THINKING ABOUT SOCIALISM
Howe, Irving
Christianity did not "die" in the 19th century. Millions held fast to the faith; churches survived; theological controversies flourished. Yet we can now see that in the decades after the...
...In order to rein in such enterprises, both of our models envisage "tripartite management" (government, consumers, workers...
...12 Radoslav Selucky, Marxism, Socialism, Freedom (New York: St...
...t The centralized, authoritarian structure of the East European societies "requires that all basic economic decisions be made at the top of the social hierarchy...
...Some of these conditions were a result of difficulties created by the civil war...
...7 I cite these two influential figures to show that such ideas do go back to earlier generations of socialist thinkers...
...So long as it is one individual, there would probably be no objection...
...One possible rule might be that above this limit there be a choice, either to convert into a cooperative or to become a socialized enterprise, with proper compensation for the original entrepreneur...
...When doctrinaire leftists (or rightists, for that matter) point to possible abuses in a market socialism, they are almost always pointing to risks present in any democratic society...
...6 Nove, p. 206-207...
...The realization of the socialist hope depends on the growth of consciousness, a finer grasp of the possibilities of citizenship and comradeship than now prevails...
...And if so, how would it be possible to avoid the linked plagues of bureaucratism, demagogic manipulation, clique maneuverings, endless filibustering, ignorant narrowness, cronyism in elections, and a selfish resistance to the larger needs of society...
...At least with regard to the managers, however, an imaginative government would work very hard to gain their cooperation, arguing that many of them, especially at middle levels, have no unalterable stake in perpetuating corporate control of economic life or in vast social inequities...
...I exaggerate a little, but not, I fear, very much...
...But there would be also the possibility of a private entrepreneur actually employing a few people, which makes him an "exploiter" insofar as he makes a profit out of their work...
...Notes ' Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949, paperback), p. 96...
...AMONG SOCIAL DEMOCRATS this habit of thought encouraged an easy confidence in the benefits of historical evolution...
...As for small-scale private enterprise, Presumably even the fanatical dogmatist would accept the existence of freelance writers, painters and dressmakers...
...I list some of the possible answers: social democratic parties often have come to office without parliamentary majorities, which meant they had to enter coalitions that imposed severe constraints...
...1=1 525...
...Incentives would have to be attached to their jobs, allowing them sufficient authority to display leadership while still being subject to the democratic check of worker-employers...
...No doubt, in some instances there were also the betrayals of principle that the far left charged against social democracy, but most of the time, I think, social democrats were victimized by their own intellectual slackness...
...VII A mid such turnings of political thought, a harsh question intrudes itself: Does the socialist idea, even if rendered more sophisticated than in the past, still survive as a significant option...
...It may come...
...2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London, 1942 edition), p. 26...
...What does it mean precisely...
...Less and less does that seem an avenue to the cooperative commonwealth...
...For in politics, as elsewhere, choices must be made...
...Could not many liberals endorse Stuart Hampshire's "moral injunctions...
...So with all the necessary qualifications as to tentativeness and speculativeness, I proceed to offer a sketch of a sketch, cheerfully pilfered from the work of several recent writers...
...Probably...
...Morris Hillquit, quoted in William English Walling, Progressivism and After (New York: Macmillan, 1914), pp...
...ities" are now to be taken into systematic account...
...For the worker technology holds the most direct access to science and everything that lies beyond it...
...There is, furthermore, one great advantage in being powerless, and that is that it enables, sometimes stimulates, serious thought...
...On the other hand, politics develops evils of its own—evils specific to the exercise of power...
...Yet even a glance at the Bolshevik record after the November 1917 revolution will show that Lenin and his comrades had only the most sketchy and confused ideas about the socioeconomic policies that might enable a socialist transformation...
...The same argument against private control of the founder-owner or by the current corporate owner works . . . against private control by the community of employees...
...But unless we can suppose an implausible cornucopia of goods and services, we had better accept the idea of a regulated market as necessary under a feasible democratic socialism...
...Wage differentials would remain, in accordance with pressures of scarcity and skill, though again subject to social boundaries...
...That the market subjects the human encounter to the fetishism of commodities, signifying that men are not free from the rule of impersonal exchange and wage labor, is true...
...A wealth tax—attractive...
...How are decisions to be made regarding capital investment...
...Neither of our model-makers discusses sufficiently a major problem: the place of unions in a democratic socialist society...
...secondly, that as great inequalities in wealth between different social groups lead to inequalities in power and in freedom of action, they are generally unjust and need to be redressed by governmental action...
...I do not know...
...Social democratic parties were often voted into office at moments when capitalist economies were suffering breakdowns, which meant that precisely the condition prompting their victories also limited their capacity for taking radical measures...
...The authority for major decisions of the enterprise should rest in the larger public, the democratic polity...
...Could it be otherwise—especially in a country with little experience in political democracy, before or after Tito...
...For to say that a social vision is the province of all risks making it the passion of none...
...In the process, however, each is supposed to observe two rules: (1) to combine factors in such a way as to assure that at the prices established for such inputs any given output is produced at a minimum cost, and (2) to fix the scale of output of any commodity produced at a point where its marginal cost equals the corresponding price...
...There now followed a sharp drop in production: further depletion of industrial plant...
...which, if mankind continues to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of the laborers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves...
...goals now unattainable will never be reached unless they are articulated when they are still unattainable...
...far better to recognize a multiplicity of interests and outlooks, with the certainty that, if ventures in self-management are undertaken, they will be subject to many difficulties...
...At one point he proposed the creation of labor armies, a kind of militarized garrison economy...
...They operate within the framework of the market, which is regulated by a central indicative plan...
...but can anyone be certain that there will not be new or recurrent social crises that will give an 516 unexpected relevance to at least some of the basic socialist proposals...
...Marxists would reply, with some irritation, that their vision of ultimate social harmony depends on the unfolding of a lengthy historical sequence during which not only new values and habits, but a new humanity would emerge...
...But there remains a utopian outlook that relates immediate objectives to ultimate goals, and it is to this that socialists cling...
...Socialism should be envisaged as a society in which the means of production, to an extent that need not be rigidly determined in advance, are collectively or socially owned—which means, democratically controlled...
...In any case, socialists remain...
...Such transitional measures, whatever their ultimate benefits, are certain to create immediate difficulties...
...Mulling over this question, I find myself in some sympathy with the traditional leftist reluctance to indulge in "future painting...
...it can perhaps help to create a modern infrastructure in third-world economies...
...How these moral requirements are best realized, at particular times and places...
...This view was in accord with Lenin's realistic understanding that socialism—seen traditionally by Marxists as a society presupposing economic abundance and a high level of culture— could not be achieved in a country such as Russia, certainly not without substantial aid from the industrial West...
...There is no way to disprove such expectations, any more than to dispel the skepticism they arouse...
...Let us focus on two models for a democratic socialism offered by Radoslav Selucky, a Czech exile now living in the West, and Alec Nove, an economist living in Scotland.** As a matter of strict principle, both agree on the need for multiparty democracy...
...Is Selucky, p. 185...
...And in time there could be a trade-off between some of the efficiencies allegedly brought about by authoritarian forms of organization and the growing creativity of cooperative production...
...In the writings of the English guild socialists we find some hints on these matters, but not enough...
...Whatever we may now claim for a refurbished socialism, we can hardly claim that it satisfies the emotions as once the early movement did...
...a radical cut in the size of the working class...
...Mistakes and abuses are always with us...
...There is one argument, however, against self-management that seems to me peculiarly insidious: it is offered, as you might expect, by ex-radicals, and its main thrust is that workers "show little interest" in the idea...
...As Selucky says very sensibly, "Since no [complete] harmony of interests is possible at every level of society," there would have to be mediators to control the conflicting interests...
...They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: they do not sit and wait for the millennium...
...In the Marxist anticipation of the good society there is little recognition of the sheer recalcitrance of all social arrangements, the limitations that characterize the human species, the likely persistence into the future of error, stupidity, and bad will...
...and it can be initiated by a socialist government intent upon deepening democratic practices in all areas of social life...
...they would often be unable to grasp the technical aspects of the information they got...
...What should be the criteria for measuring efficiency in nationalized enterprises...
...Now, any proposal can be pushed too far, turning into a vicious parody of itself...
...They would acquire some of the skills of management (those arcane mysteries, it's sometimes said, which must forever remain beyond the reach of the lowly...
...I do not think so...
...It isn't necessary, or desirable, to envisage a constant state of intense participation in public affairs, a noisy turmoil of activists, in order to recognize that the felt quality—as distinct from the mere economic workability—of such a society would depend on the fundamental concern of a sizable portion of the population...
...Martin's Press, 1979), p. 36...
...To stop there would be to acquiesce supinely in "the given...
...Marx and Engels praised the early 19th century "utopian socialists" for their boldness in projecting visions of a new Golden Age, but they were also contemptuous of the utopians' habit of indulging in detailed "future-painting...
...Here everything depends on conscious effort, the vigilance that had better be eternal—quite as with regard to political democracy...
...but some were the fruit of a by then habitual refusal on the left to think concretely and problematically about the social transformation that might follow upon the assumption of political power...
...Such a bundle of reforms, graduated in their social penetration, would signify a radical series of changes, even if not yet reaching a socialist society...
...after them also for personal experience and for worldly insight...
...Few of us are born passionate democrats...
...If the modern state nationalizes certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system...
...They thought they knew what had to be done the next day, but when it came to their sacred "historic mission," they often grew uncertain and timid...
...The citizens can choose, for example, what sorts of private initiative to encourage or to tolerate, the desirable forms of cooperatives, the extent of workers' participation in management, and much else besides...
...Within or close to a number of European socialist parties there are significant groups of political people seriously trying to sketch out "the face of socialism...
...Nove, p. 200...
...Lay people (workers) would have difficulty in securing relevant information from managers...
...If the society of the future is to be entrusted to its living actors, then Marx was right, perhaps, in thinking it imprudent to detail its features in advance...
...It aims not for some absurd version of total equality (whatever that might mean) but rather for a progress toward the fair sharing of socioeconomic goods and political power that would allow each person to fulfill his or her potentialities...
...Be it noted that there is no provision for any class of capitalists...
...And perhaps, too, it does not really matter: each generation must do what it can...
...Democratic planning, in which many socialists place great hope, is at once attractive, complex, and problematic...
...In principle one would like to combine Selucky's stress upon worker self-management with Nove's stress upon varieties of property, but that may be asking for the best of all possible worlds, something actuality is chary of providing...
...Nove's model, by contrast, gives an uncomfortably strong place to "centralized state corporations...
...Marxism has usually failed to consider with sufficient attention what we might call the trans- or supra-class elements of politics— those elements likely to be present (and perplexing) in any society...
...That is why the case for socialism rests not just on its proposed reduction of inequities in wealth and power, but on its wish to democratize economic practice...
...One result was that the already festering crisis of socialist thought grew much more severe...
...but socialism—has not that name been soiled in the pillagings of our century...
...Serious socialists would now describe the desired society by invoking desired qualities, with a stress on sentiments of freedom, attitudes of fraternity, and, sometimes, priorities of social allocation...
...As Paul Ricoeur has written, Politics embodies a human relationship which is not reducible to class conflict or socioeconomic tensions...
...gradually it lost the ability to seize and hold the imagination of serious young people...
...Even today water, some health, and many educational services are free, which in actuality means carrying them as a shared or social cost...
...A classic case for workers' control appears in John Stuart Mill's The Principles of Political Economy: The form of association...
...Socialist governments need to find channels to capital growth, but the tensions created by the changes they initiate can lead to panic and "sabotage" in capital markets...
...Too often in recent socialist literature the idea, sometimes merely the slogan, of workers' control has remained gloriously vague...
...13 Ibid., pp...
...One lesson to be learned from past efforts of socialist governments is that much depends on pacing...
...No social system," Joseph Schumpeter has remarked, "can work that is based exclusively upon a network of free contracts . . . and in which everyone is supposed to be guided by nothing except his own (short-run) utilitarian ends...
...Socialism is not to be "defined" as a society in which private property has been abolished...
...among revolutionary Marxists, a faith in the self-elected vanguard party that would satisfy the ends of history...
...Many such problems constitute disadvantages probably inseparable from the advantages of a regulated market, and they seem to reinforce the traditional critiques, both Marxist and romantic, of the market...
...In the Communist dictatorships the mere takeover of industry has made for a frightful concentration (and fusion) of political and economic power...
...The Leninist conelusion is that the "transition period" requires a "temporary" abrogation of democracy, in the name, to be sure, of a "higher democracy...
...The work is just beginning...
...As for cooperatives, take the example of the Israeli kibbutzim...
...what is relevant is who disposes of it, who decides on it, who manipulates it, in whose interest one makes decisions and in whose interest controlling functions are exercised...
...And how well democratic capitalism will be able to deal with these problems is very much a question...
...This does not mean that we are exculpated in advance and allowed to cherish these illusions endlessly, after so many defeats.' During the last 15 or 20 years, then, we have seen a significant shift in the nature and direction of socialist thought...
...5 Stuart Hampshire, "Epilogue," in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 249...
...Selucky lists a number of concise premises for his model, and I quote the essential ones: The means of production are owned socially and managed by those who make use of them...
...One precondition is both political and economic democracy, with the latter signifying the replacement, insofar as possible, of "vertical" hierarchical structures by "horizontal" egalitarian ones...
...Scale as well as structure is important...
...And as free access to a modest number of basic goods would become customary, misuse of the privilege would probably decrease...
...it can lead, and has led, to societies far more repressive than capitalism at its worst...
...By now it seems clear that Marx was keener in analyzing the "driving forces" of the economy than in allocating the "tasks" of the proletariat, a class that has shown itself capable of intermittent rebellion but not, at least thus far, of serving as the creator of a new society...
...3 Paul Ricoeur, "Power and the State," in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 736...
...Quoted in Nove, p. 204...
...As an exploiter of labor, the state is superior to any private capitalist...
...It should be...
...5 Now I find this very sympathetic, but suspect it's open to the charge that it contains nothing distinctively socialist...
...and since the inclination of Marxists was to think about conflicts and evils as the consequence of class domination, it followed—did it not?—that the eradication of classes must sooner or later mean the disappearance of these afflictions...
...Marxism offers a strong theory of social change but has little to say about political arrangements—structures of government, balances of power, agencies of representation...
...Unforeseen societies—mixed, retrogressive, opaque—can persist for long periods of time...
...The seizure of power—about that they could speak with authority...
...This could be decided democratically in the light of circumstances and experience...
...And now, for the past several decades, the socialist experience has involved a dislodgment of received persuasions, a meltingdown of ideological structures, and a search for new—or for cleansed and reaffirmed old— values...
...In certain empirical respects, this is not even true...
...and in part the answers are similar to those that might be provided with regard to private enterprise (since the criterion of profitability cannot simply be dismissed...
...Centuries passed before masses of men came to feel that democracy is a necessity of life...
...Of that I am certain...
...And they continue also to grapple with fragments of a tradition...
...The substance of our problems would remain, the weight of this century's burdens still press upon us...
...And not only is this state of affairs morally repulsive, it is socially unjust, a major barrier to the genuine realization of the democratic idea...
...but they entail the likelihood of shortages, black markets, misallocation of resources, economic imbalances...
...the planner [can] facilitate the democratic process by presenting to the people intelligent alternatives for their choice...
...We would still regard capitalism as an unjust society, still find its inequities intolerable, still be repelled by its ethic of greed, and still be trying to sketch the outlines of a better society...
...Still, the market has drawbacks traditionally noted by the left, and one possible way of getting past some of these, as also perhaps moving a bit closer to Marx's vision of "free associated producers," is a modest increase in society's provision of free goods...
...What we can see here is a deep incoherence, a floundering by gifted ideologues who had not anticipated, while still out of power and in a position to think theoretically, that the taking of power would by no means exempt them from the difficulties faced by their adversaries...
...One suggested way of alleviating these difficulties would be to stress the need for higher productivity, "a larger cake" so that most segments of the population would be satisfied with immediate benefits...
...Marx might occasionally allude to "the elements of the new society...
...but if too sweeping, they can alienate segments of the middle class, whose support a socialist 515 government needs...
...I would say yes, unambiguously...
...Except for some brilliant remarks in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx gave little weight to politics as an autonomous activity, politics as more than epiphenomenon, politics as a realm with its own powers, procedures, and norms...
...Indeed, the visionary tone of early Marxism helped give the workers a quasireligious confidence in their own powers...
...And Morris Hillquit, the American Socialist leader: "Socialists entertain no illusions as to the benefits of governmentally owned industries under the present regime...
...Between immediate struggles for specific reforms and rosy invocations of the cooperative commonwealth still to come, a whole space is missing—the space of social reconstruction...
...In fact, it also helped bring about valuable social changes, a sequence of reforms eventuating in the welfare state...
...But at least with regard to America we continue to speak of small groups trying to keep alive a tradition...
...Nor is it difficult to foresee conflicts among autonomous enterprises as they compete for the credits, subsidies, tax breaks, and contracts that are to be had from the state...
...In making this shift, these socialists were doing something morally and politically necessary but also tactically disabling...
...We cannot be certain...
...Pressed by the often clashing interests of the worker-employers and the central planning agencies of the state, managers might hesitate to take risks or use their initiative...
...3 From such perceptions emerges a problematic view of the entire process of change that is supposed to lead to socialism...
...Risk, thought Tawney, is "bracing if it is voluntarily undertaken," and in a cooperative commonwealth self-managed enterprises and producers' cooperatives could take socially useful risks that would bring into play their energies and minds...
...What's more, they usually fail to cope with the economic problems they alone are supposedly able to solve...
...In his biography of the "right" Bolshevik leader Bukharin, Stephen F Cohen remarks that Lenin took a "censorious attitude toward discussing future problems...
...But it's by no means certain that in a transitional period this could be achieved...
...Many socialists of my generation would customarily defend their belief through what I'd call a hygienic negative: "We entirely reject any sort of party-state dictatorship: the very thought of it is appalling...
...Once an idea becomes contaminated or a generation exhausted, it takes a long time before new energies can be summoned, if summoned at all...
...A large corporation — is a national resource...
...OUR PROBLEM MAY BE RESTATED as that of utopianism—does the utopian vision still have value for us...
...The distinction is mostly an analytical convenience...
...One painful yet predictable result of this reshaping, or cleansed reassertion, of the socialist idea was that in the very course of being given an increasingly humane and democratic character, it also came to suffer from greater uncertainty with regard to social arrangements and institutional mechanisms...
...In some capitalist countries, portions of the economy have been nationalized, sometimes because socialist governments wished to make at least a dent in bourgeois ownership, sometimes because governments, bourgeois or socialist, came to the rescue of enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy...
...IV A number of writers have tackled the problems that seem likely to appear during a "transition period" between capitalism and socialism...
...but...
...19 John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy...
...As earlier Marxists such as Kautsky and Bukharin glimpsed, planning does not have to wait for the happy arrival of socialism, but is at least partly to be found in "late"—that is, monopoly or cartel—versions of capitalism...
...And insofar as the identification was popularly accepted, so was the discrediting...
...These inroads on traditional "management prerogatives" often constitute modest beginnings of economic democracy, whether or not those who make the inroads so conceptualize them...
...Such questions can be answered...
...They became socialists because they were moved by the call to brotherhood and sisterhood...
...And social democratic parties, settling into the routines of institutional life, began to lose their radical edge...
...Gradually Christianity lost its claim to speak for the whole of Western culture...
...In a cooperative commonwealth, such provision might be extended to milk and perhaps even to bread...
...a decline in labor productivity, and so on...
...Such writers as Alec Nove, Michael Harrington, and Radoslav Selucky have offered proposals for the kind of immediate reforms (civil rights, women's rights, racial equality) that are not uniquely socialist in character but upon which liberals and socialists can happily agree...
...Many Bolsheviks came to regard all this as the appropriate road to socialism, though in later years some of them would admit that grave errors had been made...
...It proposes a dispersal of economic power in horizontal enterprises, each largely self-sustaining and freely administered, though subject both to market signals and social regulation...
...They understand that, in view of the volatility of modern history, it is necessary to think now with regard to what may be done the day after tomorrow...
...If the workers own an enterprise cooperatively or if they manage one democratically, is there still a need for unions...
...Marx wanted to place the socialist project within the course of historical development, and this he did by specifying two driving forces within history: first, the evolution of economic techniques and structures, leading to a concentration of ownership and wealth, a recurrence of social crisis and a sharpening of class conflict...
...1° Steps might also be taken toward creating "social property," pilot projects of enterprises democratically owned and controlled by employees, with the government encouraging, through generous credit and other provisions, the establishment of producer and consumer cooperatives, "small-scale, de-alienating, good for ti aining workers in running their own affairs...
...The intent is clearly to enable a pluralist flexibility that is present in, though often only claimed for, capitalist democracy, while at the same time eliminating many of its socially retrogressive features...
...The market would provide goods and services, regulating those prices not controlled for purposes of public policy (or those products the society might decide to provide without cost...
...Or that in the United States millions of citizens don't even bother to vote...
...Anything remotely like the centralized "command economies" of Eastern Europe must be entirely avoided, since these are economically inept, politically repressive, and intellectually intolerable...
...Through their unions, workers have often fought very hard for such noneconomic rights as grievance mechanisms and a proper work atmosphere...
...Sweeping tax reforms—desirable...
...My own list would be longer...
...To the question of the elements of social restructure [that is, socialism...
...yet that might not be as wasteful as many of the practices we simply take for granted in a capitalist society...
...All the while it was a not-very-large company of intellectuals who sought to "impose their fantasies" about democracy upon ordinary people...
...But if some sophisticated Marxists have recently begun to recognize the autonomy of politics, it must in honesty be added that this was by no means the prevalent view of the socialist movement during its formative, most powerful years...
...In my view it is possible and desirable to have several...
...These latter "structural reforms" might be described as extending and deepening the welfare state...
...finding ways to help workers whom technological changes in a given industry or enterprise have rendered superfluous...
...recall the assumptions of political democracy...
...The utopia of a "withering away of the state" is a fantasy gone stale...
...Substantial benefits for the poorest segments of the population—absolutely...
...Wby has the European social democracy been unable to advance further than the welfare state of Scandinavia...
...For until the society reached an unforeseeable state of material abundance, a major source of conflict could well be that between general and partial interests, society as a whole and its regions, social groups and industrial units...
...The limit could be on numbers employed, or on the value of capital assets, and could be varied by sector...
...Notions of self-management, our conservatives tell us, are mere futile efforts by small groups of intellectuals to "impose their fantasies" upon ordinary people who seem quite content to allow the corporations to determine their work lives...
...Still, for the sake of the argument, let us grant the conservative claim that workers today "show little interest" in selfmanagement proposals...
...511 Once in power, the Bolsheviks veered wildly in their economic policies...
...Nor do we want a complete nationalization of industry...
...I have been speaking about the problem of socialism as if it were self-sufficient and selfreferential...
...And sometimes they were struck dumb...
...Between 1917 and 1923 Bolshevik oscillations on economic policy found a vivid reflection in Trotsky's writings...
...Everyone knows that today in the United States socialism is not on the political agenda...
...The two values—equality and freedom—are sometimes, of course, in tension, but when regarded in a spirit of generosity and humaneness, they flourish together, as they seem to have flour521 ished, partly, during the early days of the American republic...
...In the socialized and cooperative enterprises, according to the Nove model, managers would be appointed by an elected committee representing the employees and would be responsible to that committee for basic policy...
...It's only fair to add that Marx's failure to engage critically with the problem of the envisaged socialist society did have some positive aspects...
...Can it still be in time...
...there is clearly in the West a serious crisis regarding such problems as unemployment, technological change, relations with the underdeveloped world...
...If it is true that utopian-apocalyptic expectations are indispensable for a movement advocating major social change, then democratic socialists are in deeper trouble than even they recognize...
...1° Michael Harrington, "What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could," in Irving Howe, ed., Twenty-Five Years of Dissent: An American Tradition (New York: Methuen, 1979), p. 23...
...23 Leszek Kolakowski, "The Concept of the Left," in Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism, p. 686...
...Until about the First World War, this genial mythicizing of an assured future may not have done too much damage, for in those years the main work of the left was to rouse the previously mute lower classes to the need for historical action...
...The "utopia" imposed through force and terror by a self-chosen vanguard is hell...
...what is decisive is the political character of the regime exercising control over a postcapitalist or mixed economy...
...But it is also too late to trust simply to the workings of history...
...Nor need it be denied that such models contain within themselves a good many unresolved problems, tensions, perhaps even contradictions...
...In such a socialist society, wage levels would be subject to the law of supply and demand, shaped in part through collective bargaining undertaken by free trade unions, though also (as is sometimes now true in industrial nations) bounded by social regulations such as "incomes policies...
...that minority thereupon organizes itself into something very much like a union...
...there are only undemocratic roads that can bring, and have brought, nations to barbaric mockeries of the socialist idea...
...To read the passages in Marx's writings that deal with the socialist future—they are scattered, infrequent, and fragmentary—is to rec509 ognize how valid the charge is that on this matter he slips into a vague and static perfectionism...
...They often had no clear idea, no worked-out vision, of what a socialist transformation might entail...
...Even convinced socialists must by now feel some skepticism about this version of utopia...
...Health and education services and social benefits for the disabled are distributed according to one's needs...
...Might it not be better for a movement to shake itself clear of all the old confusions, defeats, betrayals...
...From the functional point of view, it is irrelevant who has a formal title to property...
...3) Cooperative enterprises...
...We understand now—experience must teach us something—that the transition from capitalism to socialism is likely to be a lengthy process, interrupted by setbacks, and fraught with tensions, conflicts, difficulties, and errors...
...They knew...
...but there surely could be a large measure of selective control by workers even in giant enterprises, with technicalities left to managers and large policy issues decided through democratic mechanisms...
...Choices would have to be made, so that fundamental socioeconomic measures would not be jeopardized by divisions over secondary or symbolic issues...
...Even today, who can say that this persuasion has taken deep enough root...
...Leszek Kolakowski puts it well: Where are we now...
...because the world seemed aglow with the vision of a time in which humanity might live in justice and peace...
...Through electoral decisions, compromises and bargaining, it could adjudicate among conflicting parts of the population, setting rules for the operation of the market while protecting both the norms of the society and the rights of its citizens...
...Workers' control, self-management by those who work in an enterprise— some such concept is crucial to the socialist hope...
...It's possible to foresee a situation in which a minority of workers in a self-managed enterprise believes it is being mistreated by the majority...
...In both of these extreme circumstances, the poverty of Marxist (not all socialist) thought regarding the "face of socialism" becomes very serious...
...History must be left to those who will make it...
...The results have not been very inspiring, especially when no efforts were made to introduce democratic workers' participation in the management of newly nationalized industries...
...but the answers should also be different from those prevailing under private enterprise (since such factors as "externalnationalization of an economic function or an industry is a step toward the cooperative commonwealth...
...It all depends on the spirit and terms in which we approach the matter...
...But there is reason to expect that with higher levels of education and a greater provision for time, leisure, and training within the organized work community, some of these problems could be overcome...
...The recovery of Western capitalism during the several decades after the Second World War has come to a halt...
...and they would lack the time needed to reflect upon what they did grasp in order to arrive at coherent plans...
...Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 174...
...s Harold Orlans, "Democracy and Social Planning," Dissent, Spring 1954, p. 194...
...From November 1917 to the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks favored what we'd now call a mixed economy, in which, for a time at least, large areas of private ownership of industry would continue, but production and investment decisions would be controlled by the leftist state together, presumably, with working-class institutions...
...Like any other human enterprise, planning is subject to error, manipulation, bureaucratic sluggishness, and sheer bad will, so that it must always be tentative, proximate, and fallible...
...Their aura of certainty, their persuasion that history lay snugly in the party's fist helped the Communists win the support of many European workers and intellectuals during the years between the world wars...
...it is a socially conditioned phenomenon open to change...
...Nationalization of industry has been part of a worldwide drift toward the interpenetration of state and society...
...yet some deep inner crisis of belief, to say nothing of public failures and defeats, has beset socialism...
...The right to participate in direct management of the work units exempt wholly or partly from the market is derived proportionally from labor, ownership, and consumption of the provided services and utilities...
...Powerful parties in Europe still employ the socialist vocabulary and millions of people still accept the socialist label...
...All these problems are instances of a larger problem often cited by conservatives for whom socialism is anathema, as the market is for doctrinal Marxists...
...If any activity (not actually a "social bad" in itself) can be fruitfully and profitably undertaken by any individual, this sets up the presumption of its legitimacy...
...The practical impediments to workers' selfmanagement that both sophisticated organization theorists and "the man in the street" detect are often real enough—but are the consequent objections very much more cogent than similar arguments once used against the feasibility of political democracy...
...4 Alas, we have seen...
...What would be needed in a democratic socialist society (as today in a democratic capitalist society) is some version of the welfare state...
...A painful irony must here be acknowledged: many of the criticisms Leninists have made of social democratic reformism have a point, for instance, that timidity would inhibit radical initiatives, while radical excess could drive people of the political and social middle to become outright opponents...
...6 Karl Kautsky, "The Commonwealth of the Future," in Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism, p. 169...
...The idea of selfmanagement could then take a somewhat more prominent place on the agenda of public discourse— kept alive by "unrealistic intellectuals," "visionary socialists...
...One needn't be a fanatic and set up standards so impossibly high, they will fall of their own weight...
...The weaker segments of the population should be able to protect themselves through organization...
...Its effect may be decidedly reactionary...
...Significant socialist texts can readily be cited making it clear that nationalization is not necessarily to be taken as an equivalent or even precondition of socialism.t Yet it would be misleading to lean too heavily on these texts, since I am certain that older socialists share the * An illuminating parallel can be found in a passage from the British philosopher Stuart Hampshire: For me socialism is not so much a theory as a set of moral injunctions, which seem to me clearly right and rationally justifiable: first, that the elimination of poverty ought to be the first priority of government after defense...
...And if these values are now accepted as truisms, it is because a bitter struggle had to be conducted in their behalf...
...And perhaps the day after tomorrow will come tomorrow...
...8 No 514 assertion of general principles can remove the constant need for a nuanced and vigilant mediation between agencies of planning and a political democracy...
...Another complex of problems worth at least pointing to concerns how, when, and whether the state should intervene if a self-managed enterprise is failing...
...our small private entrepreneur works, even when employing a few others...
...Where the utopians, wrote Marx, pictured a socialist society as "an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself," 2 he saw the movement toward socialism as a necessary outcome of concrete social conflicts...
...The right to participate in direct management of the work units operating in the market is derived from labor...
...Let me now, in no particular order, consider a few of these problems: • The Selucky and Nove models of ownership suffer from opposite difficulties...
...Has something like this been happening to socialism these past several decades...
...They would form cooperatives...
...On the other hand, "popular participation [can] inform the planner about the social terrain he is trying to map...
...After a time such responses came close to being instinctive...
...As a matter of historical justice I should add that once we free the working class from the "tasks" imposed on it by Marxism, we can recognize that, as the main unpropertied class in modern society, it has exerted a strong and positive pressure to bring about major improvements in the social order...
...Too slow a rate of change disappoints enthusiastic followers...
...Socialist governments must put into office people who lack experience and often, in consequence, make mistakes or slip into confusion...
...The demand for national or municipal ownership of industries is always qualified [by socialists] with a provision for the democratic administration of such industries...
...Socialist governments do not rest on undifferentiated popular support, and many of their voters might not wish them to go beyond limited reforms...
...Among examples of such "state corporations" are power stations, oil and petrochemical complexes...
...Selucky, writes Nove, appears to envisage an evolution toward one type of producing unit...
...Shortly before the Russian Revolution, Lenin had written that if the Bolsheviks came to power in backward, war-devastated Russia they would establish "workers' control" over industry...
...Nevertheless, in a market socialism such free provision could only be marginal...
...It provides consumers with freedom of choice, and citizens with free occupational and educational choices...
...Planning does not necessarily offer an encompassing method for the solution of socioeconomic problems...
...Just as under capitalism competition tends to destroy competition, so it is by no means excluded that selfmanaged enterprises can form rings or cartels...
...Would people take more than they need, would there be waste at first...
...There might be the danger that some of these giant enterprises would assume a monopoly posture under socialism as disadvantageous to consumers and workers as it can be under capitalism...
...There is something morally repulsive in the maldistribution of wealth and income in a country like the United States...
...but he did not propose large-scale nationalizations...
...the people so hired may well feel they need a union to protect themselves against the benign or notsobenign edicts of the cooperatives...
...had no inner relation to this idea...
...For my present purposes, I want to stress another, important if not decisive, reason for the difficulties of social democratic parties...
...For that matter, it is foolhardy to suppose that unem520 ployment might not be a problem in a democratic socialist society: all one can reasonably expect is a readiness to deal with it quickly...
...There is something attractive about this, but also something that betrays political uncertainty...
...Beyond this second group of proposals lies a third—the kind that would begin to change the fundamental relationships of power and property, such as— [a] challenge to corporate control of the investment process by insisting that public policy concern itself with what is produced . . . [to] include public controls over private investment decisions, such as specifying the conditions under which corporations can leave a locality or oligopolies can raise prices...
...Major investment decisions...
...Insofar as right-wing and left-wing dogmatists found it convenient to identify the Russian dictatorship with socialism, they joined to discredit the entire socialist idea...
...There is of course some truth to this argument, though it largely proceeds on the assumption that workers in a better society will remain quite as workers are today...
...t Both writers agree also on the need for a market economy, subject to controls by a democratic polity: laissez-faire would be quite as inoperative under advanced socialism as it has turned out to be under advanced capitalism...
...some because of a mixture of Bolshevik arrogance and inexperience...
...Social ownership of the means of production is separated from the state...
...3) The assumption that economic planning is a unique aspect or virtue of socialist society, ensuring both justice and orderliness in economic affairs, such as unplanned economies are not likely to match...
...It's only when we come to specific proposals for putting these injunctions into practice that the socialist case can be said to stand or fall...
...Alec Nove's deeply interesting discussion appeared in the Summer 1985 Dissent...
...deciding upon—or how to decide upon— appropriate surpluses for capital investments and new technologies as against the "natural" inclination of self-managed communities to reap immediate rewards, and so on...
...t As far back as 1892, Karl Kautsky, an accredited legatee of Marx, wrote: "It does not follow that every 513 recollection that there was a strong habitual tendency to put great faith in the value of nationalization...
...There is no undemocratic road to socialism...
...Indeed, there should be no list...
...tokens must be offered of the direction in which we hope to move...
...Stephen E Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1975, paperback), p. 54...
...This would have to be resisted, except perhaps in circumstances where economies of scale are very substantial...
...Had 510 the movement achieved nothing else, this arousal of the plebes would still be to its credit...
...The principle of self-management is limited to microeconomic units only.° This model, attractive in several respects, stresses—as, after the experiences of our century, socialists must stress—the separation of political and economic power...
...One encounters here a deep and inescapable tension between the technologicaleconomic realm and the democratic-social arrangements of a socialist (and perhaps any modern) society...
...F inally, the socialist aspiration has less to VI do with modes of property ownership than with qualities of social life...
...169-70...
...About such matters it would be foolish to be dogmatic...
...a dynamic socialism can never be "full...
...If taken over because they have failed in private hands, what order of losses should society be prepared to accept...
...working out income policies that might arouse opposition from unions but could be seen as justifiable for the common good...
...Our hope must be that there are other kinds of fervor—quieter, less melodramatic, morally stronger—which a democratic reformist politics can evoke...
...For those socialists who have experienced in their bones the meaning of our century, the time has not yet come, I believe, to cast of its burdens...
...At another point, veering sharply, Trotsky proposed an economic course anticipating the New Economic Policy that would in fact be introduced in 1921: a considerable loosening of state controls, a return to a partially free market, something like a mixed economy...
...And a socialist government, it should be remembered, would also have a stake in maintaining a good measure of national cohesion and civility, even if its legislation antagonized large property owners and small ideologues...
...The abolition of capitalism is not necessarily a step toward human liberation...
...22 Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1983), p. 255...
...Whatever the fate of socialism, the yearning for a better mode of life, which found expression in its thought and its struggle, will reappear...
...They should contain them, for that is what lends a savor of reality...
...Not many people became socialists because they were persuaded of the correctness of Marxist economics or supposed the movement served their "class interests...
...How often have we not heard that most people care more about their bellies than their freedoms...
...It can be a device for trying to solve a crisis of capitalist economy...
...This proposal was at first rejected by the Bolsheviks, but under the pressures of reality they finally introduced the NEP...
...and second, the gathering strength and rising consciousness of the working class, derived from or enabled by its crucial position within the capitalist economy...
...Certainly, there can be no call, at this point in history, for either prediction or prescription...
...In the end socialists have no choice but to accept the wager—either a genuine, if imperfect, economic democracy is realizable or the entire socialist enterprise must be relegated to historical fantasy...
...The idea of a greater diversity of production units is in principle appealing, since the aim of a socialist society ought to be the maximizing of opportunity, choice, and freedom within democratically agreed-upon bounds...
...The values of freedom have to be learned...
...For unless plausible social structures and agencies could be located for realizing the values that were now being placed at the center 512 of socialist thought, we were finally left with little more than our good will.* Nevertheless, the clarification of socialist values was the essential task during, say, the past half-century: little of importance could be accomplished on the left until that was done...
...The egalitarian ideal has been very strong in socialist thought and tradition...
...It is useful to restate a few: • There is no necessary historical sequence from capitalism to socialism, nor any irrefutable reason for supposing history moves along a steadily upward curve...
...but if on too lavish a scale, these can result in an inflation threatening both the economic program and political stability of the government...
...The right to participate in indirect political control over, and regulation of, the socially owned means of production is derived from one's position as a citizen...
...They function pretty much like cooperatives but also hire outside labor at wage rates...
...It is essential to * In such a society, observes Abram Bergson, managers of socialist plants and industries—the former responsible primarily for current operations, the latter for larger investments, especially introduction of new plants— are allowed similarly to determine autonomously inputs of factors and corresponding outputs...
...Far more troubling, at least for a socialist living toward the end of the 20th century, is the fact that this vision of a society in which "the state withers away" and "the antithesis between physical and mental labor vanishes" does very little to help us achieve a qualitatively better, if still imperfect, society— the kind that some of us call socialism...
...Were I writing here a comprehensive study of modern socialism, a central emphasis would have to be put on the enormous damage wrought by Stalinism once it became a powerful force in the 1930s...
...Given their commitment to democracy, their justified distaste for Bolshevik dictatorship, and their recognition that a good part of their electorate cared more about particular measures than a new society, they began to find the idea of socialism increasingly slippery, evanescent, insubstantial...
...In Nove's model the extent of central planning is, then, greater than in Selucky's...
...During the three or four decades after Marx's death, the movement as an institution grew stronger, but its vision of the goal for which it was striving declined into a slackness of perfection, only tenuously, through a papery chain of rhetoric, related to the issues and struggles of the moment...
...Not so the Bolsheviks...
...thirdly, that democratically elected governments ought to ensure that primary and basic human needs are given priority within the economic system, even if this involves some loss in the aggregate of goods and services which would otherwise be available...
...An independent Yugoslav writer, Branko Horvat, reports that in his country "inherited authoritarian attitudes are so deeply ingrained that they are unconsciously carried into selfmanagement...
...Even the state most in subjection to a dominant class is also a state precisely to the extent that it expresses the fundamental will of the nation as a whole...
...but that is no more than a useful analytic device, an abstraction from the real world in which the fate of socialism must be bound up with the fate of capitalism...
...In the "centralized state corporations" that Nove proposes as one mode of socialist ownership, there would surely be a need for strong unions to resist bureaucratic dictate...
...For this argument against self-management is essentially an extension of a larger skepticism about democratic politics...
...Suppose, indeed, we were to conclude that the socialist label creates more trouble than it's worth: we would then have to cast about for a new vocabulary, something not to be won through fiat...
...Social democratic parties in office frequently had to face flights of capital, a problem that, within the limits of the nationstate, proved very difficult to cope with...
...Historical energy and idealism cannot be supplied on demand...
...And such proposals for economic growth would encounter a bumpy course: they would be opposed by people who fear the ecological consequences and think "consumerism" at variance with the socialist ethos, as well as by entrepreneurs and managers reluctant to help raise productivity at the very moment their "prerogatives" are being curbed...
...Are we [then] fools to keep thinking in socialist terms...
...the political act of revolution remained the one thing worth striving for...
...So it could be in many areas of a socialist society...
...That decisions regarding production, prices, wages, and investment in a giant enterprise like a "socialist GM" would be made by the assembled workers or even their representatives...
...An excrescence of bureaucratism might indeed flourish on the structure of self-management...
...1 Abram Bergson, "Market Socialism Revisited," Journal of Political Economy, October 1967, p. 656...
...The argument against capitalism first made by R. H. Tawney still holds—not that it's bad if people take some risks but that in a society where a few have much and most have little or nothing, the majority doesn't enjoy the privilege of taking risks...
...administering such "naturally" central productive activities as electricity, oil, railways (today "public," actually private, utilities...
...Lethargy isn't a universal constant...
...but it can lead to capital flight...
...20 This criticism can best be regarded as a warning against exclusive control of major enterprises by the workers within it—though even that should not preclude a good measure of self-management with regard to intraplant arrangements...
...For [socialists], its significance...
...To regulate the conflicts, two mediators are necessary: the market mechanism for economics and the multiparty system for politics.'" 8 • Employment and income policies could also bring serious difficulties—for instance, coping with tendencies toward local monopolizing of jobs where enterprise profits are high...
...They can experiment, learn from experience, commit and correct errors...
...This cure, however, is far worse than any malady one can imagine, since "temporary" dictatorships have a way of slipping into permanence, especially those established by Communist parties...
...You cannot opt for the rhythms of a democratic politics and still expect it to yield the pathos and excitement of revolutionary movements...
...From his remarks we get a vision of a world marvelously free of social—and indeed nonsocial—conflict: no longer in thrall to alienation, exploitation, and social fetishism, humanity reaches, for the first time, a high plateau of the human...
...This model presupposes the flourishing of "civil society" and its autonomous "secondary institutions" (such as trade unions, political groups, fraternal societies), apart from and, when necessary, in opposition to the state...
...But who can say with assurance...
...They proposed, first of all, to secure the socialist idea in the realm of values, whereas, to simplify a little, the tradition in which some of us had been raised was one that focused on institutional changes...
...The institutions which provide health, education, and welfare services are wholly exempt from the market...
...A socially controlled market would also have some attractive features...
...A "complete" transformation of humanity is a corrupt fantasy that can lead to a mixture of terror and apathy...
...Copyright ® 1985 by Irving Howe...
...This intellectual effort, it must be admitted, can handicap them politically...
...It may be a long time before the value of democratic norms is secured in socioeconomic life...
...5) Individuals (for instance, freelance journalists, plumbers, artists...
...It might even be necessary to introduce a species of "socialist antitrust" legislation...
...The working class has not been able to "transcend" its role within capitalist society, except perhaps during brief outbursts of rebellion...
...Full" participation in managerial activities might, in some situations, be a chimera...
...And it rests on direct democracy within the workplace insofar as that is possible, and on representative democracy in the society as a whole...
...Selucky's lacks variety and flexibility in its proposals: why should there not be a range of democratic structures in economic life just as in political 519 life...
...21 George Lichtheim, "Collectivism Reconsidered," in Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism, p. 757...
...Because the producers are dispersed, of technological necessity, the basic division of labor between those who rule, control, plan and manage, and those who are ruled, controlled, planned and managed, cannot but remain in existence despite the nationalization of the means of production...
...Only in the last 15 or 20 years, under the impact of crisis and defeat, has some of that "missing space" been occupied through the writings of a number of serious thinkers—I shall discuss them later— who have tried to offer some guidelines (not blueprints) for a socialist society...
...Marx and Engels never gave a positive answer, because they This essay is excerpted from Socialism and America by Irving Howe...
...Nothing is ordained...
...this ghastly idea, meeting with bitter resistance from Bolshevik and other trade unionists, was rejected...
...Selucky strongly favors social controls from below, while Nove would encourage a greater variety in the modes of ownership...
...economic democrats" or "democratic radicals...
...there would have to be vertical decision-making subject to the check of the democratic polity...
...Suppose that we have a legal structure which permits the following species: (1) State enterprises, centrally controlled and administered, hereinafter [called] centralized state corporations...
...A healthy society must always be in transition...
...If we were forced to conclude that there cannot be a democratic road to socialism, then we would also have to conclude that the entire socialist enterprise is illusory...
...And even the best-conceived program of transition is likely to be hostage to the business cycle, as well as to imbalances of wealth and power among the nations...
...And there is much cogency in an argument advanced by George Lichtheim that A future advance will probably have to start from a concept of technical education which envisages it not simply as a means of improving efficiency, but as a link between the worker and the planner...
...The ogre of bureaucratism rises with regard to both—in opposite ways, the one through rigidity and the other through concentration...
...Perhaps so...
...But must not any discussion of a socialist society now seem remote, unrelated to current needs and concerns...
...It would be hard, according to the economist Abram Bergson, to work out satisfactory criteria of success and reward in a socialist society for managers of the autonomous productive units...
...Selucky's views on this matter seem more attractive, Nove's more realistic...
...And while, in its initial phases, a democratic socialist society would have to strive for increases in production and higher productivity, it might, after a time, through modest increments, supersede the efficiency principle in behalf of more attractive social ends.* Alec Nove's model for democratic socialism differs from Selucky's in one crucial respect...
...but, whatever else, it is surely not a sufficient condition for a socialist transformation...
...monitoring decentralized investments...
...2) The assumption that the nationalization of industry would, if accompanied by a socialist winning of office, smooth the way for the new society...
...But the purpose of a model is not to "appropriate" the future, it is to indicate the nature of thought in the present...
...The problem of socialism would become acute when a socialist movement approached power or, in quite different circumstances, when it was weak and under sharp intellectual attack...
...The clarification of values to which some of us had to devote major energies has now been achieved, at least in part, and as a result socialist thinkers have been able to turn to a study of those institutions and mechanisms through which these values might be realized...
...War communism intensified the economic disaster that was by then well advanced as a result of Russian defeats in the war...
...this is a condition of freedom and can be eliminated only by eliminating freedom itself...
...The "centralized state corporations" would include banks and enterprises necessarily very large or occupying a monopoly position, or both—and with regard to all this there would be significant, large-scale economies...
...Next would come "structural reforms," such as tax proposals aiming at a gradual redistribution of income and wealth and efforts to achieve full employment, which would surely entail some overall economic planning...
...Where they differ significantly is with regard * Among them Oscar Lange, Abram Bergson, George Lichtheim, Radoslav Selucky, Henry Pachter, Wlodzimierz Brus, Michael Harrington, and Alec Nove...
...setting ground rules for the autonomous economic sectors, "with reserve powers of intervention when things got out of balance" (today bailing out Chrysler, Penn Central...
...Three instances: (1) The assumption that the proletariat would serve as the leading agency of social transformation...
...The soaring passions of the early movement are gone, and those of us who strive for socialist renewal cannot help wondering whether we are caught in a drift of historical decline, perhaps beyond reversing, perhaps to yield at some future moment to a new radical humanism...
...How much would actually change if our words were to change...
...We will emerge from our present slough of small-spirited conservative acquiescence and live again by more generous aspirations...
...518 One main difference between socialized and cooperative enterprises is that in the former the state would have "a residual responsibility for their use or misuse, or for debts incurred," while a cooperative could freely dispose of its property or decide to go out of business (again, no doubt, within the bounds of social regulations...
...History has vetoed this idea...
...They would need, also, to adjudicate between local interests and larger, more distant social goals, which might put them in a cross fire and cause them to yield to whichever side was the strongest...
...There are ways in which planning must always be somewhat at odds with democratic procedures, if only because it often depends, in modern societies, on skilled professionals who are likely to develop their own caste or bureaucratic interests...
...Subject to what limits...
...By now we have learned otherwise...
...Whether socialism can be revived as a living idea—which is something different from the mere survival of European social democratic parties—is by now very much a question...
...What we lack in our thinking about society in socialist terms is not general values . . . but rather knowledge about how these values can be prevented from clashing with each other when put into practice...
...The larger the enterprise, the more difficult selfmanagement becomes and the more likely its bureaucratic deformation...
...The existence of a utopia as a utopia is the necessary prerequisite for its eventually ceasing to be a utopia...
...But technical education without responsible participation soon loses its spur...
...Producing and trading enterprises are autonomous from the state and independent of each other...
...Our vision of egalitarianism implies a steady, perhaps slow and surely gradual rectification of inequities through education, legislation, and popular assent...
...2) State-owned (or socially owned) enterprises with full autonomy and a management responsible to the workforce, hereinafter [called] socialized enterprises...
...Socialism came gradually to be "defined" as a condition of classlessness, seen more as premise than problem...
...An egalitarianism enforced by authoritarian decree—what's called in Eastern Europe "barracks egalitarianism"— is utterly alien to the socialist idea...
...Introspection rarely makes for public effectiveness...
...If, say, we ceased calling ourselves socialists and instead announced that henceforth we are to be known as—what...
...I can well imagine that a movement in America might choose to drop the socialist 524 label: who needs, once again, to explain that we do not want the kinds of society that exist in Russia and China, Poland and Cuba...
...Subject to limits, this should be allowed...
...Economic controls—probably unavoidable...
...4) Small-scale private enterprise, subject to clearly defined limits...
...But the criterion here ought to be technological, not the corporate structure that prevails today, since some present-day corporations are large because of the power it gives them over the market rather than because of any criteria of efficiency...
...So too is the possibility, or hope, that it may serve as a bridge toward a radical new humanism...
...IF PUT TO THE TEST OF REALITY, such projections would surely require many changes...
...Who in the 20th century can deny that possibility (or any possibility...
...Socialism, self-manage523 ment, economic democracy are options, sometimes brighter, sometimes dimmer...
...At the start of the civil war they abandoned their initial moderation and introduced the draconian measures of war communism: virtually complete nationalization of enterprises, the requisitioning of agricultural product, and a highly centralized politicaleconomic command...
...Isaiah Berlin has written that liberalism is "a notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position...
...522 A somewhat different problem is raised in a recent study by Allen Graubard, who sees workers' control, narrowly conceived, as clashing with public rights...
...One frequent argument against self-management proposals is that their advocates tend to minimize the sheer complexity of modern enterprise...
...Whatever has been done in Western Europe to bring about more justice, more security, more educational opportunities, more welfare . . . could never have been achieved without the pressures of socialist ideologies and movements, for all their naivetes and illusions...
...What, then, would the social structure of a democratic socialist society look like...
...1 This observation by Martin Buber, while slightly overstated, embodies an essential truth...
...An absolute prerequisite is the preservation and growth of democracy...
...For socialists, individually, this was often a clarifying and chastening experience...
...But there is another, less attractive reason for Marx's failure to draw "the face" of a socialist society...
...To be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...Emphasis in original.]" to structures of property and productive relations in a "market socialism...
...Some commodities could be produced in such abundance and at so small a cost, it would be economical to dispose of them at zero price rather than incur the overhead costs of charging for them...
...Insofar as we think of a socialist society as one with autonomous institutions and enterprises, this entails the likelihood and even desirability of democratically contained conflict...
...179-80...
...I would borrow his words for democratic socialism, which is not quite the same as but, in my sense of things, has a kinship with his liberalism...
...In all such projected arrangements a crucial factor must surely be the morale and consciousness of the people...
...The reassertion of values led to skepticism about major elements of traditional Marxist thought...
...but for their movement it brought grave difficulties...
...2" Allen Graubard, "Ideas of Economic Democracy," Dissent, Fall 1984, p. 421...
...are matters for the social sciences and also for a critical reading of history...
...But I do not see why even in subdivisions of Nove's "centralized state enterprises" there could not be nurtured at least a measure of workers' control regarding such matters as relations and pace of work, even if it is granted that on large overall decisions (how much oil should Britain extract from the North Sea...
...It is possible that the autonomous enterprises might repeat some of the socially undesirable behavior with which we are familiar in corporate capitalism, functioning as "socialist corporate" units in quite as selfish a spirit as present-day corporations are known to do...
...23 "Very nice," a friendly voice interjects...
...Times change...
...Nationalization seems, in short, to be a somewhat neutral device, available to just about every kind of government...
...and now, as a result of technological innovations, its specific gravity as social class and political actor seems to be in decline.** As if in response to this development, there has appeared a tendency to regard socialism as a goal transcending the interests of one or another class...
...lies in the fact that it arises spontaneously out of the modern process of work, while at the same time it enables the worker to develop his individuality.' In practice self-management would sometimes thrive, sometimes stumble, but always be marked, like all human enterprises, by imperfections...
...A pluralism of institutions signifies a plurality of interests, and these must express themselves openly through modulated conflict-and-cooperation...
...It favors a market mechanism that would be interdependent with "indicative" planning—that is, planning not merely im517 posed from above but with institutional mechanisms for democratic decision-making and checks from below...
...too rapid a rate can lead to the loss of middle-class support, excessive inflation (there is bound to be some), and serious disturbances...
...Yet we can now see that in the decades after the Enlightenment Christianity suffered deep wounds that could not be healed, sometimes were even made worse, by the sincere efforts of various thinkers to refine and revise the faith...
...Some of them it could still attract, but not with the assurance of the past...
...it can form part of the breakdown of "civil society" that enables the rise of totalitarianism...
...Serious problems have arisen in the operation of such industries, some of them caused by the inherent difficulties of functioning through a calculus of profit while trying, within an economy still largely capitalist, to satisfy social goals...
...Between the period of "transition" and V a "full" or achieved socialism there is no thick or impenetrable wall...
...As Leszek Kolakowski has written...
...He preferred Napoleon's advice, 'On s'engage et puis . . . on voit.' " (One engages, and then . . . one sees...
...But if it is to be a socialism of free men and women, there can be no other way...
...There is then no unearned income, arising simply from ownership of capital or land...
...Total" planning—that is, a command economy— entails authoritarian political structures...
...For some would fail, the operation of even a regulated market under socialism having certain parallels to its operation under capitalism...
...A democratic commitment—unconditional as it must be—may well delay and even thwart socialist programs...
...9 Leszek Kolakowski, "Introduction," in Kolakowski and Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea, p. 15...
...drafting long-term plans—all these, subject to decision and check by Parliament or Congress, would be the responsibility of central planning, thus entailing a greater concentration of economic power than many socialists, myself included, would prefer...
...No longer tolerating their reduction to mere factors of production, workers would learn through experience to demand their rights as free, autonomous men and women...
...Meanwhile, we hope to serve as a link to those friends of tomorrow who will have so completely absorbed the lessons of our age, they will not need to rehearse them...
...If, then, one turns to the revisions in socialist thinking that we have had to make in recent decades, it becomes clear that we find ourselves in an uncomfortable but, I would contend, worthwhile difficulty—refining our values, growing somewhat uncertain about our means...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
