Political Identities

...Above all, those transmitted to each new generation, belying the claim that "free enterprise" enriches the realm of human choice...

...Keeping up that kind of map-making commentary is just the kind of thing that Dissent should be good at...

...Not that there are no imagined visions of an ideal capitalism: Milton and Rose Friedman are authors of a book entitled The Tyranny of the Status Quo...

...And the kinds of inequalities I have in mind here are not only those of wealth and power but also inequalities in education, disposable time, and political savoir faire...

...So how does one classify a political vision like this one...

...The converse is the image of capitalism as a bleak, unchanging order of exploitation, inequality, greed, and meretricious glitter...

...So I think drastic reduction of inequality is a compelling political vision, and one compatible Dennis Wrong What is our political identity...

...Who are "we," anyway...

...Perhaps the government-versus-private dichotomy should give way to a broad spectrum of different auspices for capital...

...Similarly, any society worth living in needs to have room for dropouts, misfits, and eccentrics—and there will always be at least a few to play those roles...

...I think it reflects, rather, a feeling that communism, for all its faults and failures, was at least an eco Political Identities nomic system utterly different from capitalism...

...Similarly, we see an irreducible requirement for state action to uphold civic values that are in the strict sense unmarketable—the planning of public spaces, for example, or the preservation of the natural environment...

...A few voices on the left have disparaged this as "consumerism," particularly with reference to the East German migrants to the West, as if socialism implied a communal asceticism like that of some religious orders...

...But how do we address such constraints...

...If, as someone has said—I think it was Daniel Bell—"Social democracy is the highest form of capitalism," then I am prepared to affirm it as that too...

...But we have no assurance that economic growth tout court will sustain the civil and social values that most of us in Dissent favor...

...unlike freedom, democracy, or national identity, it is not seen as incarnating eternal values—except, perhaps, in the ideological concoctions of writers like George Gilder...

...Przeworski sees socialism as more than a political project attainable through the exercise of political power...

...Although capitalism has in the past invoked the values of individualism to justify itself ideologically and resist state regulation, the link between capitalism and individualism is historically contingent rather than inherent...

...Ernest Gellner once remarked that if capitalism didn't exist, no one would have bothered to invent it...

...I want to affirm social democracy as a sui generis political standpoint, not as a mere way station or temporary compromise on the road to some version of full-fledged "socialism...

...How compatible is such equality with other key political values and aspirations and with political-economic constraints of the sort I tried to sketch a moment ago...

...We all want a republic with social justice, in which there are neither serfs nor lords...

...I shall give the last word to the new president of Czechoslovakia...

...What are the most pernicious sorts of inequalities...

...This fact strikes directly at the traditional claims of socialism, for, whatever additional moral or cultural ideals are associated with it, it was supposed to be a form of economic organization, what Marxists call a "mode of production," that improved upon capitalism...

...But there are also forms of collectivism that suggest a world of dehumanized insectlike or robotized creatures, as in the dystopias of Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell that were for a time at least prefigured by the totalitarian regimes calling themselves socialist...

...Nor do I regard it as a less forthright synonym for "democratic socialism," implicitly acknowledging the inevitability of slow step-by-step progress toward an ultimate goal of supplanting capitalism altogether, let alone as a resigned settling for second best in the face of a recalcitrant reality...

...It's useful, sometimes even fun, to locate one's self on the political map...

...Maybe we should be talking about how "ownership" might take on meanings and new social content in an egalitarian market economy...

...If socialism encompasses a realm of ideal possibility that is not exhausted by past failures to realize it, capitalism usually connotes what actually exists...

...But, as Perry Anderson observes, he provides no answer to the question, "How are we to get from where we are today to where he points us to tomorrow...

...The opposite of socialism or communism, so understood, is not capitalism but individualism, identified with egoism, self-seeking, indifference, or antagonism to others...

...The adjective in "democratic socialism" is usually understood to refer not only to the ultimate goal but also to the means of achieving it...

...Protesting citizens in Europe, and in the Soviet Union and China as well, do, however, give evidence of wanting the fruits of capitalism— more consumer goods and a higher standard of living...

...This is not the case today, not even in East Germany...

...State ownership does not guarantee the mitigation of such injustices, nor—I believe—do other forms of ownership render it impossible...

...It is always judged by its results...

...A growing awareness of economic backwardness and even decline, more than the crimes of Stalin, the police state, the suppressed nationalisms, cold war weariness, or lack of cultural freedom, dictated the new policies...

...Within the broad domain of these preferences, those of us on the democratic left have many differences...

...In any world where market principles play a role, in any world that makes room for entrepreneurship and other forms of economic pluralism, some will prosper—whether by making authentic contributions or by dumb luck...

...EDS...

...A market economy is certainly a component of capitalism, but it is hardly to be equated with it, as readers of Alec Nove's immensely impressive The Economics of Feasible Socialism will be fully aware...

...We have also to take aim at a particularly malignant form of inequality—that which overwhelms grass-roots political participation FALL • 1990 • 479 Political Identities by enabling the better-off to dominate public life, especially political life...

...Second, economic growth in some form is something that every government will be expected to produce...

...In any case, the disappearance of communism will have the additional advantage of enabling us to dispense with the necessity of devising polysyllabic portmanteau labels to dissociate ourselves from it...

...These questions acquire special urgency at a moment when unprecedented events in Europe confront the democratic left with a thoroughly transformed historical situation...

...Yet even if the Soviet Union itself abandons both the substance and the symbols of communism, the memory of it will live on, as has that of Hitler's Germany, which also called itself socialist...

...For years it's been assumed that any such thoroughgoing attack on social inequality presumes some form of classic socialism...

...Such arrangements, even if morally or politically acceptable, are incapable of sustaining the complex, high-tech economies that dominate the late twentieth century, let alone producing growth in such economies...

...What labels do we apply...

...Indeed, many critics would fault a vision like this one precisely for not belonging anywhere...

...The preponderance of worker-owned and cooperative enterprises justifies the use of the socialist label, sans the "state" prefix, as well as the presence of some government planning and a generous welfare state...

...it is actually "off the political map...

...Again, this is hardly an appeal for unlimited, enforced equality in all social contexts...

...Fourth, the range of noncentralized economic systems capable of yielding such growth is considerable...

...I suggest that this may not be the most significant or fruitful point to focus on...

...JAMES RULE I recall a few years ago a visitor to one of our editorial board meetings asking Irving Howe in informal conversation what, if anything, we all agreed upon politically...

...Yet if I had to identify a key fact of social life in America (and nearly all other industrial societies) that I find most profoundly unacceptable, inequality would be it...

...What are our own values, and what lines of political action show most promise of realizing those values...

...But Nove abandons a great deal of traditional socialist intellectual baggage...

...The great danger is that of being dismissed as part of an outmoded political idea—socialism—whose undoing is manifest in the collapse of the Soviet system...

...Most of us would also like to see government policies aimed at considerable reduction of inequality of wages and wealth...

...I find Alec Nove's market-based conception of a "feasible socialism" both realistic and attractive...

...The British SDP, alas, no longer exists, at least in its original form, but I am quite content with lower-case "social democrat" as a political description...

...I'm not convinced...

...And most of us seek the enlargement of political pluralism, with forceful guarantees of the rights of unusual or out-of-favor political, sexual, cultural, or ethnic groupings...

...Voting for a party is the most obvious if superficial indicator of a political identity...

...Others have worried that when reformist leaders in the communist states have announced the goal of introducing a market economy, they are acquiescing, whether knowingly or not, in the reintroduction of capitalism...

...And one has to ask how appealing the visions of European social democrats and U.S.-style liberals really are, as seen against serious demands for democracy, liberty, and equality...

...Most of us would want to insist on striving for a world where government intervenes in economic life to protect the weak...

...Let us remember that such inequalities have typified many countries with what pass for social democratic governments...

...The uncertain reaction from some on the left does not reflect a coherent theory or even opin ion, let alone any residual pro-Soviet allegiance or a belief in the "moral equivalence" of the cold war antagonists (supposedly a fixed left-liberal tenet according to the neoconservatives...

...484 • DISSENT Political identities Individualism as a set of values is not necessarily tied to either capitalist or socialist economic systems...

...He rejects Marxist economics as "irrelevant" and "misleading," especially such utopian goals as the abolition of money and the division of labor and the creation of a New Man motivated by altruism...

...The world offers so many profoundly unappealing possibilities—ranging from the bankruptcy of the political ideas of the Soviet Empire to the exuberant greed and social cynicism of Reaganism...

...But to lay particular stress on this is to obscure the depth of popular discontent with communism...

...Nove wants to correct the "utopian immanentism," as Axel van den Berg has called it, of the Marxist tradition, the insistence that socialism requires little concrete specification because it will define itself in the course of its making...

...Much of it simply reflects distaste for the self-righteous exultation of conservatives over the West's victory in the cold war, often narrowly hailed as the victory of capitalism...

...Rule's remarks are printed below, followed by those of Wrong...

...The skew of participation in public life to the better-off is as grave a scandal as other forms of inequality...

...When chosen as names for parties, movements, or political ideologies, they extol the group or collectivity as the object of supreme value and imply that their goal is to bring about a state of affairs in which its welfare will take precedence over the claims of individuals...

...I see the following as bedrock realities...

...True, utopian dreams of a perfect society cleansed of all evil and suffering may be ineradicably rooted in human consciousness...

...There has been less comment on the ambivalence of many on the left toward the collapse of communism...

...This has to be held unacceptable...

...I can see no reason why this should be so...

...This was shortly after the Social Political Identities Democratic party (SDP) had been founded by dissidents from the Labour party...

...But that won't stop many critics from writing us off, along with the egalitarian and democratic ideas we stand for...

...Such variety should disturb no one, provided only that people's diverse courses in life are neither the result of massive, inherited inequal ities nor the cause of them...

...480 • DISSENT with market arrangements...

...All of them will have to be retained, for practical rather than moral reasons, by any viable socialist economy...

...Yet the most compelling questions for me turn not on the juridical facts of ownership but on equality...

...One component of capitalism is a decentralized market economy in which prices and production are largely determined by the interplay of supply and demand...

...Much left-wing comment has been quick to contend that the citizens of reformed communist states will not wish to dispense with the stateprovided services to which they have become accustomed...

...However, the notion of "market socialism" is no contradiction in terms nor merely a suggestive oxymoron...

...Nor has the United States with its notoriously inadequate welfare state, about which we on the left constantly complain, failed to attract immigrants from the communist world...

...Often these differences are debated in terms of socialism-versus-liberalism— that is, in terms of where ownership of major productive wealth should reside...

...There are undeniably forms of individualism, at least at the level of practice, that are thoroughly antisocial, whose unrestrained expression conjures up the image of a Hobbesian or Social Darwinist world that is the very negation of society...

...We need to show the world that the list of political possibilities is richer than that reflected in existing political regimes and movements...

...On the latter point, he sensibly doubts that all, or even most, workers will wish to "participate in decision-making" on the details of production and sales despite FALL • 1990 • 483 Political Identities collectively owning the firms for which they work...

...The speakers were Bogdan Denitch (a version of whose talk appeared in our Spring issue) and James Rule and Dennis Wrong...

...In short, we support some sort of guided economy, with a considerable role for market forces...

...The end of the socialist project, however, is not the end of social democracy, the welfare state, or post—New Deal American liberalism, our equivalent of European social democracy...

...No doubt this is so, but the welfare state should not be equated with socialism any more than a market economy is with capitalism...

...Howe replied that at the very least all of us would almost certainly vote the same way in the major Western democracies, except perhaps in the case of Britain...

...How much equality do we want, and, perhaps more important, what kind of equality...

...Nove's economic model of socialism presupposes a political context of full representative democracy...

...Is socialism as an ideal and actual or potential movement irreparably damaged even though it can be plausibly argued that the Soviet model and its replicas were perversions of the values originally identified with socialism...

...Or it may take more egalitarian and constructive forms...

...Let us finally admit that the word 'socialist' has lost its meaning in our context...

...A centrally planned, command economy was capable of producing rapid growth in the early stages of industrialism—when administered with forced reduction in consumption and massive repression of dissent...

...Third, economic systems based on market principles—including both capitalism in its 478 • DISSENT Political Identities unreconstructed forms and economies involving various forms of government participation— can foster this much-sought-after growth...

...It therefore kept alive for radicals in the West the hope that their societies did not have to be the way they were, that if such a far-reaching though unappealing alternative to capitalism could exist, a more desirable alternative might also be attain able...

...Anderson evidently believes that only a successful revolutionary assault on capitalism can defeat it, as is implied by his claim that the cold war is "founded on the ceaseless determination of major capitalist states to stifle every attempt to build socialism, from the Russian to the Vietnamese, the Central European down to the Central American revolutions...

...Of course not: no one has ever died for capitalism, as Schumpeter pointed out long ago...

...The impact of communism's collapse, however, is at least in part a matter of historical timing, both in the communist world itself and in its coinciding with social and economic changes in the Western capitalist democracies that have for some time been adversely affecting the political prospects of socialism...

...Would employment in an establishment whose capital was formed from various "private" sources—conceivably including trade unions—under a strong "workers' bill of rights," necessarily be inferior to that in a state-owned enterprise...

...Most of us never felt any stake in "socialism" of that sort, and we feel optimism at the prospect of something better...

...As a political publication we need to maintain a distinctive position for ourselves among the array that makes up political geography...

...Not all inequality, not certain distinctions that seem to me bound to arise out of individual differences of aptitude or ambition, but the massive, adventitious, inherited inequalities that consign different citizens by accident of birth to radically different social worlds...

...That the postwar Soviet FALL • 1990 • 481 Political Identities empire ended now is entirely due to Mikhail Gorbachev's having indicated that he would not resort to force to keep the satellite regimes in power...

...It seems to me that government ownership of productive wealth neither guarantees an attack on such inequalities nor is necessary for success in such an attack...

...It is unthinkable, they would charge, to imagine a world that makes room for economic decentralization and entrepreneurship and yet dismantles longstanding encrustations of inherited inequality...

...Arguing last January 23 for dropping the word "socialist" from his country's official name, Vaclav Havel said: "The word evokes general repugnance...

...and we look to the state to foster diverse and egalitarian social arrangements...

...But this collapse has been so sudden, complete, and dramatic as to evoke a "sense of an ending" to many historical entities that seemed to be permanent fixtures—not that "history" itself is ending even in the special sense that Francis Fukuyama now insists he gave to that claim in his notorious essay...

...So what about my own political mapmaking...

...Capitalism is not, in contrast to socialism, a project to be realized or restored, nor is it a clearly bounded system 482 • DISSENT discontinuous with socialism, as most Marxists and their mirror-image opposites, the followers of Hayek and Milton Friedman, habitually assume...

...L et me begin by identifying some key constraints that, I believe, all political philosophers in the 1990s must acknowledge...

...Although the left in general has fared badly in the last decade, I am enough of an optimist to think that the communist debacle may end up contributing to the renascence of social democracy and American liberalism as a result of the "peace dividend" and the fact that the conservative opposition has now been deprived of the anticommunism and national defense issues it has so heavily exploited...

...It is a long time since social democrats and all but small minorities of noncommunist socialists in the West have seen the image of their desire in the "actually existing socialisms" now in collapse in Eastern Europe and crumbling in the USSR...

...Przeworski weakens his case, however, by defining socialism in so utopian a MarxistcumMarcusean fashion that one is skeptical that any route would get us there...

...But this is not the same thing as reviving the appeal of socialism as an "alternative society" gloriously delivered from the limitations of the regulated capitalism under which we live...

...And note that such inequalities have been shown to be sharper in Soviet bloc countries than in, say, welfare capitalist Sweden...

...The thorough and nonviolent nature of the successful revolt against communism in EastCentral Europe suggests that it all could have happened at just about any time since the death of Stalin: in 1953 when workers rebelled in East Berlin and Poland, in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Revolution, in 1968 with the Prague Spring, and in 1980-81 when Solidarity emerged in Poland...

...Like many of us, I find it easier to declare what I don't believe in than what I do...

...This outlook presupposes a stark contrast between capitalism and socialism, the latter meaning, in the critical characterization of Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feller, "a brand-new society . . . which was to be the absolute negation of everything that had existed . . . the total transcendence of the modern world...

...But he describes what is essentially a mixed economy, combining plan and market and including a variety of different kinds of production units: state-owned large-scale industries, socialized firms under the control of their own work force, cooperatives, small private enterprises, and self-employed individuals...

...An editorial in the Nation on the opening of the Berlin Wall insists that the events in Europe are not "the funeral of socialism," that we need not conclude that "this death of an epoch heralds a capitalist eternity," denying in familiar Freudian fashion just what is most feared...

...Whatever inequalities we accept as natural or inevitable must not be translatable into political power or domination of public discourse...

...This is true both for us as individuals and for Dissent collectively...

...A lingering nostalgia for the familiar routines of the cold war has been detected among some conservatives, including several leading figures of the Bush administration...

...To return for some final comments to the matter of choosing a political label: since a noun is more salient and therefore implicitly more important than an adjective modifying it, I prefer "social democracy" to "democratic socialism...

...Capitalism is a condition, not a theory, a set of instrumental activities, not an ideal or myth in the Sorelian sense...

...This, surely, is a radical view...

...Indeed, it can be more plausibly argued that history is now resuming in the nations where it had been frozen for decades under rigid communist regimes...

...I am aware that socialists as different as Marx, Durkheim (the colleague of Jean Jaurês), and Oscar Wilde have argued that only under socialism would full individual selfexpression become possible for everyone, but this is not obviously implied by the label itself...

...This is surely applicable to Nove's model: the state can hardly by statutory decree bring about true "economic democracy" in the form of genuine worker-controlled and cooperative enterprises...

...What difference does it make to someone at the bottom of that pyramid whether the ownership of the plant is in the hands of private capital or in those of the state...

...But social democracy is a descendant of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism at least as much as communism is...

...Clearly it is not a socialist program in the classic sense, because it places no premium on state ownership...

...I should like to work "liberal" into my preferred political label, as in "social democratic liberalism," simply "social liberalism," or "liberal social democracy," because, for me, belief in individual freedom has precedence over any other value...

...Without mastering the management of complex, modern economies, the rulers of the world's advanced societies will face revolt from their people and second-class status in the community of nations...

...For Dissent, of course, these times bring special hazards...

...After all, the West German welfare state was not yet in place back in 1961 when the Wall was built in order to stanch an outflow from East Germany...

...One thing brought to an end by the collapse of communism may be the longstanding belief that state action can achieve fundamental social change, or "structural" change as it is often called, without degenerating into tyranny...

...First, everyone must now acknowledge that Soviet-style centralism has been as disastrous economically as it has been politically and morally...

...Today the very concept of socialism seems to me too evocative of totalistic solutions, as in the phrase, still widely used by thoroughly principled democrats, "the transition to socialism," which implies a onceandfor-all passage across a clearly demarcated dividing line...

...Naturally, there were some differences of opinion and emphasis...

...I find compelling Adam Przeworski's criticism of the electoral route to socialism, his questioning that successive reforms carried out by social democratic parties are likely to prove irreversible or to cumulate into achieved socialism...

...More than forty years ago I was impressed by Philip Rahv's statement at the high tide of the influence of Stalinism that "what we need is a disenchanted socialism, a socialism defined simply as a socio-economic project of twentieth century man" (his italics...

...The continuing large numbers of migrants from East to West Germany are indeed able to avail themselves of the Federal Republic's generous state services...

...That is, the auspices of such growth-producing economies range from relatively egalitarian, centrally planned Sweden through less egalitarian but still statist Japan to the relatively inegalitarian and much less economically statist United States...

...But he also dismisses Marxist strictures against commodity production, wage labor, and material incentives...

...It may involve egregiously one-sided enrichment of a small minority, environmental decimation, destruction of civic amenities, or any number of other undesirable phenomena...

...At a recent Dissent editorial board meeting, we held a discussion on political identity...

...We should stand for a system in which inequalities of wealth and power begin and end in a single lifetime...

...Socialism is one of a family of terms most of which were coined in the first half of the nineteenth century...

...How do we label ourselves politically, for labels are unavoidable even as they unavoidably simplify...

...Think of a production worker in an auto plant, whose salary is perhaps a fiftieth of that of the managing director and who has no say whatever in the conditions of work...

...Communism, collectivism, communalism, communitarianism, and solidarism are other members of the family...

...When in our lifetimes have those maps changed so rapidly and so radically...

...Marx may have been wrong in thinking that capitalism was doomed because of its internal contradictions, but he was probably right in believing that only its complete economic breakdown would suffice to make possible the rise of a new and entirely different economic system...

...The growth that results may take many forms...

...Nove's feasible socialism is based on his life-long study of the Soviet economy, whose inadequacies he is not disposed to dismiss as entirely the result of capitalist encirclement, Russian backwardness, or Bolshevik elitism...

...Clearly, too, it differs from standard social democratic programs in its resistance to the sorts of enduring inequalities that they so often tolerate...

...One should always pay close attention to the literal meaning of political terms and to their etymological origins...

...Nove criticizes a number of other beliefs and policies not solely of Marxian provenance that have been widely advocated by leftists: redistributive taxation, import controls, wage increases without gains in labor productivity, price controls without wage controls, the elimination of profit both as a measure of efficiency and as an incentive, the substitution of "workers' control" for managerial hierarchies of authority...

...In the Soviet Union, the weakness of the economy appears to have chiefly induced Gorbachev to set in motion the present upheavals...

...More such may follow: stay tuned...

...I do not, however, opt for "social democracy" simply as a lowest common denominator...

...Some leftists have rather plaintively noted that East Europeans are not clamoring for the "restoration of capitalism...

...I think that this question must be answered affirmatively: the dissolution of communism is indeed the death knell of socialism as a credible and attractive political goal...

...The proper response is to make our own political maps—that is, to articulate our own accounts of the possibilities for social and political organization...

...Independent of events in Europe, the established parties of the left are due for some electoral successes after so long a period of conservative rule, in accordance with the rhythm of democratic politics...

...Such a position is not just misguided, it would be claimed...

...I should like to move to the next stage in delineating an identity: the choice of a generic label...

...As in the past year, the earlier revolts were fired by demands for democracy and national independence...

...But that is just the business we should be in, above all at this lively stage of history — rewriting rewriting the map of political possibilities...

...Certainly, communism or Marxist-Leninism as a world historical force, the cold war and the division of Germany and Europe it perpetuated, the threat of a nuclear war, belief in revolution as an agency for creating a morally superior social order, the assumption that economic planning can dispense with the market mechanism—all of them, along with much else, are ending...

...But so are anti-utopian sentiments, as we were most memorably reminded by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground...

...The question is critical because it is possible to realize a number of other political ends often associated with the left without making much dent in inequality...

...But there was one important difference: in the 1950s and 1960s "socialism with a human face" was still a vibrant aspiration...

...But even if understood as referring essentially to existing societies and economies, capitalism need not be used merely as a negative label for all that socialists would like to do away with...

...The concept of capitalism sorely needs to be disaggregated, broken down into its components, maybe abandoned altogether as having outlived its usefulness now that its nineteenthcentury form has been overcome...

...Even under most social democratic regimes, the children of the least privileged are born with possibilities for development and well-being sharply different from those of the well-to-do...

...Of the most widely used paired political labels, "liberal-conservative" and "left-right," liberal is the only one with a substantive meaning of its own, the others being definable only in relation to their opposites...