A Symposium
Cesar, Lewis
Now that the suffocating mortgage of communism has finally been lifted, opportunities for the democratic and socialist left in both East and West may have a second chance. Yet, by a curious...
...The bright boys from Harvard who helped unleash the market forces in the declining economy of Poland have been so insensitive to the resulting human deprivations and tragedies that a near majority of Poles seems to hanker back to the good old days of goulash communism...
...No new Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital is likely to help us unravel the mysteries of the world's economy or of the devious ways of the contemporary manipulation of technological power...
...There are few situations in history in which only one course of development is bound to prevail...
...What happened in Poland might well happen in various Balkan countries...
...I write this while radio commentators are busy reporting that in Poland the former Communist parties have won an amazing victory over the market-oriented parties of Walesa and tutti quanty...
...As Max Weber, that supreme realist, once wrote, "Certainly all political experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible...
...But the love affair in the East and the West with the ideals of the classical economists is likely to be nasty, brutish, and short if, and this is admittedly a large if, alternative visions appear of the world and of human destiny...
...This will surely be a most arduous political and intellectual task...
...But a collective of innovative and radical thinkers might accomplish what no individual thinker will be able to set before us...
...At this juncture it would indeed seem likely that a market society will appeal to many men and women who are in search of new political ideas and political goals...
...Yet, by a curious twist of the zeitgeist many of our friends and co-thinkers on the left act as if it were they rather than the communists who had suffered a decisive defeat...
...But such views only testify to a failure of historical imagination...
...It seems unlikely that in the foreseeable future there will appear a major guide to the analysis of the present and the preparation of the future...
...Those of us who have stood in the vanguard of the fight against both totalitarian rule and alienation in market society must now attempt to reformulate a vision of the good society and of the ways gradually to approach it...
...When people are not inspired by some living ideal they are likely to prefer a milder version of the prison house of the past to the amateurish and insensitive policies of the present...
...It is not likely to involve only a short span of time...
...In the East as well as in the West, if we want to be heard, non-sectarian practical engagement in the struggles of the day have to be combined with a dogged belief in utopian idealism...
...It will surely require more than the lifetime of most or all of us...
...Only individuals or parties that fight for policies that are radical but also politically sensitive have a chance in the East as well as in the West...
...If the voices of dissent can still make themselves heard they may turn out to be a major part of a saving remnant who, by upholding the still viable ideas of the past and new thoughts emerging in the crucible of daily engagements, prepare the ground for a new democratic and socialist left...
...They seem to believe that once totalitarian society has strangled itself in its own contradictions, market capitalism remains the only alternative to the defunct rule of the knout...
...We shall not WINTER • 1994 • 11 The heft Atter Forty Years enter the promised land, but we might help the next generation to enter it...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
