A Symposium
Gitlin, Todd
The crash of communism coincides with a loss of faith and face on the part of social democracy. Where social democrats remain in power, as in Spain and Norway, they are reduced to trimming the...
...I understand the doubt, but do not find it decisive...
...At the end of the twentieth century, we're all properly chastened—as capitalists, liberals, and conservatives should also be...
...Cushions are no small achievement— we could do with plenty more in America...
...Where social democrats remain in power, as in Spain and Norway, they are reduced to trimming the public sector—for some good reasons and many bad...
...What follows, I think, is that to get social democracy, socialists have to stand for more than "piecemeal [opposition] to the . . . status quo...
...factories can be moved somewhat more slowly but quite surely...
...Could it be that, when the marketeering mentality is so strong, to get serviceable cushions we have to aspire to far more than that—while also remembering, as the sun goes down and deals need to be made, that half a cushion is better than none...
...The practical reason is that if reforms are not animated by a larger hope, they wither...
...No longer the crusading champions of the one-tenth or more of the population who are jobless, they are reconciling themselves to their new role: cushions...
...The hope I speak of is the hope that human potentials for both cooperativeness and freedom can be realized by more than a tiny fraction of humanity...
...In this setting, one commonly hears that an attachment to "the socialist idea" is sheer sentimentality...
...It means that even when we acknowledge the goods of which markets are capable, we refuse to relinquish our belief in the social bonds that unbridled markets destroy...
...Radical enough...
...For the 12 • DISSENT The Lett After Forty Years foreseeable future, to paraphrase Sartre, social democracy is the left's horizon...
...The moral reason to renew the old commitment is to further equality and democracy— to a degree that neither liberals nor most social democrats approve...
...From this discrepancy follows the weakness of American labor, and the decline of prospects for even the most modest of social democratic agendas...
...Where social democracy tries to take power in one country, as in the France of 1981, capital easily goes on strike, and the parliamentary road to significant reform washes out...
...Socialism is no longer a design, but a disposition: a spirit with which we wish to animate political life, and from whose absence political life suffers...
...This means that we try to surpass single-issue agendas...
...but labor scarcely moves at all, except in the form of migration—and Western laborers are not the ones doing the migrating...
...The fundamental economic feature of the world today, as I understand it, is the discrepancy between the mobility of capital and the relative immobility of labor...
...It means that equity matters to us...
...Still, the decline in the ambition of the actually existing left does raise the question: how do we even get cushions...
...But of course it does not follow that a better, more accessible road lies around the bend...
...In an age of thermonuclear bombs, mass famine, and greenhouse effects, that should be maximal enough...
...If socialism is "the name of our desire" but we do not know what this socialism amounts to or how we would recognize it if it were here, then just what does our desire name...
...And this radical hope has to be coupled with another: that human society should endure...
...Investment capital can move at the speed of light, from stock market to stock market...
...What follows, however, is not necessarily grousing, nor the bitter-end conclusion of Durkheim that socialism is only a cry of pain...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
