Utopianism

...I might be critical, I might tilt a little toward whatever left wing it had...

...And it's certainly not a time of leftist domination, even though moderate social democratic parties hold office in some European countries...

...So, to friend and foe, at a moment when the embers of utopianism seem very low, I'd say: You want to call us utopians...

...Some of our readers, I suspect, quietly skip past these articles...

...one of the last to embody these was Willy Brandt, and now he is gone...

...Communist parties were powerful in most of the major European countries...

...Seldom have so many good people sacrificed themselves for so bad a cause...

...They are, if you please, sketches of utopia...

...That's fine with me...

...In its years of influence and power, communism seized upon the imagination of millions of people throughout the world...

...But even if, at a given moment, the immediate issues loom large, at least some of us want to think in terms of long-range options...

...There is the utopia of community and egalitarianism...

...it is a "nowhere...

...The communist movement destroyed entire generations...

...Others avoid any long-range expectations or desires...

...But there are other utopias...

...There is the democratic utopianism that runs like a bright thread through American intellectual life—call it Emersonianism, call it republicanism, call it whatever you like...

...It is a claim for the value of desire, the practicality of yearning—as against the deadliness of acquiescing in the "given" simply because it is here...

...The results of this great historical disaster are staggering...

...Some are sour (usually edited by ex-radicals) and others are timid (usually edited by quasiliberals...

...It doesn't necessarily entail a particular politics...

...This kind of utopianism is really another way of appreciating the variety and surprise that history makes possible — possible, nothing more...

...With all due modesty, I think this version of utopianism speaks for us...

...Some years ago Theodore Draper made a remark in conversation that has stuck in my mind: the central experience of the twentieth century, he said, was communism, like it or hate it...

...The ethical world is never given...

...When the anti-Stalinist groups won over a handful of people from the Communist parties, it was almost always people who were intellectually and psychologically exhausted, their fanaticism burned out and their intellectual energies diminished...

...For one thing, the constituencies of these parties, the people who vote for them, also share in their spiritual hesitation, their intellectual skepticism and bewilderment...

...Declaring itself the legatee of humanism and the bearer of good news, communism inspired thousands— no, hundreds of thousands—of workers, students, intellectuals, to feats of devotion and, sometimes, heroism...

...Leftist bashing, in both newspaper editorials and learned books, is very much in...

...Little of the spirit of socialism remains in these parties...

...it is for having largely abandoned the questions...

...But they are efforts to indicate possibilities of renewal...

...Some of us call this belief socialism, out of a wish for historical continuity or for lack of a better label...

...In much intellectual discussion it tends to be used as a term of dismissal...

...For the truth—as every Dissent reader learns from every issue we publish, perhaps to excess—is that the socialist idea is as precarious as the ideas of the conservatives and liberals, though the latter have the advantage of being at ease with the existing social and political order, while the social democrats presumably desire some change...

...Nor is it as if there were a clear socialist idea or vision that the parties reject...

...With a good many former communist leaders, the sequel has been an ugly form of nationalism—as in Yugoslavia, SPRING • 1993 • 131 Comments and Opinions where the leaders of both Serbia and Croatia are former prominent communists...

...To be sure, there was fascism and the end of colonialism, but fascism could be seen as essentially a ghastly reaction to the rise of radicalism and the end of colonialism as an all-but-inevitable cluster of events...

...That much said, it's only fair to add that this isn't entirely their fault...

...Even those of us in the United States, insulated by our native mythologies, who were never tempted by Communism, are experiencing the consequences...

...That word "utopia" has come into disrepute...

...To be sure, in the East European countries the communist dictatorships attracted a large share of careerists (the kinds of people who in the United States might have been Republican officeholders...

...It's not as if "the masses" are pressing the social democrats for a more radical outlook...

...Yet the truth is that, except in one or two countries, social democracy today has become a decent and honorable party that (rhetoric apart—and that even less and less) does not really aspire to move beyond the status quo...

...The memories of yesterday grow dimmer...

...So there really is no point in the old-style leftist denunciation of social democracy...

...That's why in almost every issue of Dissent you'll find one or two articles about "market socialism" or allied topics...

...The sheer waste of human resources, of the energies that might have been available for social renovation, is incalculable...

...This is true of the intellectual world, with the exception of a few mavericks like Gtinter Grass...

...You can see the signs of this exhaustion if you pick up any of the leading intellectual journals...

...In the sense that Cassirer speaks of it, utopianism is a necessity of the moral imagination...

...We want, that is, to avoid the provincialism of the immediate...

...But there, too, the communists gained the support of decent, misguided followers...

...New generations, new energies do not arrive overnight...

...But in this comment I want to focus on only one reason: the aftermath, or perhaps more accurately, the aftertaste of the collapse of communism...

...The difficulty of formulating an attractive program is far more serious for the social democrats than for their opponents...

...That's OK, as long as they see why we print them...

...Those of us who were long-time anti-Stalinists, enclosed in our little groups and sects, found it hard to acknowledge the idealism—twisted, distorted, corrupted yet idealism nonetheless—that went into the communist movement...

...Well, we Dissenters, the handful of us, try to hold fast to the vision of social transformation, even as we have dropped many of the traditional proposals for how to reach it...

...not at all...

...There has first to be an interval of weariness, disillusionment, "pragmatism" —and diminished expectations...

...But just such a conception of a nowhere has stood the test and proved its strength in the development of the modern world...

...but for many ordinary people "the movement" burned with flames of hope...

...It is also true for what remains of the European left—either solid, decent social democrats with barely a touch of fire left in them or unrepentant communists masquerading as socialists in Eastern Europe...

...it doesn't ensure wisdom about current affairs...

...It exists at no moment of time and at no point in space...

...It's not that we're smarter than most European social democrats...

...Idealistic visions, utopian hopes, desires for social renovation are all out of fashion—indeed, are regarded as dangerous illusions that set off memories of totalitarian disasters...

...What we can and should criticize the social democrats for is not that they have failed to come up with the "answers...

...But I would be part of it...

...It follows from the nature and character of ethical thought that it can never condescend to the "given...

...Our advantage, if that's what it is, consists in the fact that we are distant from power and therefore able or, indeed, driven to think in terms of long-range possibilities, the revival of the democratic left in what may turn out to be the not-very-near future...

...Let me be clear: if I lived in any of the major European countries, I would belong to or support the social democratic party...

...Some subsist by mocking the hopes of their youth...

...It's tempting to compare this post–cold war moment to the postrevolutionary decades of early nineteenth-century England...

...They provide materials for developments some of us will never live to see...

...What I've been saying here holds, I'm afraid, for large segments of the European social democracy...

...It is a testimony to the resourcefulness that humanity now and then displays (together with other, far less attractive characteristics...

...There are, of course, many reasons for this mood indigo, only a few years after the enthusiasm raised by the "velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia and the Gorbachev reforms in the former Soviet Union...

...Nor is it a time of liberal dominance, although in the United States the Clinton administration has given rise to some liberal hopes, by no means certain of realization...

...And, of course, there are versions of utopia—based on force or terror or the will of a self-appointed "vanguard" —that are abhorrent...

...There were of course careerists, hacks and thugs in the communist movement...

...The current catchword is sobriety, which sometimes looks like a cover for depression...

...Of course we also respond to immediate issues, so that Dissent carries articles about taxes, health care, budget crises, and so on...

...Still others narrow their focus of concern to the daily routines of politics, sometimes saying useful things, though not much more...

...Often enough, these articles are provisional, a little abstract, and inclined to disagreements with one another...

...We have had enough of these...

...What it does provide is a guiding perspective, a belief or hope for the future, an understanding that nothing is more mistaken than the common notion that what exists today will continue to exist tomorrow...

...They don't necessarily paint a picture of an actual future—who can...

...Devoted to decency and democracy—no small matters—the social democrats cannot evoke the idealism and selflessness of the socialist yesterday...

...it is forever in the making...

...But the comparison is of slight value, since what we are experiencing might better be called a postcounterrevolutionary moment...

...a bit later, they appropriated the heritage of anticolonialism in Asian and African countries...

...With many rank-and-file militants, the sequel has been silence...

...and even in the United States, where the Communist party was never a major force, it has been reliably estimated that nearly a million people passed through the Stalinist milieu (not the party) between, say, 1920 and 1950...

...In an essay Lewis Coser and I wrote some forty years ago in the second issue of Dissent, we quoted a passage from Ernst Cassirer that still speaks to our condition: A Utopia is not a portrait of the real world, of the 132 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions actual political or social order...