Socialism for the Nineties

...we can't believe in the vanguard party...

...It is one in which everyone feels that his or her welfare is as much an object of general concern as anyone else's, and that one's ideas and aspirations are taken as seriously as anyone else's...

...Apart from traditional and semicorrupt behavior such as marked the competition for government contracts even before the Civil War, American industry has always expected to be protected by the U.S...

...Most countries in Eastern Europe will surely swing to the right...

...meanwhile, the benefit to them of working while others are not is large...

...Between mindless celebration of the collapse of an old foe and gawping curiosity about what replaces the Eastern European ancien regime, articulate thought about our own condition may easily be squeezed out...

...Nonetheless, American municipal self help was strikingly like the British phenomenon of "gas and water socialism...

...once factitious reasons for dissension had been removed, it would become pretty obvious what an optimally functioning economy required at any given level of productive capacity...

...One goal of the public supply of public goods must be to enhance the sense of community...

...British voters want to know what the Labour party will do that Margaret Thatcher will not or cannot...

...We must regret the loss of many aspects of working-class self-help, and many features of working-class community...

...An obvious objection to allowing me to do any such thing is that it creates people with an interest in seeing that my parents die at some particular time, and we all know what that can lead to...

...So, we need to revert to our second argument...

...If we have "won" the cold war, there is little incentive to ask what exactly we are up to, and what sort of victory it is...

...Capitalism was internally incoherent and conflict ridden...

...Much has been written recently by Marxist or marxisant theorists about the rediscovery of "civil society" —though not only by them...

...And the same proposition applies: a government that believes it is legitimately and properly in the business of attending to health and education will do a better job than one that is ideologically inhibited...

...I can be pretty sure that fifty dollars to my local church soup kitchen will produce fifty dollars worth of food given to people in need...

...A more plausible reply to his question might have been that as with so much else the middle classes had absconded with it...

...We may admire the energy and boldness of revolutionaries whose hopes have subsequently turned to ashes...

...Still, it is not true that there is a rich vein of pure altruism waiting to be tapped...

...The second stems from that thought...

...To be sure, there are no people's palaces of culture, but there is the American equivalent—playing fields, picnic places, swimming pools, and ice rinks...

...Those who think that you need to be slightly mad to believe that anyone's won will probably agree that it's a good moment to reflect on the fate of socialism in the nineties...

...People like myself, whose attachment is to the common ground of British "New Liberalism" and the goals of the British labor movement, are skeptical about looking for much more in the way of moral and emotional comfort than that...

...Assuming they are not plagued by ethnic conflict and have some energy to devote to ordinary politics, it seems certain that they will put an exaggerated degree of trust in the workings of laissez-faire and gung-ho entrepreneurship...

...It is not only a more adequate kind of efficiency than that worshipped by enthusiasts for the marketplace that we are after...

...Europeans are also frequently struck by the unabashed way in which the town officials, however elected, dictate matters of public propriety—that lawns shall be mowed, paths swept of snow, houses painted suitably anodyne colors...

...Thus, health and education are public goods— healthy and educated workers cannot be offered to one employer without being offered to all employers...

...All the difficulties of the transition will be ascribed to the legacy of a vaguely defined "socialism," and all improvements to an equally vaguely defined "free market system...

...These arguments can be multiplied: public transport, effective planning, and much else belong on the list...

...q 442 • DISSENT...

...The same story goes for almost all forms of collective action...

...So long as there was enough room for entrepreneurial vigor, there would be a case for capitalism...

...It is the argument that private property is intrinsically self-destructive, and that an economy based on private property needs governments unafraid of socialist measures to keep it going...

...Still, it is a corrective to the jeremiad that portrays the American people as wholly hostile to all sorts of socialized provision...

...This process is effective in securing continuous growth but wasteful in the obvious sense that the resources of the unsuccessful could have been devoted to something more useful...

...Human beings face a natural environment that offers many opportunities but also many hazards, and of these age and death are inescapable, while ill health and injury are only a little less so...

...Mostly, he concentrated on the frame of mind of the workers, and that allowed him to announce that their revolutionary passions had been appeased by prosperity...

...They are the argument from public goods, the argument from the protection of community, the argument from the self-destructive tendencies of private property, and the argument from rationality...

...It would be a rational move for me to run a sweepstake on the date of their deaths, if I could expect to get more from the sale of the tickets than I would have to pay out in prize money...

...But when all caution has been exercised, there is still a distinctive argument for socialism—the one I offered in the previous paragraph...

...Once the corporate state became identified with the states established by Musso lini and Hitler, it was hard to say out loud that the corporatist criticism of unorganized capitalism was sound, and that modern governments abdicated their responsibilities if they did not deal with organized workers, and organized industrialists, to avoid mass unemployment, revolt, and political instability...

...I cannot embrace the giddy optimism of many commentators...

...It means, in short, reiterating the old lesson that it is capitalism that teaches us the necessity of socialism...

...It is deeply mysterious that even under as popular a president as Ronald Reagan, Congress should have been so readily taken in by demands for deregulation of the banking sector...

...Supposing, as I do, a general use of markets for supplying consumers with what they want, the socialist emphasis on the state's role in supplying public goods is absolutely not out of date...

...Planning in some Western countries has become a casualty of the same sort of process that made the concept of the corporate state obnoxious...

...during a boom, it can work, just as the person who kites a check may put the proceeds on the right horse and come out all right...

...It is to me inconceivable that one could argue for the welfarestate provisions that socialists in Western Europe have always argued for without seeing as one of their purposes the creation of social trust on the one hand and an impersonal benevolence on the other...

...The ordinary citizen is not as selfish as he or she is often portrayed, nor as readily corrupted by the spectacular greed of the Boeskys and the Milkens as the newspapers sometimes suggest...

...Nor can we look for a sudden simplification of the social, political, and economic structure of a developed industrial society...

...When Sombart asked his famous question, "Why is there no socialism in the United States...

...The point is that there is nothing in the nature of private property rights to control the invention and manipulation of such rights and nothing to inhibit the potential for destabilization...

...Of course, governments have been committed to these without seeing themselves as socialist...

...But more horses lose races than win them, and financial booms notoriously come unstuck...

...By the same token and more seriously, the large American corporation has never hesitated to tie itself to the government's apron strings...

...But I cannot believe that anything very edifying is going to emerge...

...But there is some danger that we shall be so entranced by the transformation of the once arrogant and bullying Stasis and Securitate into shifty and frightened political criminals that we shall forget to think about politics nearer home...

...This does not mean we can turn our back on the better aspects of what they represented...

...Private property as currently understood—rights over assets structured to maximize their holders' ability to secure an income or a capital gain—is intrinsically unstable, because there is no limit to the number of possible rights one can erect on the basis of an initial right...

...more blame must lie with the inclination that is strong in all of us to believe that the sort of world we want to achieve is not only desirable but attainable with a few politically implementable organizational changes...

...It will explain none of what is in fact going on in Eastern Europe, but it will present one more hazard for anyone trying to think about what is and isn't left of the socialist ideal in the unauthoritarian, developed, industrial societies...

...It is to say that one task for socialists is to keep nagging away at any government that fails to see the point...

...the history of British banking in the nineteenth century ought to have taught everyone on both sides of the Atlantic that banks go broke if governments don't keep a careful eye on them...

...Socialism had been "wrecked on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie...

...Altruism, as distinct from a desire for social justice, is readily tapped by the local church, or by the March of Dimes...

...Lastly, there is a view that I hesitate over but cannot entirely leave out...

...Once that backstop understanding of how self-interest might drive us to solidarity and revolt is given up, simple self-interest cannot provide all the motivation that is needed...

...Suppose I stand to inherit a large fortune from my parents...

...My excuse is twofold...

...but since none of us has any reason to believe that our individual self-restraint will make any difference to everyone else's behavior, our individual self-restraint is quixotic...

...Once more, some of the Name lies with Marx's vision of a society in which decisions become mysteriously simpler while life itself becomes richer and more many-sided...

...More impressive is the East European litany of complaint about what happens when a political regime fails to take civil society seriously...

...It will be equally tempting to do the equivalent of "kiting" —the old criminal trick where successive bank accounts are opened on the strength of one small initial deposit, and subsequent fraudulent deposits, with the aim of emptying the largest account for cash before the first check bounces...

...We must say farewell to some old myths...

...Marx was famously scornful of the purveyors of duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, but we can't be...

...So far, the most productive economies we know are those where what Joseph Schumpeter celebrated as gales of creative destruction eliminate seven out of ten new enterprises—not to mention ninety-nine out of every hundred new novelists and pop groups...

...they say nothing specifically to the groups whose lives must rack the consciences of any halfway civilized American— the homeless, the sick, the victims of the drug wars, women who feel cut out of public life, Hispanics who feel linguistically shut out, and blacks who feel that unofficial discrimination continues to dog them in every area of life...

...Other things being equal, few Americans would rather succeed at the expense of their neighbors than succeed without costing their neighbors anything...

...Free-standing sentiments in favor of justice or altruism cannot be relied on...

...Associating socialism with foreign agitators, dynamiting anarchists, and at best with Eugene Debs, Americans did not acknowledge what it was they had taken over...

...This is not to say that an attachment to socialism is consistent with abandoning economic planning...

...If everyone reasons thus, strikes are unlikely, and successful strikes very unlikely...

...Indeed, although the record of the East European countries in caring for the environment is pretty dreadful, it seems obvious enough that societies with a self-conscious and unapologetic commitment to remedying the failure of the market to care for the environment will do a better job than societies whose governments are thought to be less legitimate than private businesses, whose profits depend upon not having to pay the full cost of their activities to the public...

...The contrast between a free-market ideology appropriate to the traditional model of an infinity of small producers of almost identical products and the more or less socialist practice of government-sponsored aircraft manufacturers, weapons firms, and consortia of other producers is a bad joke...

...American socialism is middle class and smalltown, not national and proletarian...

...The temptation to raise a loan on the strength of minimal assets, then use that loan as security for further loans, and so on is always strong...

...Schumpeter thought socialism would arrive when all the investment opportunities had run out, so that managerial low- or zero-growth capitalism would to all intents and purposes be indistinguishable from managerial low- or zero-growth socialism...

...Or, more guardedly, the altruism waiting to be tapped is generally focused on more personal, more immediate good causes than the creation of a new social order...

...What positive defense of socialism can we produce in the 1990s...

...If we were all self-restrained about the use of our cars, it is very likely that the benefit to each of us of greater ease of travel would much outweigh the inconveFALL • 1990 • 439 Socialism for the Nineties nience...

...Once you clean up the river, I can swim in it whether or not I have paid toward its cleaning up...

...as corporations grow larger they replace vulnerability to the winds of the marketplace with an orderly and planned existence...

...One might assimilate the first and third arguments, but I think they are better kept separate...

...His other focus was on the missing labor party of a European kind...

...The services of a lighthouse or a radio beacon cannot be withheld from those who haven't contributed to their creation...

...To feel that society is organized as a collective exercise in selfdefense is a comfort and a reassurance that most of us could do with...

...It is not easy to do it simply...

...This is not something one should believe for sentimental reasons— because the socialist transformation must wait until the creation of "socialist man," for instance...

...he misled himself by concentrating on two things, and, as it happened, the wrong things...

...The moment the lid is lifted, creativity flowers...

...The Hungarian sociologist Elemer Hankiss has nicely characterized the results as a paradox whereby a mobilizing regime has demobilized society...

...For any such thing to succeed by our voluntary action, hundreds of thousands of people would have to join in, each convinced that the other hundreds of thousands would do their bit...

...Most of the list is uncontentious...

...The chief effect of authoritarian regimes is to preserve the underlying society in a state of suspended animation, so that what emerges once the lid is lifted are the social tensions and political conflicts of forty, fifty, or sixty years ago...

...The liberal goals of diversity and pluralism also have their place, and many of the emotional supports that communitarians seek ought to come Socialism for the Nineties from small groups and not from anything directly within the control of government...

...Socialism as such must, if we're to discuss it calmly and hopefully, center on the public control of the consequences of an economic system based on private property...

...Again, we cannot believe that a planned economy will be easy to achieve...

...To feel that it offers only as much help as one will be able to purchase in a competitive market under conditions where one's buying power is likely to be at its lowest is no comfort at all...

...Nor will they be provided voluntarily, since in anything other than the smallest community nobody has any incentive voluntarily to contribute to their production, even if they will benefit from the good in question, and even if the good is one which would yield them more benefit than their fair share of the cost of providing it...

...To have a government at all is to make the first break with leaving everything in the hands of fate or accident...

...Bankers who had voted against Roosevelt and would do so again nonetheless flocked to place themselves under federal protection in the 1930s...

...The British imperialist Leo Amery was one of the chief begetters of the scheme for supplying free milk and orange 440 • DISSENT juice to British children, along with free perinatal care—a gift to cartoonists who enjoyed drawing him pushing a perambulator...

...Since trusts were first attacked in the Progressive era, anti-trust legislation has always been held in abeyance where there was an even halfplausible case for supposing that reorganization was genuinely needed to preserve an industry or a business...

...So let us return to socialist arguments appropriate to the 1990s...

...and the simplest way is usually to wave a hand toward one's favorite writers on such subjects, which is all right among friends but no way to persuade skeptics...

...What we have to keep saying here is that curing the particular evils we are all too familiar with demands that we take seriously the primacy of politics over economics...

...It is the name rather than the object they dislike or distrust...

...It is a community of moral equals, not one of a closed hierarchical structure...

...By the same token, the regulations that gung-ho capitalists publicly deplore are essential if the stock market is not constantly to take off like a freshly charged rocket and fall back like a spent one...

...A last belief that we need to abandon is the expectation that either simple self-interest or simple altruism will drive everyone to embrace FALL • 1990 • 437 Socialism for the Nineties socialism...

...reunited Germany will not take the SPD on trust...

...What it is hard not to hanker after is what he thought impossible: a system in which there was room for growth and imagination but in which we might get more of the answers right before trying them in the market place...

...I do not see how anyone could fail to be impressed by the intellectual and personal courage of both Lenin and Trotsky, just as I do not see how socialists in a developed country with an even moderately democratic political system could ever have regarded the Communist party as a political organization to emulate...

...The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe has been so much the most interesting political event of the 1980s, and such an apt celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, that it is hard to think of anything else...

...It is true for reasons of the most drearily practical kind...

...Later in the century, the legal system was rearranged to make it easier to build railroads and secure rights of way for oil pipelines...

...For reasons that Galbraith spelled out in simple but adequate terms thirty years ago, the managers of large quantities of investment capital have no intention at all of behaving like the small entrepreneur of classical economic theory...

...Yet when one thinks of the contemptuous way in which Marxist sociologists used to dismiss theorists of "industrial society," one might think that this rediscovery has been a long time coming...

...And here, too, we have to distinguish the sort of community involved from what a certain kind of conservatism and nationalism are equally attached to...

...What socialism involves, if not a measure of collective social control over decisions that under pure capitalism are left to actors in the marketplace, I do not know...

...Nor is the phenomenon recent...

...government, whether by tariffs or by the methods currently in vogue...

...One is that socialism cannot mean everything we favor...

...But simple self-interest makes an equally insecure basis...

...There are two reassuring lessons these events will teach...

...It is a familiar but decisive argument that the ordinary processes of the market will not achieve an optimal supply of goods and services to the population because there are many goods— clean air and water are usual examples—that cannot be sold to their consumers on terms that ensure that only those who pay for them get them...

...As I said, we have to stop well short of Ernest Mandel's thought that Marxism was all about the coincidence of rationality ex ante and rationality ex post...

...So the question arises, what are we to appeal to...

...The implementation of collective decisions and the organization of collective provision cause no ideological qualms, so long as the things provided have the right aura...

...The first thing to say is that to a European eye, the United States is remarkable in the way it practices middle-class socialism and calls it something else...

...and while the American public school system doubtless sprang from much the same impulse as the French common school system, the free elementary and secondary schools to which all but the children of the rich would go achieved a comprehensiveness and uniformity of provision that Labour governments in postwar Britain achieved only haltingly and in slow installments...

...This picture must be taken with a large grain of salt...

...Their inhabitants may get out of practice in self-government, but their desire not to be oppressed does not weaken with time, nor does their wish to govern themselves diminish...

...Marx was just wrong about that, even if nobly wrong...

...I am very conscious that these are cool, lowkey considerations...

...A worse danger is that the collapse of the authoritarian bureaucracies of Eastern Europe will discredit socialist thinking in the West...

...Marx sometimes expected the proletariat to revolt because capitalism could not even guarantee to keep the proletariat from starving...

...it makes an insecure basis for socialism...

...Any productive society requires human capital as much as finance capital, raw materials, and technology...

...We can't believe in natural proletarian solidarity in the absence of a proletariat...

...Whatever emerges in Eastern Europe will doubtless reflect the hatred of the recently oppressed for their recent oppressors, and thus far is a genuine expression of a libertarian urge...

...Small town and suburban America is not impressive for the public provision of mobility for the non–car-driving public, or of health services...

...It is possible for large firms to hire physicians to give them a healthy work force, and to hire educators to give them an educated work force, but there are strong disincentives for doing so, since their competitors can hire away the improved work force and enjoy its productive edge without having paid for it...

...I, at any rate, am after what R.H...

...The third argument for socialism in the 1990s may seem a bit paradoxical...

...In the fight between the advocates of central planning and assorted forms of decentralization, it is often forgotten how much Marx and his successors relied on the thought that the rationality of a planned economy would make production decisions increasingly simple...

...We saw in the sixties and seventies how futile it was to try to build a politics out of every disadvantaged and alienated group one could think of...

...Readers of Dissent won't be impressed by claims that "we've won" —where the "we" in question is the worldview and the political and economic practices of Reaganite Republicanism—but the larger world seems at best confused, believing that "we've won," but puzzled that the winners 436 • DISSENT Socialism be the Nineties of a cosmic struggle should be politically and economically so uncertain of themselves...

...The first is that dictatorships fail to win the hearts and minds of their subjects...

...Even the most ardent enthusiast for the role of the entrepreneur and the market does not deny FALL • 1990 • 441 Socialism for the Nineties that the entrepreneur himself or herself must put together a firm that produces intended, not accidental products, and places them before their intended consumers or users...

...No matter what the actual follies of Soviet attempts at central planning, and no matter what the theoretical difficulties of gathering the sort of information that a planned economy needs, the ideal of replacing social accident by social reason is anything but absurd...

...Workers who would benefit from a successful strike would benefit even more from working through the strike if they could collect its benefits without sharing its costs...

...This is not to say that only an avowedly socialist government would have such ambitions...

...There are three obvious ones and one that reflects perhaps my lingering attachment to one of Marx's more attractive but perhaps more dangerous ideas...

...In an age of predatory takeovers, they are even more likely to go broke, because the temptation to puff up their apparent value by dangerous means is just about irresistible for anyone facing a takeover...

...Even if American social democrats are largely confined to nagging the Democratic party from the left, they still need some picture of how the world might be made better...

...British socialists have long been resigned to seeing Labour governments rescuing the economy from whatever their Conservative predecessors got up to, and there is something faintly dispiriting about the thought that an argument for socialist measures is that they can keep capitalism working...

...Their lives will be sheltered from the sudden accidents of the classically unorganized marketplace, while those who need protection most will continue to be left out in the cold...

...The connection between communitarian ambitions and the socialist ideal is, I think, what it always was...

...Given the remote relationship between the stock market and the underlying economy, it will always be tempting to sell tickets to a sweepstake on the future level of share prices, or to invent financial instruments whose value is contingent on very unpredictable events...

...It would be a strange sort of socialism that trusted the health of mothers and babies to the mercy of the marketplace, and it is an oddly amnesiac concern for the education and entertainment of the ordinary person that overlooks the fact that most of us are born too young to drive and die some time after we have become unfit to drive...

...The second is that intellectual and artistic vitality is harder to destroy than we might fear...

...But what does have to be abandoned is any thought that we shall achieve Marx's vision of a world in which "society" rationally chooses what to consume, how to produce, and how to distribute it, as if "society" were a single individual writ large...

...Their defection makes the strike less likely to succeed and so makes it less likely that they will get the benefits of a successful strike, but only very marginally...

...While one might hope that a socialist society would eliminate so many of the causes of racism, drug addiction, and the rest that there would be little of the uglinesses we now see around us, that is an empirical hope...

...Socialism or death" would not express a fine sentiment, but the literal truth...

...There is a ready-made organization doing what I hope it will do, and chipping in my share is not wasted effort...

...However, these countries seem likely to endure many of the misfortunes of developing countries anywhere in the world—Romania and Bulgaria worst off, East Germany and Czechoslovakia best off...

...Tawney was after when he said that under socialism anyone could tell anyone else to go to hell, but hopefully would not feel the need to...

...Whatever the uncertainties in Eastern Europe, the propaganda opportunities the change offers the antisocialist politicians of the Western world are obvious enough...

...By the same token, there is every chance that socialism for the less well off and the less well organized will be scorned, while socialism for the large corporations, for doctors, lawyers, financial planners, and the top strata of academics will flourish...

...Nonetheless, it is impossible to believe that we have to give up on the idea that broad-brush planning reduces waste and at any rate diminishes the irrationalities of production and distribution...

...This may seem an odd time to be thinking about socialism in the 1990s and in the West...

...There are other benefits that have similar properties, which it clearly makes sense for governments to supply even on the most hard-nosed calculation of the benefits involved...

...But it would be less plausible to pay that fifty dollars to a group working for the rational distribution of welfare payments to the needy of the entire United States...

...By the same token, under capitalism, the casino-like quality of the economic game must tempt people to erect all sorts of rather similar gambling devices...

...Because it is impossible to sell such services piecemeal, the market will not provide them...

...The "amoral familialism" that gloomy political scientists blamed for the backwardness of southern Italy has been created in Eastern Europe by successive governments rewarding corrupt, private, and unofficial deal-making while they repressed overt, public, secondary organizations that could have represented their members' concerns in a public-spirited and uncorrupt fashion...

...One reason lies in the nature of appeals to anyone to join in an activity to which it is not clear that others are committed...

...That means not letting go of the fact that the best of the so-called "free enterprise" economies are those where the government's responsibilities for health, education, and welfare are taken seriously, where governments do not sit on their hands in the face of incipient crisis...

...Corporate capitalism makes little sense except on the understanding that something other than the market ought to operate inside a large corporation...

...Some old baggage needs to be dropped, some eternal verities reaffirmed, and—more contentiously — a taste for speculative institution building needs to be encouraged...

...The casino element can be allowed to operate only in the sense that so far as any individual entrepreneur goes, it will be more or less luck that determines if his or her products are chosen or rejected when they are put on sale...

...Without offering it as a definition, I think that one essential element in socialism must be the use of the political mechanism to overcome deficiencies in the economic system...

...His aims were not simply humanitarian: viewed caustically, one might say he was out to produce healthy cannon fodder for the next imperial adventure...

...It is less dispiriting as an ad hominem argument against mindless or hysterical defenses of laissez-faire...

...Europeans who visit a tolerably prosperous American suburb or small town are commonly struck by the lavishness of public support for 438 • DISSENT Socialism for the Nineties many kinds of civic amenity...

...The first and most obvious argument lies in the inability of the market to provide public goods...