Confessions of an Old-Timer
Rabasseire, Henri
Ideas change but their formulas remain. Two people a thousand years apart may be of the same mind though they strove for different things; on the other hand, no bore is more boring than...
...But the liberals and democrats could have protested against the realization of liberal and democratic ideals a hundred years ago...
...The pluralistic system which this implies cannot be justified on the ground that it is more efficient than straight capitalism or straight despotism...
...most of them think they are defending democracy...
...weak industries such as farming must be subsidized...
...It is freedom, or the refusal to submit to command...
...We were wrong most of the time when we tried to realize doctrines or when we followed a course of action that seemed to follow from the scriptures...
...In industrial-commercial relations, togetherness is neither freely granted out of the fullness of sympathy and generosity, nor is it ever allowed to bring out essential human impulses...
...they claimed to have realized every socialist demand...
...or the man who said: "The meek shall inherit the earth...
...But it is true that there never was less peace between them than now...
...Vice versa, orthodox disciples of the "economic" view of history now admit that wage, price and related disputes have become "political...
...A socialist they call a man who admits that free enterprise no longer can handle all these jobs: atomic energy must be kept under safety rules by the Government...
...The Traffic Commissioner is committed (and has been commissioned) to see that "The Traffic" flows freely...
...Yet I love him—not for the doctrine he continues to profess but because once in our lives we hated and loved the same things, sang the same hymns and were clubbed by the same police...
...but they will never let him educate himself...
...SOCIALISM is not a thing to have...
...He no longer considers himself an artist...
...But they never stole the basic assumption that Man is God...
...OUR REAL DEFEATS were not the occasions when we were beaten...
...Our society deprives itself of that part which is the essential part of the personality...
...If all this is true, socialists were even more mistaken than they seemed to be...
...How could we be wrong so long as we asserted our faith in Man...
...When this clarion was first sounded, by Le Bon and Ortega y Gasset, it was the war whoop of declared anti-socialists, and, with the exception of Hendrik de Man, no socialist at the time protested against these aspects of the new socialism...
...after expropriating the owners of the communications networks their function still would be "socialized"— maybe without minds...
...Opposition against the "manager," hence, can be aroused in the name of democracy only...
...Then the aim is to check the command powers through the countervailing powers of labor and other organizations...
...So many socialists now are fighting the spread of the so-called mass culture...
...we hear nothing but exaltations of so-called creativity...
...Certainly, they are right...
...Sometimes it can hardly be distinguished from its worst enemies—state capitalism, fascism, and nationalism...
...by that token, this operation might be called the "least capitalistic," but it is so conducted only for reasons of foreign policy and any benefit to the people which might accrue from it is strictly accidental...
...One is a socialist...
...That is to say, they break every equation...
...36 one, can or should be an end...
...But his gradual disappearance or submission under the abstract law of profitability merely confirms what should have been clear to readers of Capital from the beginning: that class situations are not properly described by the symbols rich and poor, but by economic function, and that authority is derived not from property but from the right to use it...
...hence freedom is "for what" only to the extent that it is "from what...
...Marx still wrote against "Das Capital...
...they may well become the symbols of his inability to make responsible choices...
...There is no genuine freedom if the choice is limited within a system...
...On the contrary, socialists enter the picture precisely at the point where such a system breaks down and people refuse to obey the abstract law of efficiency...
...The price—science has been taken out of political and philosophical context...
...They will do everything for the people and eventually provide them with the most perfect socialist economy...
...Sometimes we were wrong—maybe more often than we know or care to admit...
...I suppose I would have recognized their voices before I appreciated their ideas...
...they merely translate the equation of rational efficiency into "personnel relations...
...Our ideas, let's 32 face it, had a tremendous success...
...All this is not new since Huxley's "Brave New World...
...No institution, not the most perfect • The editors have suggested that I distinguish the two kinds of socialism, for instance, by putting the mock socialism in quotation marks...
...These alternatives require some reflection on the question of what socialism is today...
...it includes a sequence of anarchist, apocalyptic and chiliastic rebellions against the domination and exploitation of man by man, against industrialism and the modern State, against commercialism and militarism...
...This attempt at evading the issue, therefore, defeats the claim that socialism is an organic whole...
...they represent the human element in society...
...ists under all systems...
...On the whole capitalism has promoted progress...
...It has been perverted into a totalitarian State philosophy and into the ideology of conservative labor parties...
...To REPEAT, and to cross the t's: socialism should not be capitalism minus capitalists, nor the most advanced, streamlined system of industrial accountability...
...it can be validated by men who believe in it militantly, or invalidated by faint-heartedness...
...There should not even be a word "creative" apartfrom any specific creation...
...they presume that various powers sooner or later will become institutionalized and freeze into a well-organized system where, e.g., wage conflicts are superseded completely by a pyramid of negotiation and arbitration machinery which in the end will figure out what part of the national product each popu 40 lation group should get...
...In the meantime, the collectivist haven has developed traits which are worse than the capitalist hell.Capitalism brought oppression from outside, but left the inner man largely intact...
...Because Necessity and Reason -always will be the specific patterns of the existing society, freedom can exist only if alternative frames of reference are offered by competing powers...
...but today it is a problem for socialists...
...Its history in modern times begins with the Jacqueries and Luther's indictment of the "Companies Monopolia...
...SOCIALISTS, QUA labor, do not represent the human "factor" in the production equation...
...Yet, were we given a chance to live our lives over again, we probably would make the same mistakes, fight the same enemies, hold the same illusions holy—or similar ones which also are based on the same assumption: that Man is good...
...they fought the wrong enemy at a false front...
...today we are tempted to indict "Das Social...
...Freedom must always remain the liberty of refusing cooperation, of debating "necessity" and of disregarding "reason...
...The capitalist had to justify himself in terms of his usefulness in the promotion of progress...
...Choice which is the essence of freedom always is between possibilities...
...perhaps we, are wrong even now...
...The more capitalism develops, the less is the parasitic beneficiary— the private owner of capital—the villain of the piece...
...but for him, this was only one aspect of a two-faced phenomenon...
...that a socialist system run by non-socialists simply is unthinkable and that socialism is an integrated whole from which no single feature can be omitted or integrated into another system...
...so much so that he was able to rebel...
...Some will go so far as to admit that man is perfectible, and they will proceed to educate him accordingly, by their own or even by our lights...
...However, theoretical considerations and the evidence of recent history suggest that this conflict between man and things, or freedom and necessity, cannot be resolved...
...They must be very flexible in promoting and checking the countervailing powers at the right times...
...No sage cowardice that has not been justified by "socialist" consciences and no bold crime that has not been committed in the name of socialist efficiency...
...Socialism, on the contrary, is being run by everybody but socialists...
...We may vainly protest that the most important characteristics of socialism are missing in all these mixed, adulterated and perverted conceptions...
...I think we can...
...To be continued) 42...
...Socialists still have to fight those who hold the levers of economic and political demand, under whatever title...
...everybody "stole" them and "realized" them...
...Huxley still believed that he was satirizing the trend of capitalism (he says specifically that the entire weird arrangement had been engineered for the sole purpose of assur 35 ing maximum consumption of surplus production) , and he still implied that socialism would break this fatal trend...
...Wherever we see people together, their togetherness is either perverted or it turns its back on society...
...Staunch defenders of free enterprise now acknowledge that these elements of "socialist" economic thinking have become part of their system...
...There can never be peace between man and his works...
...They stole every part of the system, every single aim and every doctrine...
...SOME SOCIALISTS—the true ones, I think—do not agree that socialism is an extrapolation of present trends in the capitalist economy...
...Any well-run economy must provide for shrinkage, pilfering and other loss...
...THIS PICTURE of the situation might be objected to on the the following grounds: the present mass culture is characteristic of a capitalistic economy which still is being run by capitalists, and is working for their benefit...
...ON TECHNOLOGICAL GROUNDS, a socialist expert of planning and accounting might not find too much to criticize in the budget of a pseudo-socialist economy...
...classes have not been abolished, and even where state capitalism prevails, its functionaries clearly constitute a new class of exploiters...
...Socialists cannot quarrel with the accounting system either, because some accounting there must be to avoid unnecessary waste...
...This must remain the attitude of social...
...however, it deprives the workers and 39 consumers in the country of all the checks on mis-planning which normally control a national economy through the countervailing influence of foreign exchanges...
...Worse—an efficient defense industry, a crash rocket program can be planned by despotism better than by free agents...
...the various under-developed economies are being developed according to plans which may satisfy the desires of their elites but above all flatter their national ambitions...
...Suppose each worker owns his house and his car, and suppose the new techniques of economic control make it possible for capitalism, (a) to improve living standards, (b) to give people economic security, (c) to narrow class differences—do we then still need socialism...
...The human sense of dignity revolts against the dependence upon command powers, be they economic or political...
...The common denominator of all these betrayals is easy to define...
...37 Lately, another flow of noble feelings has been isolated from its wellspring of human generosity and perverted into useful techniques of management...
...An occasional patent which some monopolists failed to exploit properly is offset many times by the number of patents that would never have seen the light but for the interest of some monopolist in its sale...
...often he could not show cause but was unmasked as a mere parasite.* The functionary barely faces this difficulty...
...but on the ideological level these functionaries are better armed than the old capitalists...
...great hydraulic works must be undertaken by national planning boards...
...33 lately, and the more intelligent business executives know—or even admit —that it is here to stay...
...Proudly expressing the essence of Labor at its best, Bernstein said: The goal is nothing to me, the Movement is everything...
...Indeed, it should not be identified with any, even the most perfect system...
...production goals and distributive aims are formulated through pluralistic methods of pressure groups and political in-fighting...
...In their propaganda speeches the Russians aptly refer to the "ruling circles" of the West...
...When the goal is reached, however, the movement may stop...
...Society, which does not need love, assigned it a sphere of prescribed and permissible behavior, just as the Church, unable to cope with the totality of man, found a niche for pardonable sin...
...the Russian Bolsheviks abandoned themselves to its spirit...
...Dare we say that we never thought of Progress in terms of abstract achievements: so much planning, so much welfare, so much nationalization...
...The moment I say "democratic socialism" I admit that there are other kinds, at least potentially, and that, to satisfy me, I have to add to the definition of so cialism a foreign ingredient taken from another source...
...socialism" dies for want of a cause...
...The Japanese militarists knew how to use industrialism...
...To that extent, Marx's analysis of industrial labor is still correct: what he called "constant" costs still are the ones which are given by objective factors, and labor is the only "variable" cost...
...not quite as good is one which they praise...
...This system also has permitted the advances of Soviet science...
...Capitalism crippled people's sensibilities, to be sure, but collectivism demands their withering away...
...Business now is for social welfare, for planning, for greater equality and, horn bile dictu, for "solidarity," "togetherness" and "group thinking...
...Socialists may find a pluralistic system more suitable for their purpose but they will try to prevent its freezing into a system...
...The first is his usefulness to others and it includes every one of the qualities which make him replaceable...
...Marx still could write confidently that at the end of the capitalistic development nothing might be left to do but to "expropriate the few owners of already socialized factories...
...It is a means to achieve productivity...
...You want socialism perfect be cause you are not socialists...
...What matters to them is the point where the equation breaks and man emerges, not where a new equation is formed and man again is being integrated into a new system...
...on the other hand, no bore is more boring than the disciple who quotes what I said twenty years ago...
...I say yes, because it is a matter of attitudes...
...he can show that in terms of these calculations he is just as useful as everybody else...
...You perfect institutions instead of making them fitter for people...
...Even defeat could not disprove us...
...The complaint that capitalism stifles creativity is ridiculous...
...A moderately progressive kind of welfare economy has been "creeping" rather far and fast * Since I wrote this, the King's oil policy adviser, an ARAMCO official, has published his plan to nationalize the pipelines...
...In the democracies the fight is still raging: will modern industry breed the perfect robot or liberate man from drudgery and servitude...
...the interests of nationalism point toward a "socialized" economy, with more integration, more interventionism, more welfare and planning, more compulsory arbitration...
...PHILOSOPHY has not found a solution to the problem of conflict, nor does historical evidence suggest any avenue of escape...
...He also attacked the social class which benefits from this system and is interested in its preservation...
...The socialist represents man...
...It is about time for socialists to admit the facts: there is more "socialism" in the world today than capitalism or any other system...
...He no longer creates out of the fullness of his life in his community...
...All this is beside the point, or rather, this is just the point: that the enemy has infiltrated the fortress and the socialists are not in command of their own house...
...But he did not surmise that this criticism would still be valid under "socialist" conditions of production...
...Nationalization, welfare and planning —desirable as such—no longer symbolize man's aspiration to master his own destiny...
...socialism in this sense will be the slogan when in Poland, Yugoslavia and elsewhere people raise their demands for more self-determination and participation in deciding their own and their country's fate...
...If socialism is the functionally most streamlined system of produc tion and distribution, as provided by the most perfect electronic brains • Mr...
...Collectivism captures the man totally...
...System-builders are so well-intentioned as to prevent people from making wrong decisions...
...Nasser—and tomorrow maybe King Saud—nationalizes big industry.* Socialism has been hyphenated with nationalism, its mortal enemy, with anti-clerical radicalism and with clerical Christianism...
...The Bolsheviks appropriated the doctrine of a planned economy...
...They laid all evils at the door of private capitalists or "bosses" instead of an institution which seems to be embracing considerably more territory than just private enterprise—we have called it modern industrialism, and its characteristics are a particular rationality and accounting mentality, a necessary division of labor and a functional hierarchy...
...communications must be supervised by the State...
...Even in the advanced countries, older capitalistic traditions yield to "mixed economies" which are largely regulated...
...Whoever thinks that "socialism" or any other system is the end of history, stops thinking as a socialist...
...It may make honest errors, but these, of course, can be criticized by a loyal opposition and must be corrected within the system of industrial planning...
...this target, which evokes memories of the "Elders of Zion" and other world conspiracies of the upper class, rallies pseudo-democratic and pseudo-socialistic instincts of anti-capitalistic defense most effectively...
...the other is hidden away though it contains the unique qualities of his humanity...
...Though we don't like the kind of socialism that is being realized, we cannot repudiate it...
...Any society may use technological achievements without surrendering its own values...
...Marching together made us into a movement...
...Concretely, the government will always be able to show, figures in hand, that output should be increased and that expenses should be increased in those places preferably where greater consumer satisfaction will eventually result in better production...
...Our aim was to deprive people of the power to use other people as means to an end, be that end ever so worthy—the increase of productivity or the national welfare...
...So with other saintly fools or with my old fellow militants...
...41 Socialism is first of all movement, it is a freely organized movement...
...consent is being "engineered" or given "freely...
...MANY TRAITS of "socialism" simply appeared when certain trends of modern industrialism were extrapolated...
...Socialism so understood as the action of socialists, is not a social and economic system but a movement...
...The totality of man never is present in society...
...Planning, he says, is necessarily national planning first, and that means erecting protective barriers against the disruptive fluctuations which periodically or constantly are transmitted from the world markets to the national economies...
...Oppressed socialists under "socialism" are in the same position as Christians who uphold Christ against the churches...
...This piece, however, is too serious and too bitter for me to permit of reading aids for those who do not take the trouble to listen...
...The little fat which the bureaucrats may skim off the national soup really does not matter if otherwise they give their citizens good service...
...38 according to the economic equations, then this argument is unanswerable...
...It is solidarity, or the refusal to forget people over the demands of techniques...
...The term, socialism, should be saved from confusion with state capitalism or even state collectivist systems, such as the Yugoslavian and Chinese may be tendentially...
...it only made our faith stronger...
...This is even less possible if the missing element in all these pseudo-socialist systems is ill-defined.* Socialists themselves are not agreed on its nature, nor did they warn others of the impending confusion...
...Marx's healthy contempt for wielders of "programs" is too well known to need quoting here, and even the great utopians only used their programs to realize their secret aim—to set people in motion...
...It is a measure of our "socialization" that nobody defends jaywalkers...
...Though the government clerks might conceivably mismanage large sectors of the economy out of prejudice, for political or for purely personal reasons, in general we must assume that a government will be interested in spreading welfare and satisfactions among the population, and will impose sacrifices only if the national interest demands them...
...it cannot even be defined as a democratic system of such rational industrial relations properly institutionalized...
...But it gives people a chance to wreck plans which were made without their consent, to assert their will and to make their own mistakes...
...You substitute a system for the fullness of your humanity...
...A sad truth I shall confide to you...
...They are not interested in establishing a system with a better equation (though they often pretend to be doing that) , but in saving man from being a factor in an equation...
...Likewise, the managers of Soviet state trusts administer the law of growth of industrial enterprises...
...Socialism has become a doubtful name, not because it has been betrayed so often by its leaders, not because it has been diverted so often into strange channels, but because it has been institutionalized, taken over and managed...
...Eventually this can be done by an especially built computer...
...if and only if the aims and goals of planning are subject to controversy...
...But it has done something to the inventor...
...At times, these movements could merge in common hate of an overriding symbol—capitalism provided the common denominator for all exploitation and domination...
...To conceal this dichotomy is a sleight-of-hand by which freedom is made to disappear...
...There really should be but one such whole—man himself...
...For instance, the foreign transactions of the Soviet government probably are the single part of the world economy which is being carried out with the least regard to cost...
...His wages are those of an administrator, and he has earned his share...
...By the same token, I would have loved the man who said, 2,500 years ago: "Good government is one of which the people know it exists...
...they came when we were told we had succeeded...
...To BE SURE, most socialists are horrified by the picture of socialism that has been unfolded in the last forty years, and they will insist that this is not what they had fought for...
...he merely executes the equations of the perfect plan...
...Outside Congressional and Fourth-of-July oratory, classical free enterprise is deader than a doornail, and socialists who continue to fight against its ghosts are museum pieces themselves...
...Today we are frightened at the sight of the "already socialized minds...
...Dare we return to the original meaning of socialism—socii, the fellows —as that which people have in common...
...but they will not allow these people to act in their own behalf, make their own mistakes and assert their own solidarity...
...Moreover, the closed economy leaves the government free to use foreign commerce for its particular political aims...
...WE ARE LEARNING better to know our enemy...
...In a still more perverted form, it shows up when 34 workers repudiate socialist parties who (however ineffectively) try to defend their living standards, and follow the Communists who ask them to assert their freedom to protest...
...Governments in most new countries now are in complete command of the national resources, either through ownership of the most important enterprises or by virtue of various control devices...
...In this process society immunizes itself against feeling...
...People are "reasonable" because they no longer see alternative choices...
...he dearly fulfills a function which is determined by calculation of an electronic brain...
...They had to take the responsibility because at least one thing could not be denied: liberalism was run largely by liberals...
...CAN SOCIALISM be an organic whole...
...Creative of what...
...Socialism is a human reaction against both forms of command by law over man...
...The managers of big corporations here are not exploiting people...
...Dare we protest...
...Arcadius R. L. Gurland observes in this connection that the anti-capitalistprotest was "political" to begin with, namely, under the conditions of a strict European class society, against the owners of a monopoly...
...for originally socialism was a movement of protest against all systems...
...The Republicans have adopted the progressive income tax and the Democrats the welfare state...
...At all times, however, anti-capitalism had these two components: resistance against domination by an upper class, and resistance against an "inexorable law" which prescribed that exploitation of human factors is the way of economic progress...
...Isolationism serves the interest of socialist benefits...
...it cannot be defined...
...The famous "leap into the realm of Freedom" has not been defined as the conquest of Necessity, but as insight into its pattern, or as choice between alternative aims...
...Not private capital is the enemy but the capitalistic accounting system which holds a man worth as much as he can contribute to the creation of value...
...the best of him is kept private...
...A graver draw-back of recent advances toward socialism has been uncovered by Gunnar Myrdal...
...A principled socialist opposition would be called into being whenever the definition of "national welfare" itself is at stake, i.e...
...It just is not possible to ignore the language of the common man and to insist that the name of socialism should be reserved to an esoteric notion of an esoteric sect...
...They are using socialism...
...Man himself is a means, not only for other men but of the production goals...
...Moreover, the definition of strict or pure socialism, too, seems to be hyphenated...
...Feudalistic and capitalistic forms of ownership are successfully checked by political means...
...Solidarity was from each to all for each other—not from all to the flag...
...Man is good" is a proposition which is neither true nor untrue...
...it prevents the most human needs from affecting social relations...
...The Nazis took May Day, the very name of socialism, and the pageantry of revolution...
...the conflict between man and machine, or man and the organization, or man and the rationality of economic reckoning, has not changed, whether the executor of the abstract command of the figures is a private capitalist, a trust manager or a bureaucrat...
...We were never wrong when we acted in solidarity with people who tried to shape their own destinies...
...After taking over most of the institutions and the material aims, the enemy is availing himself of a mock-version of the socialist spirit...
...Beware lest you end up fitting people to institutions...
...Hence the system of countervailing powers should be as widely open as possible, the aim being not only to check the command powers of the ruling hierarchy but to establish the pattern of choices itself...
...I doubt that capitalism has slowed progress anywhere...
...he is cleft midways into a public and a private being...
...This democratic and humanistic root of socialism has come to flower in conceptions such as "industrial democracy," "workers' control," in the "council" movements which sprang up in Poland and Hungary recently, in the American shop steward and even in the German "codetermination" law...
...The function of the socialist in this fight is still the same, whether the enemy be capitalism or socialism...
...it misdirects it by capturing its specific virtue...
...What the critics mean is something else: productivity has been insulated and even has become an end in itself...
...Socialists may argue that they value leisure and easy production schedules higher than national power and larger production facilities, and that consumption allowances should be increased first for the aged and retired people...
...ONE cannot have socialism...
...OUR SOCIETY cripples people and inflicts on them the disease of unpersonality: a man is appreciated not for what he is but for what he contributes usefully...
...To make the perversion complete, some socialist thinkers now have been moved to join the chorus of protests against "mass culture...
...This is not to cite the Church Fathers as authorities, but to answer the question whether we can still call ourselves socialists in the same sense that they did...
...A minority of French Communists favor dictatorship and like Bolshevik terror...
...Reactionaries have seized upon this insight in asking the silly (because incomplete) question: Freedom for what...
...Socialists, at their best, always will represent the human protest against any system, and that is even more true if the system is more rational and more efficient and if the human factor is being managed more "scientifically...
...CAPITALISM does not impede creativity...
...The idea was a flag, and some sacrificed themselves for the flag—I always thought they were dying for me, not for the flag...
...Private capitalists are more or less needless costs in a modern industrial system and will be eliminated almost automatically, though slowly, should they prove to be too costly...
...The human element in this argument here disrupts the calculations of the planners...
...Suppose Dave Beck stole a million bucks, that's less than a dollar per "brother"—a thousandfold multiple of which he won for them in wage increases and benefits...
...Though not hostile to industrialism, it is not its fulfillment...
...Even some enthusiasts of countervailing powers envisage them as a system, i.e...
...It was the merit of Marx to focus the opposition against the specific "system" of capitalism and the "economic laws...
...They will do everything for the people except allow them to do anything for themselves...
...It is not, and either of these systems will normally be more efficient...
Vol. 5 • January 1958 • No. 1
