European Socialism Today

...As in France, there are millions of people, at present uncommitted to any party, who long to see the Socialists provide a democratic alternative to Communism and who see the reunification of the two existing parties as the first step to this end...

...The Russian Communists used their dictatorial power to enforce economic planning and control by the state machine—indeed, they are largely responsible for the popularity of the concept of national planning which has played so central a part in economic development throughout the world in the last generation...

...Significantly, this was the first major issue on which the Nenni Socialist party split with the Communists...

...But four years of slaughter and privation produced a great revulsion against the existing order...

...In Italy, too, the fate of democracy depends most of all on the capacity of the Socialists to lead the national revival...

...In fact, wherever democracy gave the workers the opportunity of political influence, they were able to obtain improvements in the existing capitalist system which little by little changed its very nature...

...It is absurd to talk of the decline of democratic socialism—the movement as a whole is more powerful than ever before, and everywhere the Socialist parties are much stronger than before the Second World War...

...As an international movement it is a community but not an organization, still less a machine...

...The German Social Democrats have already revised their program and doctrine pragmatically, and are likely to win power at least in the next ten years...

...Meanwhile, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had produced a great schism in the international socialist movement just at the moment when the auspices were most favorable for it...

...And it has been particularly agonizing in the last twelve years when Soviet support for foreign Communist parties has meant that democracy and national independence stand or fall together...

...Only in Sweden did a Socialist government use scientific economic techniques to control the crisis, simultaneously producing the most advanced social services in the world...

...The major problem is in France and Italy, where the Social Democrats are ground between the millstones of a clerical Right and a Communist party with considerable working-class support...

...Experience in the interwar years profoundly modified these ambitions...

...Abroad it gave freedom to most of the British Empire, including the whole of the Indian subcontinent, and helped organize the Atlantic Community as a working partnership of Western Europe...

...At this time, the German Social Democrats were the dominant influence in the Second International...

...Immune from the world crisis because they had no foreign trade, they nevertheless condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation...

...At the other extreme, there are not only the official Labor and Social Democratic movements of modern Europe...

...Not because they refused to adopt the Labor party's techniques of organization and government...

...this would require that much, if not all, of the national capital should be transferred from private to public ownership...

...And it is doubtful whether, on the occasions when it has forced a single European party into isolated opposition, the movement as a whole has gained thereby more than it has lost...

...It is likely that the Northern parties will continue to develop along their present lines as governments or potential governments...

...Until then, there had been a tendency to imagine that war was exclusively a phenomenon of capitalism and that conflicts between nations would disappear automatically as Socialist parties took power...

...And though the socialist ideal is spreading like a flame through Asia and Africa, the European Socialists have so far failed to develop the influence and prestige in these new continents which the Russian and Chinese Communists exert among their co-religionists...

...Simultaneously, it established Britain as the most advanced welfare state in the world and nationalized basic industries covering 20 per cent of the British economy...

...Yet, despite Marx's claim that his task was not to understand the world but to change it, Marxist groups made little real impact on the system they analyzed so cleverly...

...In Scandinavia, majority Socialist governments achieved similar results by much the same methods...

...A century old, social democracy is not in its old age but in its adolescence European Socialism Today By Denis Healey London As a political movement, socialism is barely a century old: The First International was formed in 1864...

...As such, it can be applied with only minor modifications in every country alike...

...When the Bolsheviks tried to get control of the international Socialist movement by the same methods, they were at first met with open arms in many countries...

...It is obvious that socialism meets a fundamental need of modern man, or its attraction would not be so widely felt...

...The real disappointment is among those—not all of them Socialists—who hope to see democratic socialism present itself all over the world as a clear and simple alternative to Communism, and who now find that socialism is often as various, confused and ambiguous as democracy itself...

...This is essentially a question of judgment, though it is easily represented as one of principle...

...In such countries, the weakness of Socialism and the strength of Communism is only a symptom of the weakness of democracy itself...

...The Great Depression revealed that Socialist economics, as it then existed, was no better able than Conservative economics to overcome the contradictions of contemporary capitalism...

...But he took his advice from John Maynard Keynes, not Marx...

...As a response to the social environment, it must change with every change in its political or economic context...

...It is no accident that the cultural and artistic standards of the Soviet ruling class resemble so closely those of the 19th-century bourgeoisie...

...A Socialist party in a multi-party state, however, can rarely hope for office except in coalition with another party which does not share its views...

...In the last twelve years, the British Labor party has come to occupy the position in the international Socialist movement once held by the German Social Democrats...

...By using rigid distortion of Marxism as the ideological cement for his revolutionary machine, Lenin associated the socialist ideal with conspiratorial terrorism...

...At this time, all the Socialist parties were committed to the same general view of their role...

...Indeed, if European Socialism is seen in its historical context, its present state may appear not as old age but as adolescence...

...The British two-party system, which gives such exceptional authority to the government in power, could not work in countries which are bitterly divided by religious, communal and historic feuds...

...the United States of America, and the British Commonwealth...

...In Germany...

...More important still, great-power diplomacy may lead to a settlement which reunites Eastern Europe with the West, with profound yet unpredictable consequences on the internal situation of both sides...

...particularly in Germany...

...Tsarism had so long been a symbol of the sort of tyranny which Socialists hated most that the October Revolution was greeted all over the world as a triumph for socialism, although in fact it was the defeat of the liberals and Socialists who had overthrown the Tsar by a dictatorial minority of terrorists...

...For even in Europe there are national differences so radical as to defy any useful generalization...

...It could be that European economic integration may provide the external impetus for countries like France and Italy to lay the foundations on which socialism can build...

...What, then, are the prospects for European Socialism at present...

...They saw clearly enough that the future of socialism in these countries lay with the organized trade-unionists rather than the cliques of "Marxist" intellectuals...

...It started by inheriting the immense national prestige of Churchill's wartime Britain...

...Among the dictators, Stalin, Hitler, Peron and Nasser have all described themselves as socialists...

...It must differ from place to place and time to time...

...Communism and the economic crisis between them helped to produce the third catastrophe which dominated the interwar years—the rise of fascism...

...Never since the days of slavery had the economic exploitation of man by man assumed so dreadful a form...

...Socialism first developed in 19th-century Europe as a reaction of intellectuals to the moral degradation and material suffering imposed on the new working class by the Industrial Revolution...

...there are the French Radical Socialists, and the Belgian Social Christians...

...It is interesting that constitutional monarchy has almost everywhere gone hand in hand with Socialist government of the British type: Both depend on a rare degree of national unity and toleration...

...In this sense "revisionism"—a cardinal sin in the Soviet doxology—is an indispensable element in socialist development...

...Pragmatism, of course, is not enough bv itself, as Pierre Mendcs-France has discovered in France...

...Indeed, the human need it satisfies is so fundamental that it is impossible to give socialism any political definition which can be applied equally in all countries at all times...

...A dangerous split is liable to develop between Socialist ministers and those they purport to represent, which can sometimes be overcome only by undemocratic control of the party machine...

...Indeed, its appeal for the masses is such that a bewildering variety of systems has claimed some part in its heritage...

...Or, in other words, how can Socialists realize the assumption which is basic to all their economic thinking, that the state should represent the people...

...But even if the organizational problems of reunification can be overcome, the Italian Socialists will still have to formulate a realistic program of legislation which can provide a basis for economic and social advance without demanding that Italians turn into Englishmen or Swedes...

...The French Socialist party now faces the choice between ossifying into a historical curiosity, like the Radical Socialists, or leading the fight to turn France into a modern democracy when the final debacle in Algeria brings the long-awaited crise de regime...

...Within a generation at most, the French and Italian Communist parties will either break their ties with Moscow or shrivel into insignificance...

...As the trade unions grew in strength, the more intelligent members of the ruling class had the sense to meet their demands half-way...

...There is, in fact, only one lesson which the less successful Socialist parties can learn from their more fortunate Northern comrades—the habit of pragmatism itself, the determination to relate programs to the concrete problems of the nation, and to test the prescriptions of doctrine or tradition at all times by the welfare of the human beings concerned...

...And though experience soon brought wisdom, every Socialist party in the world finally split into a democratic and a Communist group...

...Marx and Engels remedied this deficiency...

...By doing so, it has created an unnecessary rift between the European and Asian Socialist parties...

...And though there have always been good reasons why the healthy and prosperous Social Democracies of Britain and Scandinavia have hesitated to throw in their lot with the Continent, the Common Market is likely to force them to overcome their reluctance—with consequences from which socialism in Southern Europe is bound to benefit...

...The difficulties of restoring genuine democracy inside Pietro Nenni's PSI machine are well known...

...Though many Socialists in every country tried to see Hitler as just another Kaiser playing his part in a game of bourgeois power politics which was no concern of the working class, the rise of fascism contributed a great deal toward educating the European Socialists in the realities of international affairs...

...But though they eliminated some of the economic disturbances which result from private capitalism, they showed that state capitalism is subject to contradictions which are no less damaging...

...Socialism is a social response by human beings to their economic and political environment...

...Each generation of Socialists in every country has the right and the duty to reinterpret its principles in the light of the situation in which it finds itself...

...After winning a crushing election victory, it organized Britain's postwar recovery so successfully that Britain was the first European country to dispense with Marshall Aid...

...In nearly every country, they formed at least a third of the Government...

...the Socialist intellectuals had achieved some sort of alliance with the working-class trade-unionists in most European countries...

...On the Continent, the bulk of these intellectuals were Marxist—though the process of revising early Marxism had already gone some way...

...And in Britain the architect of postwar Conservatism, "Rab" Butler, has boasted: "We are all Social Democrats now...

...Finally, the advance of European Socialism is certain to be assisted by the evident decomposition of Communism as an international movement...

...By the beginning of the First World War...

...But even if the official French Socialist party fails to fulfil its destiny, there are many ardent spirits in France who will be able to take up the torch it drops...

...And when peace came, nearly all the European Socialist parties made great gains...

...Thus the generalizations which Marx made about capitalism a century ago no longer conform to the reality in Europe or North America—indeed, in some cases they apply better to the system in Soviet Russia, where in the absence of democracy the primary accumulation of capital continues, albeit under a different system of ownership, at the same pace and with the same ruthlessness as in Western Europe during the worst period of the Industrial Revolution...

...Communism is essentially a conspiratorial technique for winning and maintaining power, concerning itself with means alone, not ends...

...Yet it has already established itself as a dominant political ideal in most parts of the world...

...The Italian and Norwegian Socialist parties joined the Comintern en bloc...

...The big social, political and economic changes took place under other auspices...

...Bismarck laid the foundations of the welfare state...

...In Britain, Disraeli and Shaftesbury began to mitigate the worst evils of industrialism...

...During the next twenty years, Socialism was to get its first chance for office at the national level...

...Ironically enough, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States who first used state intervention effectively to deal with the consequences of the slump...

...The domestic program was carried out by a system of economic planning and control more sophisticated than any other country has yet developed...

...Having won power, they were to exercise the major economic functions on behalf of the people through the state machine...

...In Britain, the Socialist intellectuals tended rather to be Christian idealists or Fabians...

...The Marxist method undoubtedly provided better tools for understanding industrial Europe in the 19th century than reformers or revolutionaries had ever had before...

...The structure of a Communist party, like its jargon, differs little from Moscow to Rome or Jakarta...

...For this reason, it may have been a mistake for the new Socialist International to have attempted to formulate general policies on either domestic or world problems...

...But unless Socialism is related to the realities and possibilities of specific situations, it is liable to degenerate into a hypocritical jargon for disguising casuistry...

...It was customary in those years to look upon Europe as a Socialist continent midway ideologically as well as geographically between capitalist America and Communist Russia...

...In Britain and Scandinavia, they won absolute majorities...

...When Europe emerged in 1945 from the Second World War, the prospects for Socialism were much brighter than in 1918, and the Socialist parties were infinitely more mature...

...The British Labor party, reputed the least doctrinaire of all, had bound itself in its written constitution to seek the public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange...

...As an intellectual system it is an art, not a science...

...There is a danger that the socialization of the nation will lead to the nationalization of socialism...

...In the second place, few Continental countries enjoy the national homogeneity which centuries of isolation have produced in Britain...

...Since then, the European Socialists have everywhere lost ground...

...Why, then, did the Continental Socialists fail where their Northern comrades succeeded...

...It was a remarkable list of achievements which inevitably gave the Labor party a predominant position in the Socialist International...

...A Socialist leader often faces the choice between trying to strengthen democracy at the expense of his party or vice versa...

...The war itself brought the total disintegration of the International and the disintegration of many member parties, as the working class chose to fight for King or Kaiser...

...In an intellectual achievement which has few parallels in history, they described contemporary society as a war between classes whose characteristics were determined by their place in the process of production...

...In Britain, the Labor Government collapsed after only two years in office because its leaders had not the slightest idea of how to use their power...

...And their enormities compelled the Socialists to examine the central problem which Marx and the Fabians alike had failed to recognize: How is it possible to combine democratic control at both the national and local level with effective central planning...

...Coalition government has a dual disadvantage in that it forces compromises on Socialist leaders without enabling the rank and file to learn the lessons of Government experience...

...They had yet to face the unhappy paradox that, to the extent that Socialist governments democratically represent the whole of a nation, they are responsible for protecting its interests even against other nations...

...It is interesting to read the comments of Marx and Engels on the Anglo-Saxon labor movement—particularly in the Sorge Correspondence...

...Marx and Engels could only explain how they had happened after the event...

...Yet, few of the early socialists had a clear idea of what precisely needed changing in the existing system, or of the general shape which a socialist society should assume...

...Meanwhile, all over Europe, ignorant of Marx's ideas and without his advice, the working class was beginning to organize in trade unions for its own protection...

...The trade unions were particularly militant and successful in Britain and America—indeed it was the American unions which established May First as the workers' annual festival...

...Its only rigid principles are moral imperatives, not political programs...

...In the first place, British Socialism depends on a degree of civic responsibility and administrative efficiency which does not yet exist in Southern Europe—indeed, it did not exist in Britain until the siege economy of wartime forced its growth...