Socialism as Problem and Ideal Socialism and Social Classes
Philip, André
Socialism as Problem and Ideal The articles grouped together in the following section were all written independently of each other. We have brought them together, not to create facile...
...In the colonies especially he easily becomes a petty bourgeois who defends his privileges against the native laboring masses...
...To the extent that he works on a piece-rate basis, the semi-skilled worker has improved his living standard considerably...
...And since group frontiers shift from one country or region or period to another, it is hardly possible to predict what will be the attitude of this or that group...
...Certain families belong to the dominant classes without being proprietors at all and without having any property except house furnishings or a place in the country...
...Every man becomes a part of a mass to the extent that his attitude is a passive one...
...These are the workers who, with a docile violence, rally to Communism or fascism, according to the times...
...Here again we are confronted with very complex phenomena which allow of diverse and often contradictory kinds of conflicts...
...But analysis of a social situation cannot, by itself, lead to the elaboration of a doctrine, or even to the definition of a principle of action...
...Socialism is not the automatic expression of the interests of one group, whatever the group...
...The example of the USSR, especially, demonstrates how in a regime where all property has been attached by the state, social groups are gradually re-established along the lines of differences in public functions and incomes attached to particular jobs...
...For as certain industries come to be nationalized, the role and influence of the smaller enterprises in what remains of the private sector have become more significant...
...The fundamental social problem has today become the distribution of power among social groups...
...They continue to 21 be deeply influenced by Catholicism...
...In short, we find here a dispensable, dissociated man who has not yet succeeded in making new social ties...
...Indeed, the more he finds himself driven toward the proletariat, the more desperately does the man of this old middle class resist proletarianization...
...Propaganda, then, allows the individual in the mass to beguile himself, to supplant a conscious choice of attitudes with external pressures in the form of effective excitation...
...So he devotes himself to the highest possible output in 25 order to raise his standard of living and thus ape the petty bourgeois life which he sees all about him...
...it is a political choice in the name of a universal moral ideal which must be found elsewhere than in analysis of the social fact...
...Finally, the mass is related to the disappearance of the general notion of a social community, a notion that can offer a goal which might unify men...
...Often there is less difference between a skilled worker of this kind and a technical manager than between a skilled worker and one who merely performs a routine specialized operation...
...More often than not, the ethics of the group are inferior to the ethics of the individual...
...But at the same time he is becoming more and more conservative in defense of his own interests against the unskilled workers...
...The individual is able to transfer to other groups his powers of hate and vengeance...
...a. Group antagonisms today are much less closely related to wealth than to income...
...he sees no way to advance within the plant hierarchy...
...1) Despite the diverse factors that we have observed, there still remains no less a social conflict than ever, still remains the fundamental problem of the structure of society...
...then skilled workers will again become the core of a working class whose function will be to oversee, adapt, and repair automatically operating machines...
...And there is a strong tendency toward an alliance between such rural elements and the various groups of organized labor...
...From this situation evolve two consequences: a. In today's world the group arrayed against other groups becomes its own goal, its own unique measure of reality, rejecting even the idea of intelligence or rationality, rejecting, in other words, any will to coordinate and synthesize values...
...and the division of the working class into a complex of autonomous groups...
...Indeed, with the progress of automation, we can foresee the day when work which today is semiautomatic will become totally mechanized...
...Further, the small entrepreneurs can barely see further than their own businesses or think about general problems...
...Often this new employee class will make common cause with the old middle class and with the liberal professions, especially in protecting its tax exemptions...
...in defending their immediate interests, they will gradually become aware of the necessity for the revolution...
...But often such a worker commits his dream of escape to some non-political sphere...
...Thus there has grown up in France the myth of the middle classes, a myth which seeks to establish between the independents and top salaried people a group solidarity whereby, actually, the interests of the salaried persons are often sacrificed to those of the small capitalists...
...Thus the French Socialist party includes a large number of tradesmen, artisans, entrepreneurs, and small businessmen who started life as workers in large industries...
...He is interested in his work and management must respect his independence...
...With the expansion of corporations and the increasing number of stockholders, the directors of large enterprises have taken on an increasing independence...
...The fact is that we must take account of a growing process of social differentiation which characterizes our society and of its inevitable psychological and political consequences...
...1) Clearly there is an intergroup mobility which will go on increasing with industrial advances...
...According to this theory, the achievement of socialism seems to be a development which, without appealing to justice, results simply from the inexorable laws of history...
...It is this intermediary status that helps explain the skilled worker's ambivalent attitude...
...This evolution is far less advanced in the European countries than in the United States, for in Europe the educational system still operates as a social barrier, setting classes against one another...
...We have brought them together, not to create facile juxtapositions or to enforce any particular stress within socialist opinion, but simply because they seem to us to contribute opinion and information that our readers may find helpful in rethinking political problems...
...These modes are related to consumption, particularly conspicuous consumption which arouses the antagonism of the majority of the population and feeds social conflict...
...In countries like Russia where such concentration has been violently imposed by the state, the policy has been a failure and has resulted in a sharp decline in agricultural production...
...Instead of two polarized classes we find a multitude of groups which have divergent interests and have thus lost a consensus of social value...
...At the bottom levels, the living standard of this group is generally no higher than that of the working class...
...These people welcome technological progress, but they have no confidence in state intervention...
...What is symptomatic at present is that when a man of the left is sent to the colonies and has command of a group of human beings, he easily becomes a racist, an imperialist, and a nationalist...
...They have no, movement of their own...
...Whatever the economic difficulties resulting from the meagerness of their holdings, the peasants cling to the soil, and no one has been able to demonstrate that there is anywhere a natural tendency toward concentration of rural properties...
...Or is it the manifestation of a desire for justice and liberty, assuming different forms throughout history but seeking through this diversity of forms a constant moral ideal...
...He is one of an elite which in the past was in the vanguard of social and political battles...
...An office worker's budget is about the same as a worker's, but its composition is more nearly like that found in the higher social classes...
...Today it is again he whom we find in all countries at the top of trade-union organizations...
...The Break-Up of the Management Class Now we come to two new elements: a. First, there is the new independent middle class, in manufacturing and trade, which represents, not modes of production threatened by industrial progress, but new modes of production which are tied to the expansion of large industry...
...But his road is blocked...
...a. In the first place there are the farmers, small land-owning peasants...
...he thus acquires a domineering mentality...
...They are inevitable, as a consequence of technological progress...
...A fact cannot be turned into a value...
...With certain peasants, the more revolutionary they are in their speech, the more conservative and anachronistic they are in their methods of farming...
...The man who at the factory fears the boss, will away from work fear the party...
...it is not possible to generalize on the subject without undertaking, in every country, a profound sociological study which would investigate each group at once in its work circumstances, its social environment, and its historical traditions...
...c. But one group that is becoming more and more important is that of the white-collar workers and office holders, that is, the salaried middle class, which now includes more than a third of all workers and which seems to be constantly increasing...
...In a large number of industries, traditional craftsmen are thus threatened...
...These Marxist formulations, I would contend, no longer conform to the realities of advanced industrial societies...
...In the same way that on the national plane, patriotism is found in its most aggravated form at the frontiers, it is at the frontiers of the social plane that patriotism is also most aggravated, and on the edges of social groups are to be found the most virulent conflicts and the greatest bitterness...
...The factory is simply the place where, without making any sense out of it, he passively carries out tasks and orders so that he can make a living...
...Today we no longer have a generalized conception of the oneness of civilization capable of orienting and inspiring men...
...These phenomena are related to the evolution of saving in the last several years...
...to the Italian journal Tempo Presente for Silone's article...
...The term "mass" was originally used to designate a crowd gathered momentarily...
...In France this class of small and medium-sized businessmen is becoming more important...
...In every group, association, or political party, the overt or implicit interest of the leader is toward maintaining existing structures, whereas the interest of the mass of followers is toward changing them...
...It is in this group that we find the strongest resistance to pan-European ideas, to grasping an awareness of the inevitable evolution of the old colonies...
...Anyone reading these articles will no doubt sharply disagree with some of them...
...There are only battling groups, each defending its private, often variable, interests, with no common standard that would allow us to judge them and order them by relative importance...
...b. But the majority of workers are still semi-skilled or unskilled laborers who are actually the product of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution...
...While the individual's relations are with those near to him and he can thus be made responsible for the direct consequences of his actions, intergroup relations are with those who are distant, so that the consequences of actions cannot be known, except by a minority of leaders...
...Perhaps here the progress of automation will lead to concentrating responsible judgment in a minority and pushing the majority into the position of the worker who executes one simple operation and submits to an increasing insecurity in his job...
...The social origin of this group has also changed...
...It may even be suggested that automation will tend toward the same end...
...30 He is subjected to the impulses of fashion, to the propaganda of press and radio, and it is not by chance that this massification has been particularly realized in the United States...
...All that matters is that the idea of socialism, rescued from the deadlines of ritual incantation, should be regarded as a significant problem and a living ideal...
...And as for his work itself, it is almost without interest...
...At the same time he is completely without security, for with any fluctuation in production he may be laid off...
...the breakup of the management class...
...In fact they are not able to believe in democracy while in their everyday lives they experience a reality which is the exact opposite of democracy...
...On the other hand, in the Western countries the agricultural system is slowly being organized into an increasing number of cooperatives...
...One small step up the salary scale, however, and a strong similarity with the middle class can be found: a wish to move closer to the executive layer, which is at once admired and envied, a longing for independence, and a resistance to proletarianization, here with a rightist orientation...
...EDITORS] 20 1) History is motored by the class struggle...
...Having received his land from the French Revolution, he remains faithful to its spirit...
...Technological progress brings about competition which gradually eliminates outmoded economic forms...
...b. Income differences are themselves related to power differences...
...Frequently a good deal of its work is monotonous and uninteresting, comparable in this to the work of unskilled workers...
...but disoriented and disillusioned, he craves little more than the most mediocre pleasures...
...But I wish to make several observations at this point...
...Insofar as the group is a large one, each individual can embody in it his pride, his wish to see himself at the center of the world...
...Despite the accomplishments that have been made in assuring free primary education, the lower social strata are kept in an inferior position because they have not had sufficient opportunity for intellectual development...
...In the Marxist system, the division into two classes whose antagonism would increase to the ultimate point of revolution made it possible to offer to one of these classes, the workers, a total vision of the world and a myth of social transformation which renewed their hopes and aroused them to revolt...
...His class consciousness is simply a directed resentment...
...At the present time some Eastern European countries, following the example of Yugoslavia, are allowing a return of the small landed peasant...
...they 28 adapt quite easily to the petty bourgeois state of mind...
...Their ideal is to work hard, earn a lot, and remain independent...
...This man is likely to be neither a responsible trade unionist nor a palitical militant...
...he leaves activism to others, himself only following and allowing himself from one moment to the next to be seduced by the extreme right or the extreme left...
...This is so especially when he has been betrayed politically and has lost the hope of a complete change in his working conditions...
...The workers will move toward socialism because they can't help doing so...
...it is not a considered expression of working-class life but an evasion of the reality to which he must submit...
...c. In conclusion it very much appears that the world of today does not correspond at all to the analysis Marx made in the mid-nineteenth century and that working-class unity is at this moment no more than a romantic illusion...
...2) The result of these complications is that in the world of today we no longer find the simple class differentiation that Marx observed, but rather a host of groups, each with its private interests and each in opposition to its neighboring group...
...More and more, higher incomes are being spent in the pursuit of a higher living standard...
...living quarters impose a serious barrier between classes...
...One might say, very roughly, that a tendency toward violent extremism, fascism or Communism, is to be found among all those whose relations to their work is a passive one: unskilled workers, white-collar workers, old middle class, backward peasantry...
...But once we go up the social ladder another step and reach the more satisfied white-collar worker, we find a group that is more likely to be attracted by democratic socialism...
...But the same is not true of workers who are interested in their work and who have a chance to rise socially...
...Today we know that physical closeness is not a necessary attribute of a mass...
...the profit of the enterprise remains the sign of their success, but their aim is production per se, the efficient performance of a task...
...Taxes and the spread of social security have reduced incentives for individual saving...
...this very modesty, it may be suggested, constitutes a virtue...
...and the man who has political power does not succeed in our time in fully expressing it in the economic and social spheres...
...2) Class structure is dependent on the organization of the owner ship of the means of production...
...In passing off his interests and his passions as the expression of universal values, man finds a way to polish his pride...
...The tenant, on the other hand, having at his disposal a medium-sized piece of land which is often superior to the small landholder's, can always hope to rent additional acreage and thus move up the social ladder...
...But he carries over into his political life his factory-learned reflexes, his habit of not thinking, of merely submitting to orders...
...Nevertheless, at the present time class mobility appears to be increasing, even sometimes disquietingly so: the elite worker who succeeds in getting a higher salary and acquiring professional competence usually tries, not to move up to the top factory jobs, but to leave the factory and become a craftsman, tradesman, or a miniature industrialist...
...Actually the role of the stockholder is more and more blurred, and in performing their jobs the directors have to convince, not so much the stockholders on whom they are theoretically dependent, as the engineers and workers with whom their daily work is conducted...
...they respect the old landowners, who still live in the country, and maintain toward them a kind of benevolent paternalism...
...Rather than modernize their technology, the small and medium-sized businessmen prefer to reduce production, take a higher markup on a small output, and maintain their living standard either by protecting themselves against competition through tariffs, or pricefixing agreements, or by cheating on taxes...
...Only a minority of the people own cars...
...and we find certain common characteristics, a certain mutual understanding among the leaders of the various antagonistic groups, who learn to respect and understand one another, somewhat as the officers of opposing armies feel toward one another a quasi-professional solidarity...
...5) Furthermore, the pauperization of the masses and social inequal ity are continuously increasing, so that the struggle between the capitalist class and the proletariat becomes increasingly bitter and leads inevitably to revolution...
...The independent farmer, then, seems destined to survive in our society...
...The same is true for some of the small tradesmen...
...This is what has happened in the Scandinavian countries, where the peasants are members at once of the Socialist party and of their own autonomous agrarian party which works closely with the Socialists...
...The more the key industries are mechanized and the more the manual work they require is reduced, the larger a proportion of the population will turn to related trades, commercial ventures, and service industries...
...On the other hand, the small landowning farmer in France is most likely to vote left...
...26 IN OUR ANALYSIS of a series of sociological groups we find that each has peculiar characteristics while at the same time embodying contradictory elements...
...It is not in defense of this or that interest group that a man can be termed political...
...Perseverance of Pre-Capitalist Classes 1) The old precapitalist classes continue to exist and do not seem at this moment to he on the road to dissolution...
...Translated by MIRIAM WASSERMAN 31...
...Socialism and Social Classes I should like to review the fundamental ideas of Marx, which may he condensed in the following statements: [This article appears as a chapter in Le Socialisme Trahi...
...More and more the directors come to their position not through inheritance but through education and professional training...
...The Progressive Differentiation of the Working Class a. Modern industry needs a certain number of skilled workers, who, depending on the country and the industry, represent a quarter to a third of all wage earners...
...None of them pretends to provide a full-scale socialist theory or "complete" answers to the questions that are asked...
...they accept nationalization of key industries, which doesn't touch them personally, but are violently opposed to planning, price fixing, social security, and fiscal manipulation...
...First, there are the old craftsmen in the preindustrial sense of the term...
...he prepares the materials for executive decisions and puts them into effect...
...Our concern is not to undertake a theoretical analysis of socialism in the abstract but rather to understand what socialism should be for us, at this time, in our Western civilization...
...Desperately seeking a psychological compensation for his position of inferiority, he is the clear prey of fascist-like movements...
...The psychological attitude of this group is analogous to that of the barely skilled worker: disgust with work that is devoid of interest, passivity, malaise, and self-expression by escape fantasies...
...but instead of becoming sympathetic to the worker, the small businessman rapidly becomes his main adversary...
...In a group which commands but little power, this may be entirely in the hands of a minority of leaders...
...A group is always hard to unify and it can more easily be unified against than for something...
...most workers have to be satisfied with bicycles...
...Just as in the early stages of the industrial revolution displaced artisans destroyed machinery, so certain medium farmers, hard put to adapt to new technological methods, take an extreme leftist position at the same time that, by opposing technological progress, they are actually defending the status quo...
...the exaltation of his own self, the proclaiming of himself to be sole possessor of all intelligence and all virtue, to which he can't decently give way purely as an individual, he can easily find in his party, his class, his nation...
...Undoubtedly an economic interpretation of history can demonstrate the conditions for the realization of a political ideal, the obstacles that stand in the way of its achievement, and the lines of force that might favor it...
...It is in this kind of enterprise that labor relations are usually worst...
...Some of the articles by foreign contributors have been condensed to eliminate local or topical references...
...There is an imperceptible crossing over from the precapitalist to the new middle class, especially if the old craftsmen and tradesmen, instead of clinging to their outmoded techniques, group together in cooperative organizations so as to use contemporary techniques while at the same time preserving the individual's independence...
...Here we can observe an example of Marxist principle, but often expressed in a way that Marx himself could not possibly have foreseen...
...The Consequences The analysis of different social groups that we have just offered seems to suggest two consequences, one related to power and the other to massification...
...he aligns himself against the state, which levies taxes, against 22 large-scale finance, which oppresses him, against the banks, whose interest rates he considers too high, and above all against the workers and office holders whose security of employment he envies...
...The mass man, be he conformist or in revolt, awaits the savior from without...
...Here we see a professional aristocracy which, having been reduced in numbers and influence by the industrial advances of the nineteenth century, is today being reconsolidated...
...The mass has little chance to exist in a structured society whose individual members are integrated in clearly defined social classes, each of which has its own way of life, its own characteristic scale of values...
...This worker in effect continually skirts the edges of the bourgeois world...
...But at this moment the orientation of the younger French farmers, who seek technological innovation, is toward an organized economy based on cooperatives...
...On the whole it seems that the same man—qualified worker, tradesman, or lower civil servant—can have different psychological attitudes in different circumstances...
...The situation is somewhat different among certain elements, mainly craftsmen and tradesmen, who represent precapitalist enterprises outmoded by modern technology...
...Further, we are all of us far too little aware of the fact that right now 60 per cent of the human beings in the underdeveloped countries are starving, and that the gap between the condition of these people and our own, far from closing, widens from year to year...
...3) Political power is essentially a reflection of productive power...
...they are composed of receptive individuals subjected to external pressures...
...The existence of trade unions, which organize not only specialized workers but also professionals, white-collar workers and civil servants, has given these diverse groups the possibility of expressing themselves freely...
...Now, social groups play a more and more important role in the world of today...
...The members of this new middle class often come from the working class, and they remain—at least verbally—attached to the working class...
...These modern farmers, are aware that to market their products, they require both an enlarged European market and a large and prosperous working class...
...Social differentiation is manifested in three ways: the survival of the precapitalist classes...
...This situation can lead the specialized worker to one of two attitudes: I. He may have an escape fantasy whereby he invests in a political myth his hopes and profound desire for change...
...In machine-tool shops, for example, such workers construct new machines or new devices for old machines in accordance with engineers' designs...
...The economic development of the country 27 has more and more come to depend on the two factors of public, taxfinanced investment and self-financing, whereby business enterprises instead of declaring dividends to stockholders plow back enough profits to assure their expansion...
...d. This complex distribution of power creates extreme variations in psychological attitudes, and changing trends in these attitudes follow regional traditions and environmental conditions...
...4) The working class continuously increases its numbers, little by little absorbing the old middle classes as these are destroyed by tech nological progress...
...While the skilled worker strives to provide himself with a comfortable home and a little garden, the unskilled makes do with a motorbike, movies, football, dancing, and betting...
...Among the elite workers, office holders, middle-level office workers, and higher management personnel, there is a trend toward socialism...
...But the mass appears as soon as society begins to dissolve, as soon as differentiated classes begin to break up into a host of small groups which represent diverging interests and none of which is general enough or structured enough to sustain a value system...
...In traditionalist regions, such as western France, the tenant farmers, even though not proprietors, are often conservative...
...often he even turns to Communism, to the extent that, as the owner of a few acres with a meager yield, he sees his road blocked...
...Still, two phenomena characterize our epoch: mobility between groups and the progressive institutionalization of the conflicts bred among them...
...Hence I raise the question: Is socialism primarily the expression of clearly defined interests of a specific social class...
...These are men devoted above all to productivity...
...The group is hardly aware of the long-term effects of its actions, especially the effect of its passivity...
...translated and published here by permission of Librairie Plon and the author...
...In these circumstances property is playing a declining role in class differences, which come to be better defined by income differentials and especially by varying modes of spending income...
...it is the result of the behavior of the individual in the middle when he has been depersonalized, deprived of his relation to society and of the inspiration of a common ideal...
...they are useful, as a means for the social reintegration of isolated, desperate individuals...
...We are grateful for permission to repri-nt in the following instances: to the French journal Esprit for Paul Ricoeur's article...
...b. The consequence of this multiplicity of hostile groups, each expressing its own private collective interests, is the phenomenon of "massification" which characterizes our time...
...The skilled worker is often proud of his professional qualifications...
...The same individual who, in certain spheres of his activity, is ground down may have a great authority in his own particular group...
...But at the same time they are demigods in conflict, demigods whose relations are based on a more or less hidden violence...
...An ideology capable of defining socialism cannot emerge automatically from any of these groups...
...This will be achieved by their vanguard, who, during a transitional period, will set up a "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Recognizing the necessity of economic organization, the managers represent the most progressive element in economic life, and it is among them that we find today the majority of the innovators of pan-European institutions...
...b. On another side, in big businesses, control is gradually being divorced from ownership...
...c. The problem of power pertains not only to relations among groups but also to internal relations within each group...
...Socialism as Problem and Ideal The articles grouped together in the following section were all written independently of each other...
...Further, the egoism of the group is more difficult to overcome...
...Such masses allow no differentiation...
...That is quite as it should be, and exactly the way the editors feel too...
...In the West industrial power is distinguished from political power: the man who wields industrial power doesn't necessarily wield political power, even if he has great influence...
...2) Social conflicts are officially recognized and institutionalized...
...Whether or not they retain membership in a left-wing party, these 23 elements are actually oriented toward an obsolete policy of economic liberalism, and it can even happen that in a time of economic difficulties they will become pawns of a potential dictator...
...Because of the diversity of its elements, it is hard to define the character of this group...
...The general acceptance of collective bargaining tends to regulate conflicts in accordance with commonly agreed-upon rules...
...Class differences also continue to be expressed in external signs...
...He has an inner wish to take the initiative, to master 24 the machine rather than be mastered...
...The danger is, however, that, arrogant in the knowledge of their value and convinced of the need for a profound economic transformation, they will try to work for the people, but not with them, and will thus contribute to the formation of a technocratic regime which will require a strong discipline, a powerful executive, and a government with authoritarian leanings...
...Here then is a worker who is alert, organized, and responsible but has at the same time a tendency to establish himself in the existing system to the extent that this system is really receptive to his initiative and offers him a chance to rise on the social scale...
...But members of this group are distinguished from workers strictly defined by the fact that they manipulate not machines but human relations and that, in addition, they participate in the power of the managers...
...but in the case of the last named it is a technocratic, aristocratic socialism which could as well turn toward Communism or fascism...
...The individual is beginning to emerge from the masses...
...Andre Philip's publisher (see below...
...The individual, if he so wishes, can see the consequences of his actions...
...A great deal of discussion has centered on the question of whether the majority of the people in Hitler Germany knew what went on in the concentration camps...
...Observations made recently both in Austria and in Great Britain demonstrate a growing trend toward the disintegration of this part of the working class and toward the development of attitudes which are a-collective, if not a-social...
...A mass is not a special social layer...
...It seems that they really were unaware, just as at this moment the majority 29 of Frenchmen still don't know what is going on in Algeria...
...Though in France these skilled workers do not at the present time command a very high wage, they continue to enjoy a prestige which other workers do not...
...There is a struggle between the minority, which holds power, and the majority, which allows itself to be directed...
Vol. 5 • January 1958 • No. 1
