A Symposium
Barkan, Joanne
Forty years after the founding of Dissent, we asked some editors and contributors, How much of what we argued for then would we argue for now? The negative utopia of Soviet communism, for so long...
...I can almost hear Nelson Denoon railing again: your vision is more than a bibelot but hardly a blueprint...
...The first half of the essay criticizes the Marxist movement for its vague and static vision of socialism...
...The non-Denoonian types in our circle are hollering now...
...Today we'd agree with most of these broad strokes, and we'd recognize them as an WINTER • 1994 • 7 The Lett After Forty Years uncompromising refusal of this century's orthodox socialist credo...
...For example, the authors assumed, as did many thinkers in the 1950s, that technology would probably reduce work hours dramatically...
...But to his creator, and to all who share similar interests, just one word: subscribe...
...Give me something on capital markets and interest rate differentials...
...rather, we began surveying systematically the territory staked out decades earlier...
...He shuddered to think of how few socialists there were who could define marginal utility...
...He's fixed forever where he belongs—in a superb novel...
...Dissent's contribution for four decades has been to link outrage and efforts in the present to a vision of the future...
...Dissent, they insist, has always had a broader, more compelling purpose than polishing up the socialist vision...
...Dissent didn't change course...
...This withering away of work goes hand in hand with an equally mistaken but farther reaching idea: the end of scarcity...
...At first glance, this debate looks like a departure from Dissent's early stance...
...we would protest with less hope...
...I'd give him the last ten years of Dissent...
...Joanne Barkan Midway through Norman Rush's awardwinning novel Mating, a renowned leftist sociologist named Nelson Denoon rails against those who turn socialism into "an orientation or aesthetic or feeling...
...Chalking up more failures than success stories, the real world invited radicals to delve deeper...
...I would guess that model-making grew more appealing in the early 1980s when it became somewhat less abstract...
...In reality, Dissent had no epigraph, no manifesto, but it did run an article in 1954 called "Images of Socialism" in which Irving Howe and Lewis Coser wrote: " 'God,' said Tolstoy, 'is the name of my desire.' . . . we should like to twist Tolstoy's remark to our own ends: socialism is the name of our desire ." Everything—or almost everything—is fair game for the fiction writer, so I'd never quibble with the novelist's fanciful riff on Dissent's history...
...So we argued then, and so we argue now...
...Socialism was becoming a bibelot...
...not much state ownership...
...In "Images of Socialism," economic efficiency is needed only initially, to establish material well-being...
...therefore the quality of leisure, rather than the quantity of work, would constitute a human problem...
...As for Nelson Denoon, he will never change his mind about Dissent...
...Are we now the advocates only of an American version of social democratic reformism, reduced to piecemeal opponents of the liberal status quo, urging only that things be made a little more democratic...
...Keeping in mind that only some Dissenters consider themselves socialists, has "our" vision of socialism evolved over four decades...
...In "Images of Socialism," didn't the authors claim, "Blueprints, elaborate schemes do not interest us...
...These articles map out, often in detail, how the institutions and mechanisms of a market socialism might work, or not work...
...Give me marginal utility...
...Denoon's socialist magazine is, of course, Dissent...
...Obsessing to his lover over dinner one evening, Denoon remembers an offending magazine: There was a socialist magazine whose charter issue had the epigraph Socialism is the name of my desire, from Tolstoy, over its manifesto...
...They had no idea what they were revealing about themselves, Denoon said...
...The negative utopia of Soviet communism, for so long our necessary obsession and albatross, is gone...
...But as a moderate Denoonian, I would add this: without an image of a better world, without some working drawings for a radically expanded democracy, we would find the labyrinth of partial reform morally bewildering...
...But we'd also want to repaint a few parts of the picture...
...As left-wing realists, we analyze and propose immediate reforms...
...And so on...
...pluralism and diversification of institutional functions in civil society as well as politics to combat bureaucracy and the concentration of authority...
...This better world would have its problems, some old, some new, but they would not derive from substantial inequalities or a lack of freedom...
...As left-wing opponents of the status quo, we agitate against abuses of power and wealth...
...He'd find a few dozen articles there that contribute to the contemporary debate on the economics of democratic socialism...
...Denoon pinpointed the place to start: "Images of Socialism" — which served for many years as a Dissent "agenda of concerns" (Howe's phrase...
...I want to know about risk diversification and allocative inefficiency...
...Didn't they call the effort to paint the face of socialism in detail "absurd...
...no economic plan of rigid specifications imposed from above...
...History does not end...
...I agree completely...
...Working Americans are putting in more hours per year than they did a few decades ago...
...And given what needs to be done here and around the globe, scarcity will remain a fundamental predicament...
...Has Dissent ever reduced socialism to a feeling, an aesthetic...
...But on our fortieth anniversary, I'd like to take up the Denoon character's general challenge...
...For Denoon socialism is about "concrete institutional propositions that could be shown to work or not work...
...None of this sounds plausible today...
...the second half sketches a more convincing image...
...Can we still project some kind of radical hope?—Ens...
...The proposals vary, but they all share this characteristic: a willingness to reexamine creatively traditional assumptions about socialized ownership and planning...
...There was Mondragon in Spain, workers' control in Yugoslavia, market-reform efforts in Eastern Europe and China, the Japanese keiretsu, additional decades of testimony on the Israeli kibbutz and the soviet-type plan, and so on...
...After that, we'd measure socialist success in terms of how much we could afford to disregard efficiency...
...In telegraphic form, 1954's socialism looked like this: a decentralized economy of mostly small cooperatives both cooperating with each other and competing...
...The amount and variety of data had increased...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
