A Symposium
Cohen, Jean L.
I must admit that I felt ambivalent about responding to these questions. My ambivalence derives not from my attitude toward the history of Dissent, but from a certain discomfort with the way the...
...But first and foremost, this requires acknowledgment that democracy is the broader category within which socialism is only one partial project...
...But that brings me to what I find disturbing about the formulation of the second part of the question...
...But that is as it should be...
...In other words, democratic socialism must accept as its unifying principle the plurality of democratic movements, actors, projects, and forms...
...revolution" dichotomy makes it appear as if we still believed in the utopia of a total ("radical") revolution that would accomplish a complete break with capitalist market economies and bourgeois liberal democracy, and which would put in their place a classless socialist economy, and a conflict-free political society...
...And wasn't this true of socialism itself...
...For it seems to buy into the worst aspects of that ideal while obfuscating the real sources of radical hope, then and now...
...So do many of the concrete suggestions for change that have appeared in Dissent's pages...
...Discussions of the limits to growth and critiques of nuclear technology involve a renewed ethical reflection that is quite compatible with what is best in the socialist tradition...
...Once this is done, it becomes possible both to rethink the positive dimensions of the socialist ideal and to recognize the real sources for radical hope...
...To ask whether the collapse of Soviet-style communism consigns us to "soulless [that is, social democratic] reformism" is thus doubly misleading...
...Moreover, we also understood that universalistic claims made in the name of one class (the working class) and one movement (the labor movement) were a part of that myth that fed intolerance...
...But many of us recognized long ago that this phantasm of revolution is a dangerous myth that has always played into the hands of authoritarian statists (whether in or out of power...
...In short, to continue to speak in terms of the old "reform vs...
...It is this potential implication of the question that I take objection to...
...We might then see continuities and exciting discontinuities between the new paradigms and projects and Dissent's other concerns...
...It would be easy to answer the first question with a strong affirmative statement—very much of what Dissent argued against and also a great deal of what it argued for stands up rather well today...
...Struggles for social justice, greater democratization of the workplace, and a mode of development that is not guided solely by the profit motive are as valid today as before, but they must be construed within the framework of a con10 • DISSENT The heft After Forty Years sciously self-limiting socialist project (one that renounces totalizing claims of the sorts mentioned above...
...Or, even worse, do we actually reveal some sort of regret for the passing of "really existing socialism" — as if despite all that we have criticized it for, the Soviet Union still stood as a distorted, derailed, unacceptable, but nevertheless indispensable alternative model to liberal democratic capitalism, and thus as a kind of assurance that something different is possible...
...Neither the demise of "really existing socialism" nor the call for conscious selflimitation of movements visa vis one another entails the end of radical hope...
...Have we bought into Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "triumph of liberalism...
...Why should we think that because the Soviet Union is gone, we are now reduced to an American version of "social democratic reformism" or to "piecemeal tinkerings with the liberal status quo," and that we are now without radical hope...
...If we do not want to appear to be nostalgic for these myths, we should avoid the conceptual framework in which they are continually regenerated...
...So are demands for the reduction of labor time, for job sharing, for flexible hours, for on-thejob day care, for comparable worth, family leave, equal pay, and the end of sexual harassment, all of which have been raised by the feminist movement...
...Certainly the relentless criticism of both Stalinism and McCarthyism in the first decade or so of the journal, along with the enduring critique of the forms of domination, exclusion, and injustice typical of capitalist systems, and of oligarchic "liberal democratic" polities retain their cogency...
...I suggest we look toward contemporary collective actors—to their forms of interaction, projects, learning processes, and to the theoretical debates these have generated, for radical hope...
...For example, it should not be so difficult for democratic socialists to see that the ecology movement involves, in part, a continuation of the original socialist concern to limit the destructive effects of a mode of development guided solely by the profit motive (in its capitalist or bureaucratic communist forms...
...Socialism was first and foremost a theory of and for a movement—the workers movement—which created new forms of solidarity and democracy and which articulated new projects without having to rely on any "really existing socialism" to be able to mobilize its members...
...It must be self-limiting especially with respect to other projects, other collective actors, other ideals...
...My ambivalence derives not from my attitude toward the history of Dissent, but from a certain discomfort with the way the questions have been formulated...
...After all, hasn't the source of "radical hope," of new ideas, indeed of new utopias always been collective action—the projects and struggles of social movements mobilized around egalitarian democratic ideals...
...However, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the theoretical paradigm within which much of this critique was embedded, namely, Marxian socialism, however redefined or revised, has lost its credibility...
...After all, it has been obvious to most of us for a long time that the "counter-model" presented by the Soviet Union discredited radical hope for many and was used as an excuse by others to crush alternative projects here and elsewhere...
...And this, I insist, occurred well before Soviet-style communism finally (and deservedly) collapsed in 1989...
...Of course many other demands and projects are new and apposite to older socialist concerns...
...Rather, they mean the possibility of learning from one another and fighting together for common as well as distinctive democratic, egalitarian goals...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
