A Democratic Socialist Reflects on 1956

...Fortunately, the worst of these parties (e.g., the Know Nothings in the 1850s) disappeared leaving small trace on our history...

...Out of such study will not automatically arise an effective party in the electoral field...

...We still have a system under which Messrs...

...The apologists and protagonists of the American capitalist system, with few exceptions, justify the system in terms of an extreme laissez-faire type of "free enterprise" which never really existed in protectionist America and would reduce our present practices in business and agriculture to chaotic confusion if suddenly applied...

...But, on the part of the business interests which the party pretty well represents, the acceptance is grudging except when politicians and businessmen recognize that sometimes they can get more milk from contented cows...

...The Wallace movement, dominated by Communists, created concern bordering on alarm in 1948...

...Warburg goes on to say that "Government influence since World War II has been exercised in favor of the oil producers but there has yet been no governmental action to protect the consumer's interest" either here or abroad...

...At this point, automation may prove to be a help...

...While of course there are social and economic classes in America (partially reflected in the composition of the Republican and Democratic parties), they are not of a rigidity or commanding importance to compel us to think only or chiefly on lines of class struggle...

...The threat of war is a major fact and the cost of the arms race a kind of terrible guarantee of relatively full employment despite its shocking economic waste...

...Rather we should recommend socialism as the necessary fulfillment of democracy...

...In so doing, they can keep the chairmanship of many important Congressional committees...

...Third" parties played a significant role in American history during most of the 19th and 20th centuries down through the campaign of 1948...

...It is a system in which it would now appear that the Al Sarena Mines Co., with the aid of friends in the Department of Interior, laid profiteers' hands on valuable timber in the Rogue River National Forests in Oregon under the phony pretext of operating mines...

...What is not so encouraging is the repeated demonstration that the masses are not instinctively devoted to civil liberties or to making democratic processes work...

...But Eisenhower's proposals for the farmers are as heretical from the standpoint of the economics which capitalist protagonists talk (but don't practice) as anything the most extreme Democratic critic of Secretary Benson ever proposed...

...Even in America, socialist ideas have made progress embodied in a welfare state which admits democratic improvements...

...We socialists have to develop our educational and practical programs in the light of such facts...

...Diversity of working controls makes for both freedom and sound progress...

...None of them stands up in the face of reality, however ingenious the dialectic used in its support...

...Responsible criticism in a world as complex as ours requires alternatives to economic and political processes which we criticize...

...whose end product would be no kind of social order but only annihilation...

...That is worth a lot, but it falls far short of what we must develop if genuine democratic socialism is to triumph in and through labor unions, cooperatives and political parties...

...This would represent a profit in the neighborhood of $1.40 per barrel or 500 per cent...

...This difficulty could be worked out, I have been told, except that common ownership of valuable machinery under democratic conditions results in much bickering and friction as to its use and care...

...The admirable pamphlet, Robot Revolution, issued by the Socialist party, advances the argument that "What we are faced with in automation is a total situation which requires a total response, namely, democratic planning by the entire society to insure production for use rather than for profit, and to see to it that the benefits of automation are shared by everyone and not merely by those few who happen to control the means of production at the present time...

...Such political discussion as we have cm basic principles and programs is almost consciously anti-intellectual...

...A McCarthyist defection in the Republican party or a new Dixiecrat movement is a bare possibility, but almost certainly the reactionaries will prefer to function as a drag on the old parties...

...But it's a dangerous business for socialists to hope for a great economic depression to serve as the midwife of a democratic socialist revolution or even a strong Socialist party...

...On the other hand, the effect of the Free Soil parly, the Populists and the Socialists on public thinking and legislative programs finally adopted was very great...

...Revolutionary change by violence usually opens the door to dictatorship and imposes other catastrophic costs...

...The people, including wage-workers as consumers if not as producers, are viciously exploited because the natural resources on which the life of modern civilization depends are still in private hands...

...In the case of the great petroleum companies, this is a situation which tends to jeopardize sound international relations...

...The avoidance of that war, together with the preservation of freedom, is our supreme responsibility...

...Under these circumstances, the atmosphere in 1956 is singularly unfavorable to moral or social crusading...

...Too often, family farm operators prefer selling out rather than learn how to cooperate...

...But it is an obvious fact that the individual miner scarcely feels himself part-owner of coal mines because his nation owns them, and the interest of British workers in democratic operation of the mines is much less developed than their solidarity in standing out against exploitation by a recognizable boss...

...Our affirmative philosophy and proposals need reconsideration...

...The difference between rigid and flexible parity-price support for farmers is not a matter of philosophic principle...

...I could go on almost indefinitely about our slums in town and country and the plight of migratory workers-a plight which never seems to worry any of the bosses in the farmers' organizations...

...It was not that in 1936 when Roosevelt uttered it...

...Karl Marx or the Christian Gospel...

...The size of their vote was always less than their adherents expected, but this was an inadequate measure of their effect on the thinking of the times...

...that the tools of automation can be used for democratic planning, thereby making possible a much wider sharing in the planning process...

...Socialist theory, as applied, is not an automatic antidote to the development of a bad type of bureaucracy...

...Since 1948, there has been no significant political campaign by any party to the left of center which has caught popular attention...

...Mr...

...I have bitterly contested the notion that economic collectivism under any sort of government (avowedly democratic, fascist or Communist) must result in totalitarianism and the abolition of civil liberties...

...In the face of facts like these, the classic socialist criticism of capitalism on moral and even economic grounds needs little revision...

...Nevertheless, it is a fact that collectivism without careful provision for democratic control has this tendency...

...But it is a cooperation which must leave room for some honest exercise of the competitive principle in many lines of human endeavor...

...I have commented on Republican acceptance of a welfare state...

...Twice in this century, a third-party movement--the Bull Moose Progressives in 1912 and the LaFollette Progressive-Socialist coalition in 1924--threw substantial scares into the old parties...

...It then goes on to show that automation, which makes economic planning necessary, also makes it possible...

...But they will concern personalities and relative benefits brought to this or that group of alleged "free enterprisers" rather than basic principles and programs...

...But it is doubtful that many readers of the New Leader can remember the names of the 1952 minority-parly candidates...

...Nationalization under a democratic government in Britain has at least been better than the continuance of private ownership in coal mines and the railroads could have been...

...Thus, James P. Warburg writes in his recent book, Turning Point Toward Peace: "Due to the fixing of world prices with high-cost United States production as the basic determinant, the profit of the American companies in their low-cost foreign production has been very large...

...In recording these reflections, I am not trying to construct a systematic philosophy, much less a developed program, for democratic socialism in 1956...

...The experience of recent years has taught us--or should teach us--such facts, encouraging and discouraging, as these: Mere negation can bring tragic political confusion and economic paralysis...

...Carmine De Sapio and Thomas Curran, chairmen respectively of the New York County Democratic and Republican Committees, could quite sincerely assure their audiences in my class at the New School that working politicians were at least as honest as businessmen...

...Our pragmatic American capitalism has changed considerably for the better since the days of William McKinley, William Howard Taft or even Calvin Coolidge...

...This decline in the influence of third parties is not due to the fact that either of the old parties has satisfied tho old crusading zeal of various soils of Socialists or brought their Utopias into being under other names...

...Down through the years, neither the Christian nor the Socialist Gospel has averted war...

...At the moment, mixed economy will, I am convinced, best suit the development of democratic socialism...

...Labor has grown strong enough through its unions to win by collective bargaining increasingly favorable conditions in basic industries...

...About all they value is the fact that democracy gives them a channel of legal action when they are aroused and angry over something that has gone wrong...

...We democratic socialists cannot state our case in 1956 in any of the sectarian versions of Marxist fundamentalism...

...Our British friends furnish other examples...

...The history of America would have been very different had it not been for these third parties...

...It is a system where the poorest three-tenths of the American population, while to some extent helped by the immense increase in total production due to our technological progress and by social legislation, receive percentagewise an even lower proportion of the national income than in 1910...

...On the other hand, in democratic countries, even where democracy is imperfect, the resistance of capitalism to progressive change in the interest of the people has been neither so absolute nor so effective as we feared...

...In the case of the Socialist candidates, this is no reflection on their zeal or the quality of their speeches...

...It is due to the fact that the old parties, reluctantly and under the stress of events, have been wise enough, aided by marvelous technological progress, to set up a fairly impressive welfare state...

...Consider, for instance, the relatively slow growth of the cooperative movement among farmers for the owning of machinery too expensive for the smaller operators to acquire individually...

...It is a system under which immense fortunes can still be made or lost as a reward for stock-market speculation rather than any labor of hand or brain...

...No socialist government can make individual initiative and imagination superfluous...

...There certainly is a case for protecting farmers from the caprices of the weather and a pure market economy in fixing food prices...

...Millions of people are bored by democratic processes...

...I am simply hoping that the kind of reflections I set forth will stimulate in the younger generation far more thinking and planning in terms of democratic socialism than is now going on...

...It has been estimated that the American profits on the sale of crude oil produced in Saudi Arabia alone amounted in 1952 to something like $425 million on a production of about 300 million barrels...

...But the nature of the mixture and the supremacy of devotion to the common good are of the utmost importance and require devoted study...

...By no means all of them were admirable...

...It was the Supreme Court and no political party which dared to assert the democratic principle of integration--a subject on which some alleged champions of liberalism have taken great pains to be silent...

...According to U.S...

...Government figures, the profits of the American companies in the Persian Gulf area rose from $115 million in 1947 to $300 million in 1951...

...Plans for effectiveness in this task cannot be automatically derived from Adam Smith...

...The issues between the major parties in 1956 will not be altogether spurious or unimportant...

...The Democratic party, which in 1948 adopted a civil-rights platform even though it meant a Dixiecrat secession, is now doing its best to dodge the issue of segregation in the schools...

...Flexible parity-price support for wheat or corn, granted by the Government, is in principle as great a violation of "free enterprise" as rigid support...

...There is no such moral enthusiasm in Stevenson and his supporters in 1956 as in 1952...

...The average American scarcely realizes what this fact implies...

...The Republicans will probably be somewhat more devoted to giving away the people's resources than the Democrats, but Democrats are and have been authors of some of the most indefensible legislation for the oil and natural-gas interests...

...Part of the trouble in working out satisfactory pools for tractors and the like is that too often the farmers want the same machine at the same time, because the time is dictated by the weather and the nature of the crop...

...But democratic socialism will never save mankind unless in its principles and its fellowship it can serve the cause of peace and plenty, in terms not of narrow nationalism but of universal human brotherhood...

...The percentage of citizens, including members of labor unions and cooperatives, who don't even take the trouble to vote is one illustration of that fact...

...Cooperation, morally and practically, must be the basis of our management of natural resources and human skills if we are to conquer poverty and create the material and spiritual basis of the good life...

...Along with the achievement of this plateau of relative well-being in the United States has gone a sense of alarm when the voters looked at other nations and their experiments...

...It is scarcely that today...

...Hence, labor and even the dissatisfied farmers feel that they can manipulate the old parties and their representatives in office to win what they particularly want more effectively than they can work through any now conceivable third party...

...And the disaster we have most to fear is a new world war...

...But Adlai Stevenson was not on sound ground when he called Roosevelt's phrase "economic royalists" both "unfair" and "unfortunate...

...The revolution in it is somewhat less, I think, than writers like John Kenneth Galbraith, Frederick Lewis Allen or Adolf Berle have suggested in books which do take a more realistic approach to capitalism than its more orthodox defenders...

...Some type of fascism or Communism would more likely arise out of disaster...