LIBERAL SOCIALISM

...One wants to say to them, Steady on...

...They should not be afraid of appearing doubtful or weak by doing so...

...WINTER • 1994 • 123...

...Socialism, when understood in its fundamental sense and judged by its results—as the concrete movement for the emancipation of the proletariat—is liberalism in action...

...It can be summed up in a single word: self-government...

...it is not and cannot be either bourgeois or socialist, conservative or revolutionary, though its very nature tends to make it favor the forces of progress...

...In historical terms, the question becomes more complicated because liberalism has both a conceptual history and a practical one, and in the course of its unfolding it has produced an extraordinary harvest of practical experience and successive degrees of conceptualization...

...Liberty can never be 120 • DISSENT Liberal Socialism won through tyranny or dictatorship, or even through being granted from above...

...Socialism is nothing more than the logical development, taken to its extreme consequences, of the principle of liberty...

...Above all, everyone now sees clearly the dangers of bureaucratic elephantiasis, the intrusive state, the rule of the incompetent, the stamping out of all individual autonomy and liberty, and the loss of any incentive for managers or their subordinates...

...or put another way, you get rid of the old WINTER • 1994 • 119 Liberal Socialism only by building the new—if for no other reason than that social life cannot admit periods of arrest and regression, from which the first to suffer are the proletarians...

...This does not mean WINTER • 1994 • 121 Liberal Socialism giving up the teleological goals of socialism...

...work loads lightened and made a source of delight...

...The result is that liberty, from being a notionally universal prerogative that in fact corresponded to the interests of a minority, is truly becoming the patrimony of all...

...For serious, intelligent, educated socialists — indeed, for society's entire management elite— these things are by now viewed as fairy tales that it is healthier not to discuss...

...Socialism will be liberal on the day it is able to pronounce a noble and conclusive word on this subject...

...and to guide the forces of innovation that will arise from time to time into legal channels...

...In these circumstances the individual is enslaved by poverty, humiliated by his own subjection...

...it means only showing respect for a few essential forms of life in common...

...Those who had nothing were always the servants of the powerful...

...Even for socialists, the simplistic formulas and bold, miraculous prescriptions that were meant to unlock the secret of the future have had their day...

...The more the proletarian movement takes hold and an active sense of liberty gains strength among the masses, the more the bourgeoisie, in its most backward sectors, tries to escape from the discipline and pattern of liberty...

...In the name of liberty they ask for a more equal distribution of wealth and the automatic guarantee for every person of a life worth living...

...He does not believe that the socialist regime must be, and that it will come about over the course of centuries because of some law that transcends the will of human beings...

...Within a few years socialist support for the liberal method and the liberal climate — explicit, total, definitive support—will be a fait accompli...

...The truth is that liberalism is by definition historicist and relativistic...

...one becomes free...

...Liberalism in its most straightforward sense can be defined as the political theory that takes the inner freedom of the human spirit as a given and adopts liberty as the ultimate goal, but also the ultimate means, the ultimate rule, of shared human life...

...Ethics, economics, and right all lead to this conclusion...

...We should not rely overmuch on passing laws...

...I wish only to bring the socialist movement back to its first principles, to its historical and psychological origins, and to demonstrate that socialism, in the last analysis, is a philosophy of liberty...

...More than a system of political mechanics, it is intended to be a sort of pact of civility to which men of all faiths bind themselves in order to salvage the attributes of their own humanity out of the struggle...

...it is that the socialists accept that the democratic method and the liberal climate constitute such a fundamental conquest of modern civilization that they will have to be respected even, and especially, when there is a stable socialist majority at the helm of the government, even when the essential points of the reform program are on the way to being realized...

...on the contrary it is doing no more than bring to completion an age-old task that was begun at the beginning of human society...

...The bourgeoisie has won...

...By now there are numerous socialists who concede that the goal, or rather a goal, an intermediate stage, can be set only in very general terms, and that what has to be done is to adapt to circumstances and to a world in continuous, vertiginous transformation...

...It will be if we want it and if the masses want it, through a conscious creative effort...

...On the political level, it can be defined as a complex of rules of the game that all the parties in contention commit themselves to respect, rules intended to ensure the peaceful coexistence of citizens, social classes, and states...

...The notion of an industrial, commercial, and agricultural state has grown faint, except when the discussion turns to essential public services...

...It is no longer driven by a restless urge for liberty and progress to surpass the gains it has already made...

...it means that liberty comes into the life of poor people...

...The subsequent ferocity of the wars of religion, in which men slaughtered one another in the name of opposing faiths and opposing dogmas, was the matrix of the notion of liberty of religious conscience, which blossomed as a flower does amid ruins...

...In the abstract, this is how matters stand...

...in this critical demon that obliges one continually to review one's position in the light of fresh experience...

...All over the world the bourgeoisies no longer defend free markets and are no longer necessarily liberal...

...On one condition, however: that the poor, the working class, and the socialist movement demand the transformation of bourgeois society inasmuch as they become able, thanks to both the theory to which they adhere and the capacities they possess, to make it really better...

...Everything else is blocked by the presence of material indigence...

...In sum, it appears to me that the quite justified reservations that, in the name of liberalism, might once have been advanced against the abstractness and the utopianism of the old socialist programs are on the way to being extinguished through the victory of common sense, experience, the practical lessons learned by the movement, and above all assumption of the responsibilities of government...

...For all that it is not susceptible of a rigid definition, it could be said to be crystallized in the principle of popular sovereignty, in the system of representative government, in respect for the rights of minorities (in practice, the right to opposition), in the solemn recognition of a few fundamental rights of the person that have been definitively accepted by the modern conscience (freedom of thought, freedom to meet, freedom of the press, freedom of organization, freedom to vote, and so on), and in the explicit disavowal of recourse to violence...

...the liberal function was in its hands when it broke open the rigid, frozen order of the feudal world and sowed the seeds of fecund life...

...Many eminent thinkers (I note the recent striking conversion of G.D.H...

...He does not delude himself that he possesses the secret of the future, does not think that he is the custodian of the ultimate, definitive truth about the social universe, and does not bow down before dogmas of any sort...

...to restrain competition, which is inevitable and indeed desirable, within tolerable limits...

...I have noted that the liberal position is distinguished by faith in liberty not only as an end, but also as a means...

...that it is necessary to measure ourselves against actual experience and hold on tight only to a few fixed points of reference, for the truth is that only out of movement, out of experience freely undertaken, will we receive any guidance for tomorrow...

...We have to conceive of socialism not as the result of the imposition of views by an enlightened minority, but as the result of people coming round to a belief in it out of a long sequence of positive experiences...

...Thus it is some consolation to observe that in recent years spiritual demands of this type have been finding expression, however hesitant, within the working class, thanks to the same syndicalist movement that had appeared deaf to all questions except those involving hours of work and wage levels...

...Liberalism does not exclude violence, but it transforms it into strength by giving it the sanction of morality and right...

...With its dogmatic attachment to the principles of economic libertarianism (private property, rights of inheritance, full freedom of initiative in every field, with the state as the organ responsible for internal policing and external defense), it has managed to shackle the dynamic spirit of liberalism to the transitory pattern of a particular social system...

...It arbitrarily extends its historical experience to the proletariat and makes the absurd claim that the problem of liberty presents itself in the same terms for all social classes...

...The task of the proletariat is to bear higher and farther the torch that was passed on to it, in the dramatic turmoil of history, by the classes that came before...

...Bourgeois liberalism attempts to halt the historical process at its present stage, to perpetuate its own commanding position, to transform into a privilege what was once a right deriving from its undeniable pioneering work...

...The latter reached a high point with the publication of the Encyclopedie and finally achieved its political triumph with the revolution of 1789 and the accompanying Declaration of the Rights of Man...

...The day will come when this word, this attribute, will be claimed with proud selfawareness by the socialist: that will be the day of his maturity, the day when he wins emancipation, at least in the domain of the spiritual...

...Cole, one of the most perceptive British socialists) are beginning to adopt the view that for some branches of industry the most important problem is democratizing the command structure of the factories and the control of their technical and social management in the interests of the collectivity...

...And the sense of servitude is sharpened by bitterness and irony the moment the virtual slave becomes aware of his legal liberty and of the obstacles that society places in the way of his actually gaining it...

...In its battle against the dogmatism of the church and monarchical absolutism, against the privileges 118 • DISSENT Liberal Socialism of the nobility and clergy, against the dead realm of static, forced production, the bourgeoisie embodied, over a long sequence of centuries, the progressive impetus of the whole society...

...we only need to be faithful to a few fundamental directives...

...No party or movement is as strong as one that recognizes the right of its adversaries to exist and that declares that on the day of its own victory it will not cast aside the spirit of the liberal method that enabled it to grow from a small and weak minority into a position of dominance...

...In the words of Giuseppe Saragat, one of the most thoughtful representatives of the new Italian socialism, "The proletariat is not trying to remake history from its inception...

...In dealing with society, the only people who smash things are those who know how to build them...

...you can pass all the laws you like, but if they do not validate an objective state of affairs that is actually coming about and are not based on actual behavior, too often they turn out to be fruitless efforts...

...it is a mere phantasm...

...As a bond prior to any political tendency, it requires of those who enter into it faith in reason, sacred respect for mankind, the recognition that each citizen enjoys an infrangible sphere of autonomy, and the rooted conviction that nothing strong and lasting is built with brute force, even when it is employed in the service of the fine ideals...

...On the contrary...

...Sabotage on the part of a single player in the game is enough to prevent the method from functioning properly...

...No faith is more solid than one in which the believer is not afraid of the criticism of his adversaries, which he seeks out as both a stimulus and a boundary...

...In the name of liberty they speak of socialization, the abolition, that is, of private ownership of the means of production and exchange...

...It was born of modern critical thought and made its first mark on history at the time of the Reformation...

...Whoever adopts this cause as his own can act only in the spirit of liberalism and in the practice of socialism...

...it sees history as a perpetual flux, an eternal becoming and overcoming, and nothing is more contrary to its essence than stasis, immobility, categorical certainty, and faith in the possession of absolute, definitive truths, of the kind that now characterize the bourgeois liberals...

...The idea of liberty is not born with the proletariat but with mankind, with the first ray of spiritual self-awareness in man...

...The liberal socialist, faithful to the great lesson arising out of modern critical thought, does not believe that it can be scientifically and rationally shown that socialism's empirical solutions are the best ones, nor even in the historical necessity of the advent of a socialist society...

...Liberty is a conquest, a self-conquest, which is preserved only through the continual exercise of one's faculties and individual autonomies...

...mankind freed at last from material enslavement...

...Socialism can no longer limit itself to reforming the external aspects of social life...

...in this faith in the supreme values of the spirit and the marvelous animating force of liberty, end and means, climate and lever, lies the state of mind of a socialist who has sailed away from Marxist seas and touched land on the shores of liberalism...

...Liberty is also the means in the sense that the final stage cannot be bestowed or imposed...

...For liberalism, and hence for socialism, observance of the liberal method, that is, the democratic method, of entering the political contest is fundamental...

...If the choice is between an intermediate grade of liberty that applies to the whole collectivity and an unbounded liberty furnished to a few at the expense of the many, an intermediate liberty is better, a hundred times better...

...to permit the various parties to succeed to power in turn...

...But from that it follows that any violence used by the others to keep that individual player in line would be fully legitimate...

...Any emancipation aimed solely at reducing or eliminating oppression from the social environment, any liberty that was purely negative, unaccompanied by a reaffirmation of the eternal values of the spirit, would mean liberation from one kind of slavery in the name of another kind...

...Indigence is the great enemy, no more or less than privileged wealth...

...That is no longer true...

...Either emancipation will be total—body and soul—or it will not occur...

...it has to be earned through hard personal struggle, as the generations succeed one another in time...

...Catholics and Protestants, incapable of exterminating each other, agreed to a truce and WINTER • 1994 • 117 Liberal Socialism acknowledged the right of all individuals to profess the cult that each preferred...

...Bourgeois liberalism, so called, has forged a closed and rigid system propped up by the array of economic, juridical, and social principles that are synthesized in the expression "capitalist bourgeois state...

...These forms might include municipal management, cooperative management, guild management, management by trust, mixed management in which the general interest is incorporated into particular interests, individual and, accordingly, family management as tradition, technology, and the environment dictate, and so on...

...The ever-more insistent demand for worker control, for a share in the management of the factory, for the constitutionalization of the factory regime, the battles over issues of principle and dignity, all these things reveal the rise of a new self-respect in the average worker, who is no longer content with material improvements alone but intends to assert his autonomous personality both inside and outside the factory, not only as a citizen but also as a producer...

...it has captured the dominating heights, but as it triumphs, its revolutionary function and its progressive ferment fade away...

...In any case, the time when bourgeois politics and liberal, free-market politics were one and the same has passed...

...It is clear, for example, that while the conquest of political liberty constituted for the bourgeoisie the sublimation and fulfillment of its own power, which had already come to dominate the economic and cultural sectors, the demand by the proletariat for political liberty and the achievement of it signified no more than the commencement of the struggle for economic emancipation, since it still had no real influence on the control centers of economic life...

...He is a socialist because of a whole ensemble of principles and experiences and because of convictions formed in the study of social phenomena...

...Now the socialist contends that when socialism was born, modern society was full of individuals in this situation...

...Before ending this brief essay on liberal socialism I would like to indicate summarily what appears to me to be, in outline, the mental structures and subjective attitudes of the liberal socialist...

...The liberal method of taking part in .Ithe political contest cannot be qualified...

...Like all refined instruments, it naturally implies a high degree of civilization...

...Socialism says: the abstract recognition of liberty of conscience and political freedoms for all, though it may represent an essential moment in the development of political theory, is a thing of very limited value when the majority of men, forced to live as a result of circumstances of birth and environment in moral and material poverty, are left without the possibility of appreciating its significance and taking any actual advantage of it...

...Free in law, he is in fact a slave...

...Let us not even dwell on the problem of human happiness...

...What really counts in the last analysis is the process of raising the masses and reforming social relations on the basis of a principle of justice that harmonizes with respect for the liberty of individuals and groups...

...Liberalism and socialism, rather than opposing one another in the manner depicted in outdated polemics, are connected by an inner bond...

...this step too is inevitable, but it will require a long period of inculcation in the masses...

...Even in the most progressive and routinized areas, in which by now the possibility and the utility of socialization is evident, care is taken to state that in any event it can be implemented not at a stroke, but only gradually, in slow stages, with an adequate corollary of experience and capacity...

...The word "liberalism" unfortunately has been used to smuggle so many different kinds of merchandise and has been so much the preserve of the bourgeoisie in the past, that today a socialist has difficulty bringing himself to use it...

...Indeed, viewing the matter with a cold eye, he might even admit as a hypothesis that the forces of privilege, injustice, and the opposition of the many in the interest of the few might continue to prevail...

...Liberty without the accompaniment and support of a minimum of economic autonomy, without emancipation from the grip of pressing material necessity, does not exist for the individual...

...The socialist movement is, in consequence, the objective heir of liberalism: it carries this dynamic idea of liberty forward through the vicissitudes of history toward its actualization...

...The goal is to arrive at a condition of social life in which each individual is certain of being able to develop his own personality fully...

...It is no longer enough to demonstrate on paper that socialist society is more just and rational...

...One is not born free...

...In conclusion, if I were asked to illustrate briefly the practical consequences of the observations made in the course of this essay, I would put the matter as follows...

...To be hungry is to be morally deaf, and moralistic appeals translate fatally into sermonizing...

...it is no longer abetted by a universal ideal that transcends its class interests, as in 1789...

...It has to be made to work in practice, and to do that abilities are necessary, and abilities cannot be improvised, nor is it enough that they are present in tiny minorities...

...It bears as its fundamental premise the principle that the free conviction of the majority, just as it is the best way to arrive at truth, is also the best means of guaranteeing social progress and protecting liberty...

...For example, violence that the proletariat was forced to employ if it found itself under attack by reactionary forces following a great election victory that prepared the way for it to come to power, would be totally justified and completely liberal violence...

...The bourgeoisie was, at one time, the standard-bearer of this idea of liberty...

...he is a believer, even though he opposes all dogmatic pronouncements, and an optimist, even though his conception of life is virile and dramatic...

...The socialists too will have to commit themselves to respecting the rights of dissenting minorities and the right of opposition, no matter what the circumstances...

...The events of the war and of the postwar period, especially in Russia, have led to the abandonment of the old centralizing, collectivist program that made the state the administrator and universal controller of the rights and liberties of all...

...At this point the prevailing tendency in the socialist camp is in favor of forms of management that are as autonomous as possible, untrammeled and suited to the various types of enterprise, forms that take into account the whole gamut of different needs...

...In our age the liberal idea has revealed its tendency to structure every aspect and every part of social life, especially the economic sphere...

...But step by step, as economic circumstances get better (and they have already been greatly improved), as the working class proceeds to affirm itself politically and the state offers an opening to new demands, as the bourgeoisie, or at least its most progressive components, no longer opposes with its traditional stubbornness the process of proletarian emancipation, that of culture and morality must come to the top of the agenda, for otherwise the movement will lose its way and grow corrupt...

...It still harks back to the old principles of the French Revolution, but those principles have the appearance of being crystallized, embalmed, bereft of their inner significance...

...and life presents only one aspect to him, gives him only one illusion to pursue: material satisfaction...

...In sum, the proletariat can rightly say that the legacy of the liberal function has passed to it...

...Our task must lie in the development of these initial, obscure intuitions of the proletarian soul, in revealing the great importance they have for any revision of the theoretical groundwork of the socialist movement...

...Liberalism conceives of liberty not as a fact of nature, but as becoming, as development...

...We have to make it clear that for a revolution to bear fruit, it is not enough to capture the centers of command, that we have to proceed from the bottom up, not the other way around...

...Even the idea of socialization is no longer advanced in purely utilitarian terms of enhanced productivity...

...We have to help the proletariat to come to know itself, showing it the real reasons and the effective remedies for -the painful state of psychological and social inferiority in which it finds itself, and we have to formulate the results of this process of collective introspection in concrete political terms...

...His motto is: Socialism will be, but it might not be...

...Until now socialist action has had a predominantly economic slant...

...it obstructs the entry of militant new social forces onto the stage of history...

...Indeed, I would go farther: no socialist any longer makes any attempt to defend a priori, in general terms, the prescription that property must be socialized...

...And one stays free by retaining an active and vigilant sense of one's autonomy, by constantly exercising one's freedoms...

...Action is his true standard...

...The liberal method intends peoples and social classes, like individuals, to administer their affairs by using their own capacities, without coercion or paternalistic intervention...

...struggles, social classes, and wars abolished automatically...

...The permanent attainment of a degree of relative well-being is a conditio sine qua non...

...This is the method that in its essence is utterly permeated with the principle of liberty...

...At that point there will be one last step for the socialists to take in order to enter the logic and spirit of liberalism...

...They want social life to be guided not by the egoistic criterion of personal utility but by the social criterion, the criterion of the collective good...

...No one any longer believes, as he once did, that the simple fact of expropriation, by which productive enterprises are transferred into the hands of the collectivity, will bring about an apocalyptic transformation— with levels of production and wealth multiplied...

...Liberty as a principle then spread to the sphere of cultural life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the influence of scientific progress and as a result of the economic and intellectual ascendancy of the bourgeoisie...

...We have to 122 • DISSENT Liberal Socialism insist that an ideal of autonomy and liberty should increasingly be the beacon of the socialist movement...

...Faith in liberty is at the same time a declaration of faith in man, in his unlimited perfectibility, in his capacity for self-determination, in his innate sense of justice...

...Even the new directions that modern production—rationalized, mechanized, technocratic—is taking as it sacrifices the human personality of the worker are forcing socialists to assume a liberal function in the quite traditional sense of the term...

...rather, it is itself the product of civilization...

...but he is a socialist above all out of faith, sentiment, active attachment—this is the point, the real criterion—to the cause of the poor and the oppressed...

...they now seem to be in contradiction to the spirit that inspired those who proclaimed these very principles in a rush of generous enthusiasm...

...Liberalism is the ideal force of inspiration, and socialism is the practical force of realization...

...A critique of the traditional conception of centralized, collectivist socialism now being heard from within the ranks of socialism documents the existence of new demands for autonomy and liberty...

...Routine deference to a program that is now a hundred years old is simply irrelevant in too many respects...

...Their long opposition has made the socialists too accustomed to conceiving of socialism in polemical terms and in terms of pure force: bourgeois society is rotten, bourgeois society is full of discord, vice, and injustice, so let us smash it...

...and brotherhood, justice, and peace triumphant...

...in other words, it does not understand that political and social liberty by themselves are incapable of bringing about liberalism's true goal...

...Bourgeois liberalism is powerless to understand the problem posed by the socialist movement...

...Probably it had to be like that, since it would be utterly utopian to prate about morality, spiritual autonomy, duty, support and respect for the democratic method to someone living in indigence and barely able to satisfy the elementary demands of subsistence through exhausting and degrading labor...

...In this doubt, in this virile relativism that gives a powerful impulse to action and wishes to leave plenty of room for human will in history...

...But I do not wish to propose a new party terminology here...

...Its great pedagogical virtue consists in making sure that there exists a climate that compels all men to exercise their highest faculties, in putting in place institutions that induce them to participate actively in social life...

...and individuals in this situation still compose a large segment of the working class in the capitalist world today, deprived as they are of any control over the tools with which they work, of any share in the process of decision making that guides production, of any sense of dignity and responsibility in the workplace— dignity and responsibility, the first steps on the ladder leading from slavery to liberty...

...A true liberal is anything but a skeptic...

...In the name of liberty, and for the purpose of ensuring its effective possession by all men and not just a privileged minority, socialists postulate the end of bourgeois privilege and the effective extension of the liberties of the bourgeoisie to all...

...We have to have more faith in our own powers, to work, experiment, and struggle without prerequisites and excessively rigid programs...