The World After Communism: An Exchange Between
Heilbroner, Robert & Howe, Irving
We print below a letter that Robert Heilbroner recently wrote to a friend giving his views on the political situation after the collapse of communist societies in Eastern Europe. This is...
...This is followed by some comments from Irving Howe...
...Lord Acton's apothegm is keen, but is not unique to conservatism for it says pretty much the same thing that many libertarian socialist and anarchist critics of Bolshevism have been 434 • DISSENT The World After Communism saying for decades...
...In comparison or competition with the communist system, capitalism has indeed "won...
...If the conservative vision has a closer relation to historical development than its opposite, to what aspects of that vision can we ascribe that superior anticipatory capability...
...It is that the left's reasonings must also have been wrong, for it is on the basis of these reasonings that the left arrived at conclusions we know to be totally at variance with the facts...
...If there is a single economic thinker who has shaped our collective life, it has been the liberal Keynes, a father of the welfare state...
...First, the effect of visions on conscious thought is filtered and sublimated through so many mediations that it can at best account for only a "predisposition" or an "affinity" between an initial mindset and a finished argument...
...Not at all...
...Others may want to intervene in this discussion in subsequent issues...
...It comes from Alec Nove, not a Marxist but a socialist, in his 1983 Economics of Feasible Socialism, a book that Bob reviewed enthusiastically in Dissent...
...The other side of this large-scale development is that capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure...
...Hayek added additional reasons of a sociological kind ("the worst rise on top...
...But what spokesman of the present generation has anticipated the demise of socialism or the "triumph of capitalism...
...Bob writes that "not a single writer in the Marxian tradition" predicted "the demise of socialism" (read, the demise of the party-state dictatorship...
...But they are not correct...
...and basta, an end to it...
...In similar fashion, the conservative arguments for capitalism also suffer from serious defects...
...Still, I can't improve it or discard it...
...its collapse signifies a human victory...
...While avoiding the trap of extreme relativism, we should remember that our notions of human nature are likely to be colored by the world views and social moods dominant at any given moment...
...If, together with almost everyone on the American right and the authoritarian "left," Bob is correct in identifying the Communist party-state dictatorship with socialism, then the discussion collapses before it begins...
...Capitalism thus has no dynamic, a perception fundamentally at odds with its past, and presumably with its future...
...Lenin, after the failures of war communism, acknowledged as much in proposing the New Economic Policy of 1921...
...Clearly, total state ownership of industry is not desirable...
...It is conceived as plastic and therefore capable of being shaped through social experience...
...There has been a massive collapse of the framework of centrally planned socialism and an equally unmistakable, although not so dramatic, falling away of the magnetic appeal of "socialism" in the capitalist world...
...SOME DISSENTING COMMENTS I am glad to have Robert Heilbroner's "Letter" in Dissent, for it raises important questions and is written with his usual lucidity...
...In the United States things are more problematic...
...In the United States, after the Reaganite blessings, we have vast poverty, growing economic inequality, deepening social malaise...
...It lies in the two visions' different conceptions of "human nature" or, if you will, of the human "species-being...
...They all have elements of "truth" and of "untruth...
...The conclusion to which I come may be disappointingly bland and vague...
...This is clearly not an argument to be shrugged aside...
...More than 20 percent of American children live below the poverty line, and in the cities the figure is 30 percent—among blacks 45 percent...
...The argument goes as follows: Mises and Hayek and Friedman were right, but only in the sense of having picked the winning numbers...
...From what...
...True, what no one—right, left, or center— FALL • 1990 • 433 The World After Communism predicted was the exact moment of the communist collapse nor the exact moment that a remarkable new leader like Gorbachev would gain power, probably the main precondition for the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe...
...A democratic socialist society would have a range of property forms, with a substantial segment of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises—something radically different from what has prevailed in the Communist dictatorships...
...How much credence can one invest in such a generalization...
...Think of the vast debt structure that is sinking Third World economies...
...The difference, as I see it, lies in diametrically opposed conceptions with respect to the fixity or malleability of human behavior...
...From this admittedly impressionistic and incomplete sampling I draw the following discomfiting generalization: the further to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the validity of historical foresight...
...the further to the left, the less so...
...The "socialism" of the communist dictatorship is detestable as both idea and reality...
...Consider one simple fact: At a time when recent reports paint a dismal picture of the health care available to many American children, a study in Sweden shows that the overall health of Swedish children at the bottom tenth of the income hierarchy is no different from that of children at the top tenth...
...About other matters—how prescient has the right been...
...It is that the radical orientation toward change, progress, perfectibility, social salvation—attitudes that I am not prepared to discard for myself—must be conjoined with conservative reservations about those very possibilities...
...From their social entanglements...
...On the contrary, its "economic patriotism" was never higher...
...But if we are to be fair about this, we have to recognize that even the early Bolsheviks believed that a regulated market (as all markets are today) was necessary...
...If anything, the fault to be ascribed to many Marxian analyses of Stalinist Russia—those of Trotsky, Hilferding, Deutscher, Shachtman, many others— is that, like the Marxian analyses of capitalism, they were too ready to foresee profound and unresolvable crises...
...Skeptically yet indomitably, he held to the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of individual transformation...
...I take it that he has in mind, also, the political consequences of the popular misidentification of socialism with the communist dictatorships...
...But we democratic socialists have insisted that when the state is "owned" by a party bureaucracy, the workers and indeed all others are dispossessed...
...it goes to the very heart of our political-moral life...
...For starters: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality—has that not inspired vast numbers of people to reach for freedom...
...But on some basic matters I disagree with Bob...
...What I find startling and disconcerting is that these massive historical trends have been largely unanticipated...
...Are there any in the left centrist group...
...Another defect in the conservative case is its extremely static conception of capitalism...
...I start with the premises you are familiar with...
...Identifying socialism with the communist dictatorship seems to me as mistaken, analytically, and as damaging, morally, as was the readiness of some orthodox Marxists (really Marxist-Leninists) to argue that "bourgeois democracy" can only eventuate in fascism or Nazism (the coarse equivalent, by the way, to the wisdom of the right-wing economist von Mises, who saw the welfare state as a slippery slope to totalitarianism...
...No democracy, no socialism...
...And with regard to conservative sentiments drawing upon psychological theories, remember that it was Freud who said: Where Id is, let Ego be...
...Moreover, capitalism as a worldsystem has certainly expanded, and many of "its" problems should perhaps be seen as the difficulties experienced by the center as a consequence of the transformation of parts of the periphery into centers of accumulation in their own right...
...Here I proceed with much greater trepidation than heretofore...
...At the July Communist party congress in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev responded to complaints that Eastern Europe had been "lost to socialism" by saying memorably: "What socialism...
...I think there is something to this argument...
...But against that there is the Marxian insistence on the need to emancipate individual human beings...
...The first temptation is to explain the problem away...
...Dear X This is a letter to help clear my head with respect to the ideas we chatted about last night...
...Genetic and psychoanalytic endowments are not denied but are placed at a lower level of immediate importance...
...Unlike communism, capitalism does not face the prospect of immediate collapse—though it's worth remembering that only a bit more than two decades ago capitalist society (France, the United States) went through pretty severe social crises...
...Here is the part hard to swallow...
...Yet, if we can no longer declare with any confidence that one theory or the other is manifestly in accordance with "the facts," what have we left other than "predispositions" and "affinities" to explain why they are so different...
...I believe that the most sustained and cogent criticism of Stalinism and its offshoots has come not from the right—which in the past often admired the "efficiency" of the command economy and the "decisiveness" of the party 432 • DISSENT The World After Conunurdsm dictatorship...
...All three have regarded capitalism as the "natural" system of free men...
...Apart from a few countries on the Asian rim, which practice not "free market" economics but authoritarian state intervention, living standards in the Third World have declined from their already pitiable level during the 1980s...
...Conservative thought insists that there is a core that resists historical change...
...Hayek and Mises argue that socialism's dependence on planning strongly encourages political hierarchy and unfreedom, culminating in totalitarianism...
...Nove writes of the unfortunate economic effects of the political domination of a self-perpetuating oligarchy which claims dominance over all spheres of human activity and thought...
...Or William Blake: "What is now proved was once only imagined...
...but, a few sentences...
...One thinks of conservative thought as fundamentally identified with a vision of individualism—neoclassical economics as an example—until we remember that there is a powerful countertheme of sociality, for instance, in the work of Coleridge or Burke or Hayek...
...Mises's reasons for the "impossibility" of socialism do not appear to be those that have pulled it down...
...I would, myself, be quite content with this conclusion were it not for one thing...
...And in the next few years social democratic movements can contribute significantly to determining in Eastern Europe, though not there alone, the social content of a resurgent liberal society...
...I myself find its most impressive instantiation in the need for psychological security, derived from the inescapable anxieties of the infant condition...
...We invite contributors and readers of Dissent to continue the discussion...
...Think of the workings of free enterprise in Brazil, which leads to appalling inequality...
...an illdistributed affluence, itself increasingly vulnerable, is interwoven with signs of social breakdown...
...They all believe state intervention into the market to be inherently inimical to capitalism's vitality...
...The Shining Path—a gang of fanatic thugs, the Latin equivalent to the Khmer Rouge...
...Of course it can...
...Conversely, the conservative view is always darker than the radical...
...The problems that beset capitalism appear well within the range of the contradictions that arise as a normal consequence of its mode of operation...
...It cannot be progressoriented or teleological in the way that radical thought must be...
...Why...
...The communist states have also called themselves "democratic," yet no sensible person would speak of them as "really existing democracies...
...The Schumpeterian dicta are telling in this regard: "Can socialism work...
...They testify to a conviction that was prevalent in 1942 when the book was published and again in 1946 when it was reissued...
...But it surely does not help if we ourselves acquiesce in this misidentification...
...Even in that limited form, it can serve as a valuable guide to human action, both political and more-than-political...
...The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market...
...As for the center itself—the Samuelsons, Solows, Glazers, Lipsets, Bells, and so on—I believe that FALL • 1990 • 429 The World After Communism many have expected capitalism to experience serious and mounting, if not fatal, problems and have anticipated some form of socialism to be the organizing force of the twenty-first century...
...It would take a long article by someone better qualified than I to deal with this...
...Yes, Sweden is not yet socialist, not yet "a new society," nor is it likely to become one tomorrow...
...Success of capitalism" — it all depends what you mean...
...And the Bush administration decides that no new programs to combat poverty are needed...
...Nevertheless, there has been no major system-threatening crisis...
...Therefore one can find in their writings the basis of an explanation for the demise of socialism...
...None I can think of, including myself...
...Do the East European intellectuals chanting hosannahs to the "free market" know about this...
...Their arguments are not convincing, and their claim to social foresight is therefore invalid...
...And then, to drop several notches in quality, there's the neoconservative theorizing of Jeane Kirkpatrick, with her insistence that, unlike fascism, communism could not be transformed peacefully...
...Second, we cannot know whether a vision is "correct...
...Can capitalism survive...
...A scholastic distinction...
...Mises called socialism "impossible" because it had no means of establishing a rational pricing system...
...About the "success of capitalism" Bob is partly right...
...Think of the probable "Mexicanization" of the East European economies, in which yesterday's communist apparatchiks effortlessly resurface as today's brandnew capitalists...
...Take the concept of "individuality" versus "sociality" The World After Communism as the starting point for social conceptualizing...
...The conservative perception of the system points to no self-generated tendencies of any kind...
...Eleven years later, Trotsky wrote that an economic plan must respond to "the direct pressure of supply and demand...
...Think, also, of the emerging conflicts among Japan, the United States, and Germany, today more or less under control, but tomorrow...
...I am eager to pursue them as far as they lead, although I am not at all easy about their implications...
...Let me cite one recent example that comes pretty close to anticipating a "demise" of the communist system...
...430 • DISSENT The sociological argument is more impressive, if interpreted generously...
...Because these states call themselves socialist?—though by now even some leading figures in the Soviet Union no longer accept that...
...their thinking is as vulgar as that of "vulgar Marxists...
...This sounds promising until one realizes that it cuts both ways...
...The conventional wisdom with respect to socialism is that it was, or would be, a success and that the future very likely belonged to it...
...Perhaps the most interesting segment of Bob's "Letter" consists of psychological speculations about the contrasting "visions" of conservatives and radicals...
...Many segments of capitalism as an international system are in serious difficulty...
...It needs reconsideration and even reinvention...
...For us, the idea of socialism signifies a society necessarily, profoundly democratic...
...I think so, although skepticism arises for two reasons...
...It is more concerned with avoiding catastrophe than with achieving unrealized possibilities...
...About the kind of property forms and relations in such a society we have our differences, but about its democratic essence we are in complete concord...
...Not a single writer in the Marxian tradition...
...Irrational pricing certainly played a role in its economic difficulties, but its breakdown appears to have been caused by political rather than economic irrationalities...
...Eds...
...Socialism as an organizing idea is still powerful in the backward areas of the world—Peru has its Shining Path and China may face another Mao-like regime—but in the materially more advanced nations, "socialism" as a distinct social objective has disappeared...
...They may be accurate anticipations of movements of parts of the social whole, but they do not embrace, or sometimes even perceive other movements or nonmovements or countermovements that prove to be of incomparably greater importance in determining the overall outcome of things...
...Most important of all, I do not see any signs of political disaffection within the capitalist world...
...A variety of the Stalinist authoritarian system that we ourselves have abandoned...
...Some (the less fastidious) rightists argue as much, and if they are correct, the only honest thing for socialists to do is to close shop...
...We print below a letter that Robert Heilbroner recently wrote to a friend giving his views on the political situation after the collapse of communist societies in Eastern Europe...
...Are there fundamental differences between the visions of conservatives and radicals...
...Never mind the curious chains of reasoning behind these judgments...
...But that is the kind of thing, dependent as it is on human activity and will, that no one can or should even try to predict...
...Is all this a mere semantic quibble...
...And if we are then forced to admit that visions seem to be the only explanation we can give for the wholly different conclusions to which social argument leads, are we not forced to declare that one vision is a closer match for reality than the other because it points toward anticipations that accord with the train of things, whereas the other does not...
...That can hardly be seen as an instance of historical prescience...
...So, too, radical thought is often pictured as "starting from" society—the individual as the "sum of many social determinations...
...My suspicion is that in his "Letter" Bob extrapolates too quickly and with insufficient qualifications from the contingencies of the moment, without taking into sufficient account the historical background and deeper rhythms of the capitalist society that he himself has so brilliantly analyzed in the past...
...Still, what the Swedish social democracy has done is a major achievement— a success if not "of" then "toward" socialism—and it certainly has more to do with socialist values than the Shining Path in Peru...
...Well, not perhaps the entire structure...
...So we need the cumulative and directional social logics that are the very hallmark of radical social analysis...
...That leaves the right...
...If these are granted the name of "socialism," then I fail to see how Bob, committed democrat that he is, could ever have agreed to accept that label himself...
...all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system...
...But for decades the anti-Stalinist left, in all its tendencies, has insisted that the communist dictatorship is not socialist, indeed, is a brutal violation, a gross travesty...
...It is not a coincidence, I think, that there are no such apothegms of the left (none that I can think of, anyway...
...The radical view sees the inner "nature" of humankind through different lenses...
...They are surprisingly difficult to articulate...
...q FALL • 1990 • 435...
...There are 100,000 homeless chil dren—children!—in the United States today...
...Where I think Bob is quite mistaken is in his attribution of political prescience to the right...
...The Maoists—a sclerotic totalitarian bureaucracy shooting down the people...
...Still, if we're to talk about the successes of the West, a word should be said for the social reforms initiated through social democratic movements...
...How imprecise is Bob's use of the term "socialism" you can see by his references to the Peruvian Shining Path and Chinese Maoism...
...Nothing is left of it but a better run capitalism...
...I don't wish, in citing these examples, to deny that there have been large gaps and failures in socialist thought—I only wish to argue that wisdom has not been confined to the right...
...Such reflections would seem to reduce the explanatory power of visions to close to zero...
...When I try to discover some difference in visions that resists this sort of ambiguity, only one idea strikes me as unchallengeable...
...A fastidious effort to dissociate ourselves from an unpalatable reality...
...I believe the only one available is to repair to the preanalytic "visions" (to use Schumpeter's term), whence all theorizing initially flows...
...I think it's a skewed perspective to talk about "the demise of socialism" without at least mentioning the partial successes — insufficient, no doubt, but humanly precious— of social democracy in countries like Sweden, Austria, and West Germany...
...One version of it is the feckless phrase "really existing socialism," which some people on the left have used to describe the communist states...
...In England the Thatcherite dispensation has culminated in serious economic troubles and gross social inequities...
...So there are reasons to look askance at—indeed, perhaps to discredit—the conservative anticipations of the decline of socialism and the triumph of capitalism...
...If the cogency of the reasoning on both sides is inadequate or unconvincing, this suggests the need for another line of exploration...
...If this is not success, what is...
...But it is also painfully clear that these logics—the laws of motion and all the rest—are not enough...
...Nor are central planning and state ownership of the means of production a sufficient ground for calling a society socialist...
...The left's critical analysis of communism—from Martov to Nove, from Hilferding to Harrington—has been unyielding and fundamental...
...Although neither author develops the connection between dictatorship and massive misallocation or serious loss of social morale, it is not difficult to supply the missing links...
...The planning authorities mispriced goods not just because of an absence of information feedback (as Mises wrote) but because "efficient" pricing would have created unendurable political tensions, initially enriching the peasants, later alienating consumers (who presumably preferred to queue up), perhaps creating undue profits for successful enterprises...
...I do not know how one can test these rival claims, but at the very least there is a reasoned case to be made for an argument quite the opposite of the conservative one...
...I have already said that many elements can be counted as part of the conservative vision but that I believe the crucial one to be its "psychoanalytic" view of human nature, a view I can abbreviate by saying that it FALL • 1990 • 431 The World After Communism recognizes that behavior, like the heart, has its reasons which reason knows not.* Conservative apothegms often reflect these recognitions—" plus (a change . . ." "All power tends to corrupt . . ." — which always surprise us with their penetration, much as we may dislike them...
...The result has nothing in common with democratic socialism...
...It is this "psychoanalytic" aspect of human nature that endows it with immutable characteristics—aggression, narcissism, identification, among others—without which much of human behavior becomes incomprehensible...
...For that matter, it has not been right-wing economists like Hayek and von Mises who have been vindicated by the experience of the last half century...
...I would not deny for a moment that socialism as idea and movement is in a state of crisis—it's been there, like all other strands of political thought, for some time...
...And for the next period, it will probably exist primarily in the sphere of thought and vision...
...I have already spoken about the static quality of conservative * Curiously, most conservative thinkers detest Freud...
...As for von Mises's claim that socialism could have no rational way of determining prices, he was prescient largely insofar as Stalin provided a totalitarian command economy as an instance...
...Schumpeter's was, of course, the voice of an older generation...
...When it comes to the major historical problems, not much better or worse than other political tendencies—it shared, for instance, with many thinkers of the center and left an inclination to go along uncritically with Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism, a theory that now seems somewhat frayed...
...Or Rosa Luxemburg: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently...
...The chronic crisis of the centralized system may be reaching its acute state, with consequences yet unforeseeable...
...It follows, of course, that radical views are inherently more optimistic than conservative ones...
...The same wisdom with respect to capitalism was that its future was clouded...
...For then the jig is up...
...Right now, it's a moment of disenchantment, a moment of skepticism, settling for small goals, perhaps even of abandoning social hopes...
...He writes that the left has no apothegm to match Lord Acton's remark that "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...And I think we might manage to find a few apothegms and slogans from our side that are worth remembering...
...Another reason why some leftists call the Communist dictatorships "really existing socialism" is that there is or was in those societies centralized (mis)planning and state ownership of the means of production...
...But I am interested in another question: does the difference in orientation between left and right shed any light on their respective prophetic abilities...
...Irving Howe thought—to my mind, its fatal flaw...
...Now, if even Gorbachev acknowledges the difference between socialism and "the Stalinist authoritarian system," why shouldn't Bob Heilbroner...
...It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, von Miseses, e tutti quanti who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments...
...To be a radical conservative or a conservative radical appears to offer the best chance to position oneself wisely with respect to the future—not to "predict" it, which only a fool could aspire to, but to prepare for its blows and to secure its advances as best we can...
...Of course the conservative orientation can have reactionary political implications, as well as salutary ones...
...There are more degrees of freedom, more play between the Kingdom of Necessity and that of Actuality...
...Still, the zeitgeist is not just something to be acknowledged, it must also be resisted—what else are we here for...
...Indeed (as I've written in Behind the Veil of Economics), I suspect visions can never be falsified or verified, insofar as they necessarily project aspects of the unconscious substratum present in all humankind...
...I do not think it can...
...Through radical glasses society is always far below its potential, whereas through conservative ones it always expresses inescapable and insistent needs of the human core...
...Such figures surely appall Bob as much as they do me, but what they represent ought to play a greater role in his analysis...
...One can readily understand why this should be so...
...I need hardly say that these interventions can also be viewed as the cause of capitalism's continued vitality...
...He is quite wrong...
...And if, as we have insisted this past half-century, there is a deep chasm between socialism and the communist dictatorships, then Bob's entire structure of argument begins to crumble...
...What kind or degree of planning might be necessary in a socialist society is, for us, an open question...
...What line...
...All this, of course, you are familiar with...
...In saying this, of course, I recognize capitalism's difficulties: slow growth since 1973, serious unemployment in Europe, worsening income distribution in the United States, international monetary disorder, the foreign debt dilemma...
...I am very much aware that this paragraph may contain serious lapses...
...That is what I mean by interpreting their argument "generously...
...Socialists strive for a parallel social transformation...
...In Western Europe it seems to be enjoying what used to be called a period of stabilization, though with attendant difficulties...
...That this creates enormous and, for some time, probably insurmountable difficulties for us, I do not doubt...
...There are in the world today a number of non-socialist societies with sizable segments of nationalized industry...
Vol. 37 • September 1990 • No. 4
