The role of the democratic left

...But there is no such movement in sight...

...But even at times when ideas need to be revalued or revised, there are things we need to do and say...

...The articles we have been printing in Dissent about market socialism may not be among the most widely read, but in my opinion they are among the most important...

...Perhaps not...

...In other countries, social democracy is faced with the national question, with which it has never been very comfortable...

...Again, no one knows—there are signs, some extremely serious, of instability in all the European countries...

...As Paz writes, "revolution begins as a promise, dissipates its energy in feverish agitation, and freezes into a bloody dictatorship that is the antithesis of the fiery impulse that brought it into being...

...But can we attract Americans with such "meat and potato" issues (income distribution, trade policy, job training, health plans, and so on) when these are frequently seen as the concern of "special interests...

...Groups for whom the socialist idea is still a living issue mostly huddle within social democracy...

...The confusion of labels is the price we pay for the failures and mistakes of the past—and the price will be paid...

...We must keep saying that it's not ordained in the heavens that our cities should collapse, millions of people should be jobless, and thousands more homeless...

...2. Dissent tends to assume the centrality of social democratic ideas...

...There could also be many setbacks and hesitations along the way—we have no reason to assume a smooth historical progress...

...This clearly matters more than the pledge to the flag or multiculturalism...

...There is, however, one "social issue" that ranks in importance with the economic ones, and that is abortion...

...The idea of socialism would then serve as a "regulative principle," a norm for political activity, a vision of a future not within immediate reach...

...it has become for millions of Americans a day-to-day problem...

...1. In this moment of political and intellectual confusion, what role remains for the democratic left...

...Other editors might disagree, and will perhaps be heard from...

...So our task remains to keep assailing injustice, poverty, corruption, and, even if the national mood is distinctly sour, to keep advancing the values of human solidarity...

...Many Americans seem to feel more strongly about things like prayer in the schools, the pledge to the flag, morality on television, and abortion than about "meat and potato" issues...

...He writes that in the blissful classless society "man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler...

...Only some "advanced" academics concerned with "hegemony" in English departments fail to understand this...

...I'll hedge a little by avoiding both extremes and offer a few remarks...

...Even if regulated by progressive legislation, large concentrations of private property—we're not talking about mom and pop stores, which should remain with mom and pop—make for a situation of inequity, just as large concentrations of state-owned property can make for another kind of social imbalance...

...but it does seem as if in the foreseeable future, at least in the "advanced" Western nations, a shaky measure of social stability has been achieved, through what some writers call "neocorporatism," entailing a pact between the contending classes to live together in partial harmony...

...This could lead to severe social conflicts...

...Still, I think Octavio Paz is right in saying that "the revolutionary myth," so powerful in the imagination of the left for the past 150 years, "is dying...

...At least for the time being, social democracy as a whole has settled for "capitalism with a human face" (the welfare state), which is certainly much better than what we have in England or the United States but still falls short of socialist aspiration...

...4. With the downfall of communism, what lessons do you draw...

...First of all, unremitting social criticism...

...It seems to be suffering from a paucity of gifted leadership, certainly of serious intellectuals...

...some have become mediocre political machines not much better than their centrist competitors...

...That as a matter of hygienic differentiation we have been forced to add the adjective constitutes a tacit admission that political opponents of the right (malicious) and the left (feckless) have done enormous damage in misidentifying socialism with totalitarian regimes...

...The ruling elite of this country suffers from a sense of drift, an emptiness of mind, and, sometimes, a crude cynicism...

...5. In the writings of some Dissent editors there seems to be a certain ambiguity toward organized social democracy...

...Because that is what most of us are...

...Given the weariness that is one heritage of our century, that is about as far as social democracy seems able to go...

...That movement faces very serious problems...

...What can it usefully do or say...

...We have come to distrust the "glamour" of revolution: there have been too many disastrous consequences...

...What the differences might be between a social democratic outcome and a democratic socialist society are discussed at the end of Thomas Weisskopf's article in this issue of Dissent...

...Such an advanced welfare state with a full-scale social democratic program is a highly desirable goal, and one that's likely to take a good many years to achieve...

...I would reiterate his observation that so long as the main centers of property remain in private or corporate hands, there is likely to follow a severe imbalance in social and political power...

...Now, decades later, I am repelled by this rhetoric, with its unpleasant authoritarian promise that "the vanguard" will fulfill its "task" to reshape humanity...

...Ideally, "democratic socialist" ought to be seen as redundant, because the socialism we envision is unconditionally democratic...

...it is dying a natural death...

...but the truth is that all political-ideological outlooks entail or imply utopian visions...

...In campaigning against traditional religions and in behalf of a totalistic secular ideology, it proposed to create "a new man...

...The social democratic parties of Europe vary a great deal in character and quality...

...That may be one reason for its ruthlessness in dealing with political opponents and its willingness to trample on the symbols and myths of the very people it proposed to remake...

...Just as we were being deafened with hosannahs for "the triumph of capitalism" (especially by arriviste neoconservatives), capitalism took a nosedive...

...What should be rejected once and for all is the politics that would impose utopia through dictatorship and terror...

...7. Have you given up on the idea of utopia...

...The Scandinavian parties are more serious and reflective than most of the Mediterranean ones...

...They differ only in kind...

...That can lead only to mass apathy, followed by resistance from below and cynicism above...

...To give up this vision would be a failure of the imagination, and would turn against the entire experience of humanity, which in one form or another has continued to dream of a truly human existence...

...This question can be answered either by writing a long book or by saying that it's still too soon to make a definite statement...

...Still, we proceed patiently with intellectual work, trying to depict the features of a democratic socialist society in workable detail—its structural arrangements, not just its envisioned qualities—without succumbing to excessively mechanical specifications...

...In those countries where the welfare state is well entrenched, there is a programmatic question: what next...

...At the end of his brilliant book Literature and Revolution Leon Trotsky has a passage that in my 144 • DISSENT youth I found inspiring...

...But there is a democratic kind of utopianism that posits a better—not a "perfect" —society and that sees in socialism, among other things, the realization of liberal values...

...Is this an inexorable "law" of history...

...because even if we dropped the label, our opponents would still stick it on us...

...No one can be certain...

...People of every political outlook find themselves overwhelmed by the rush of historical change...

...What Paz describes is familiar, and if it's not inexorable, it certainly suggests a considerable likelihood concerning the outcome of insurrection and dictatorship...

...In the last several years utopia has become a term of dismissal in conservative polemics...

...And then there's a need for intellectual work—let's say for utopian thinking qualified by democratic norms...

...It's also possible that for a variety of reasons, including the decision of electorates, we might not be able to go beyond such a social democratic outcome in the foreseeable future...

...Some social democratic parties retain a measure of socialist idealism...

...It's not that we "want" a recession...

...We have an obligation to defend the right of American women to choose freely, no matter what our views about abortion itself...

...But right now, when socialists are confined to small groups, largely propagandistic and intellectual in character, I see no point in a change of name...

...Every reflective person knows the country is in very deep recession, but with problems that go beyond and will outlast the recession...

...And this for two reasons: first, the right uses "social issues" as a diversion from what are the genuine needs and concerns of most citizens and second, if we don't bring up the basic economic issues and possible radical solutions, almost no one else will...

...Events of the last several decades do require a reconsideration of what we mean by a democratic socialist society, and in a piecemeal, stumbling fashion we've begun to do that...

...SPRING • 1992 • 145...

...Such reconsiderations may not have immediate practical bearings, partly because the very word "socialism" has been tarnished by its misidentification with the communist dictatorships...

...it sought to make a dramatic break with the past...

...I would now be glad to see a situation in which "the average human type" in a democratic socialist society would be just a little more humane and cooperative...

...A recession has a way of concentrating the mind, reminding people of what the major priorities in domestic society really are...

...It would, after all, have been implausible to suppose that the decay of political life these past few decades would leave social democratic parties unscathed...

...of course not...

...Meat and potatoes" is no longer a metaphor...

...It's not ordained that the rich become richer, the poor poorer...

...The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx...

...A Holy Alliance is not killing it...

...Of course we have proposals to make...

...A national health plan, decent child care, environmental protection, measures against sexual bias, legislation enabling unions to organize, a serious campaign to help the "underclass" —just for starters...

...A plethora of Goethes is not attractive...

...And above this ridge new peaks will rise...

...Yet, if the social democratic goal is much to be desired, it isn't one that socialists should "settle for...

...I don't see this as being a conflict with the idea of a democratic socialism but rather as a major step in that direction...

...The ordinariness of ordinary life should not be threatened by the socialist idea...

...If there were in sight a significant movement of the left that avoided the trappings and language of traditional socialism but had more or less similar objectives, I'd not hesitate for a moment to drop the label...

...Last spring we published a special issue on "Social Breakdown," and I wondered whether that might not be too strong a phrase...

...It begins to look as if the era of revolution that began with the great French revolution and reached a climax with the Bolshevik revolution has come to an end...

...That is one reason socialists are reformists, hoping to achieve a better society through the processes of democratic change while realistic enough to be aware that such a commitment may also inhibit, certainly slow the process of change...

...It may be that the socialist movement that flourished some decades ago has reached a point of exhaustion and that we are now waiting for an inheritor...

...Yes, that's true for some of us...

...In the last few decades we've had to add the adjective "democratic" to the noun "socialist," as a recognition of unhappy realities...

...If so, why...

...It was not true for the American revolution, but then, in the sense that the left used the term, that was not a genuine social revolution...

...The divisive "social issues" mentioned in your question have their importance, but given the American political SPRING • 1992 • 143 system, a progressive politics must focus as much as reasonably possible on overriding economic concerns...

...They seem, in any case, to come along periodically regardless of what anyone "wants...

...and others manage to combine both good and bad...

...So here's an effort by one Dissent editor to provide, not exhaustive or definitive, but brief and provisional answers...

...the Italian Socialist party under Bettino Craxi does not fill one's heart with joy...

...I don't know...

...Perhaps not a fatal one, but deep enough...

...Right now, in early 1992, most Americans are rightly concerned about jobs, health insurance, paying bills...

...Not revolutionary changes, and many already present in other capitalist societies, especially those with strong labor and socialist movements...

...It wasn't...

...How long will this arrangement survive...

...It will take some time before we can rid ourselves of that cross...

...history is full of surprises, often nasty...

...Still, insofar as there remains in Europe a left constituency it can be found mostly in social democracy and occasionally among the Greens...

...They are called social democratic in Europe, liberal in the United States...

...Wouldn't that be a sufficient goal...

...Another caution: in its "heroic" pre-Stalinist phase, Bolshevism sought to undo, as it were, the accumulated past of history...

...3. Given the damage that has been done to the idea of socialism from all sides of the political spectrum, why do you still choose to call yourselves by that confusing label...

...and because there isn't a better one in sight...

...6. Given your recognition that democratic socialism is not now on the immediate agenda, might it not be a sufficient goal to opt for a social democratic outcome—an advanced welfare state in which capitalist property relations are subject to strong controls and fiscal measures are taken toward a more egalitarian society...