A Credo for this Moment
Walzer, Michael
Communism has given socialism a bad name. Years of tyranny and brutality, now brought to an end almost everywhere by popular rebellions, have colored, perhaps permanently, our view of state-run...
...Social democracy is the stubborn belief that these moments can be drawn out, given an ongoing institutional structure and some (imperfect) permanence...
...Social democracy is socialism revised in the course of democratic political struggle...
...I have described this as abolitionist politics: "No more bowing and scraping, fawning and toadying, no more fearful trembling, no more high-and-mightiness, no more masters, no more slaves...
...Socialism doesn't imply a necessary commitment to any set of political or economic arrangements...
...The reason stubbornness is so necessary is wellknown...
...Socialism, in the light of the ages, is a radically new idea...
...If people aren't active, energetic and so on, it is not because they are dull, or lazy, or incompetent, it is because they are oppressed...
...Efforts to sustain the excitement are contrived, inauthentic, and, finally totalitarian...
...Reprinted from the London Sunday Correspondent...
...Ironically, it is likely to be succeeded by one or another version of social democracy, which is the only socialism that has ever actually existed...
...There is also, of course, a positive program: the creation of a society of lively, energetic, active, competent people shaping their common life...
...Hard enough, but not impossible...
...Like any other creed subject to the vagaries of a free electorate, its programs have become matters of negotiation and compromise...
...Oscar Wilde stated it with elegant simplicity when he said that "socialism would take too many evenings...
...Third, that the members of political society and economy are collectively responsible for each other's welfare...
...The socialist creed can be summed up in three principles...
...160 • DISSENT...
...But socialist principles do have a driving purpose, probably best understood in negative terms, which is not some simple and unqualified equality but rather the overcoming of all the gross and degrading forms of inequality...
...The labor movement, the civil rights struggle, feminist politics, some socialist parties, some national liberation movements, the civic and democratic forums of Eastern Europe today—all have produced wonderful moments, rarely sustained, of nonhierarchical cooperation...
...Citizens and workers have claims, always partial, on the resources of the whole society...
...Who knows...
...In its social democratic version, it implies instead a commitment to experimentation, trial and error, institutional revision, and ideological openness...
...But most socialists—intellectuals, militants, and politicians alike— have believed that the negative end, once realized, would bring the positive end in tow...
...The political and economic arrangements would have to be really democratic and the men and women would have to be self-respecting and roughly equal citizens...
...So it has happened, again and again, in the all-too-brief history of democratic politics...
...No one should be excluded from political participation, from democratic power-sharing, because of class, race, religion, or gender...
...Second, that the economy should also be open and accessible to all its members...
...The whole of human history is a tale of hierarchy and subordination...
...First, that political society should be open and accessible to all...
...The precise forms of political participation and of economic citizenship, the precise extent of welfare provision—these are matters still subject to democratic debate...
...That also means it requires men and women who are sometime activists, always at the ready...
...This is the socialism that I mean to describe here...
...At the height of the struggle, people will go to all the necessary meetings, join in the exciting demonstrations...
...This second principle by no means rules out market relations...
...But perhaps what socialism requires is only intermittent excitement: institutional arrangements that are always open to popular insurgency, rather than always engulfed by it...
...Economic power should be shared by the same people who share political power...
...What has been called by some Western leftists "actually existing socialism" will now disappear from the political map...
...it only rules out what might be called market imperialism—the conversion of private wealth into political influence and social privilege...
...All its genealogies are inventions...
...That may be wrong or, at any rate, too easy...
...Years of tyranny and brutality, now brought to an end almost everywhere by popular rebellions, have colored, perhaps permanently, our view of state-run economies and enforced egalitarianism...
...But even partial victory brings rapid demobilization and then the bureaucrats and the professionals take over...
...Anticommunist and democratic, it has played a vital role in shaping the governments and societies of the West, though it has never been more than partially realized...
...there are no precedents—except, perhaps, within the movements and parties of the left...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
