start with the first oil shock caused by the Arab boycott in the course of the Yom Kippur War, and go on to OPEC's second oil shock, not caused by any political crisis but by the material success of the first...

...context of the development of Marx's personality and his broader view of the world...

...I confess that, despite repeated readings, I have been unable to understand this argument...

...He had retained his profound distrust of violent revolution, except possibly against dictatorships...

...since then, the trend has continued and expanded...

...This evolution produced among the West German Social Democrats the revival of Eduard Bernstein's ideas that puzzled Henry Pachter and moved him to write his last essay...

...But since the onset of fascism and nazism, recognition of the moral element in socialism has ceased to be a particular "tendency" within the movement...

...In the Winter 1982 issue, Dissent published an article of mine on what was happening to the "Social Democratic Consensus"—to some extent another name for the Keynesian era...

...I still remember the impact Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine had on many European socialists, including myself, in the early days of Hitler...

...His values were solidarity, justice, equality, liberty, progress...

...The general reason is, of course, that our friendship, like probably all of Pachter's friendships, was based not on continuous and assured agreement, but on ever-renewed argument...

...This concentration of my remarks on what I regard as Henry Pachter's central and abiding concern is in no way caused by a lack of appreciation for his many other interests, of which this book contains striking proof...

...I do understand, however, that this vision of a "socialist economy" presupposes either its worldwide simultaneous introduction or its complete isolation from other economies—both utopian assumptions in the strict sense that their achievement is inherently impossible...

...Thus it will be obvious that I am not the "natural" interpreter of Henry's way of thought—except inasmuch as my consciousness of the differences between us may help me to watch out for my own bias...

...Let me then begin, book in hand, to ask what socialism meant to Henry Pachter...

...He praises the 1964 attempt at a "model" of socialism, without taking adequate account of the fact that the later Pachter stated, for instance at the end of his 1978 essay on "Freedom, Authority, Participation," that "socialism today does not confront the capitalist model with a utopian model," but that it is "an open development of the economy based on an equally open movement for the betterment of living conditions...

...Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen Eric Bronner...

...It is this last and most disturbing point that was already proved by the course of history at the time his essay appeared...

...But there is another objection to the dream of socialist revolution—an objection Pachter did not mention but that may be of special importance in this period of reaction and of disappointment for democratic socialists...

...Even during the period of the greatest democratic, economic, and social achievements in the advanced industrial nations, we did not live in anything like a "socialist" world...

...361 pp...

...Some of this hankering for the lost socialist paradise of revolutionary illusions can be found in Stephen Eric Bronner's introduction to the collection of Pachter's essays in Socialism in History...

...The direction was indicated by the basic values of freedom, justice, and solidarity—a fair sample of the five values of Bernstein's quoted by Pachter...

...West Germany introduced Keynesian economic techniques only under the Grand Coalition of 1966, when the Social Democrat Karl Schiller became minister of economics—but it had profited from international Keynesianism for many years before...

...On the contrary, he charges that Pachter's vision in this essay is "both mechanical and static," and that "the moment of 'revolution' is lacking in Pachter's later works...

...25.00...

...Clearly, Bernstein was right in recognizing that the workers' fighting spirit did not depend on their material grievances alone, but on their link with those common values imbibed in the organized socialist movement, and Pachter agrees with him on this point...

...Here, too, Henry Pachter was right: There is no other way...

...In short, it is a vision of socialism too remote from the actuality of economic life on this planet to have any chance of becoming the goal of a broad political and social movement, let alone the program for its victory...

...On the contrary...

...Thus his political activity, almost wholly confined to writing and debate in small circles, was directed to the unvary451 ing aim of telling the truth to those willing to hear or read it rather than to the achievement of results in the conflicts of the moment...

...There have, of course, always been ethical socialists...

...but I had, and still have, some of the temper of a party man, and have tried again and again to influence the policy of my party, to support it in public or to criticize it...

...But if the socialist goal was not predetermined by the "laws of history," it was necessary to define the driving force that could bring it about and to define the goal itself more precisely than Marx had been willing to do...

...It also presupposes that a high level of consumer satisfaction and an assured limitation of population growth, together, would remove any need for serious economic growth...

...Henry got out of France, his first exile, in time to survive the war in the United States, and he remained therein a country where an effective political force committed to socialism did not and does not exist...

...Yet ultimately, that last essay of Pachter's comes much closer to the view from which I have 453 been arguing here than to what I call his utopian vision of 1964...

...Even where the post-Keynesian international recession has passed its low point, it leaves behind weakened trade unions, reduced social services, and a growing minority of what used to be the "working classes" suffering reproletarianization...

...In the last dozen years, many of the achievements of the period I have called the Keynesian quarter-century have fallen victim to this uncontrolled dynamism...

...Or we may start with the new worldwide awareness of the ecological dangers caused by harmful industrial emissions and agricultural chemistry, and go on to the cost of belated countermeasures...

...To Marx, of course, the driving force was the struggle of the exploited workers for their emancipation—and that motivation has remained a vital hope of socialist movements in all countries, at all times, and of all tendencies, from Eduard Bernstein to Lenin...

...There is the ominous threat that massive indebtedness may lead to a crisis of the banking systems of the creditor countries, and that protectionism may undermine the cooperation of the European Economic Community...

...They were often achieved in cooperation with "enlightened" economists and politicians of the capitalist camp, but for many years went together with a steady strengthening of the labor movement's influence—hence the widespread talk of a "social democratic consensus...

...Most readers will, no doubt, know only too well what I am talking about...

...Others are still threatened...

...q 455...

...As for me, I also eventually became a professional scholar, and never wished to become a professional politician...

...But while I am happy to commend this wealth of insights to general attention, it is the nature of Henry Pachter's commitment to socialism that I propose to discuss here—however imperfectly...

...It is therefore fitting that this second collection of his essays to appear after his death should be called Socialism in History.* But it seems to me also appropriate that a discussion of this book in the magazine for which he wrote for many years, and which shared and still shares his commitment to critical and independent socialist thought, should primarily deal with the question of just what that commitment meant to him...

...It is this relation between the cohesion of the movement and the community of its values that has struck Henry Pachter most positively in his otherwise rather mixed judgment on "The Ambiguous Legacy of Eduard Bernstein" —the latest-written essay in this book, published in Dissent shortly after the author's death...

...they said that socialism was not a final state but an unending task, a direction in which one had to work again and again in ever new and often unforeseeable situations...

...What Pachter really means, then, is not the anthropological nonsense that man is, or can be made, morally perfect, but that men and women, imperfect as they are, are capable of making a moral effort—and that the chances for mankind, including the chances of socialism, depend on that effort...

...I described a number of the retrograde developments and tentatively suggested policies that might stop the dangerous trend...