Socialism and Democracy

...For the latter is the result of funded international scientific knowledge in which there are no national, racial or class truths...

...Indeed, where the worker is protected by a free trade union and has the right to strike, he may be far less exploited in a mixed welfare economy or a democratic capitalist economy than in a socialist economy if he does not enjoy the rights of a free trade unionist...

...But it does not follow that exploitation is impossible in a socialist society...

...I shall consider briefly three illustrations of Mr...

...By Sidney Hook SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY Notes on some Soviet myths According to the Marxist conception, socialism is a state of society in which private ownership of the chief means of production, distribution and exchange no longer exists...

...Would the fact that the Soviet Union was the first country to introduce a gigantic system of concentration and forced labor camps indicate the disadvantages of "the new socialist system...

...Exploitation may arise as much from the decisions made by the bureaucrat or manager or Party cell representing the state on the conditions, wages and tempo of work as from the decisions of an individual owner...

...Given the rate of progress in scientific medicine, in the absence of birth control a condition would be reached in which in a calculable future there would be no standing room on earth...

...The work of genius cannot be simply read off as a causal consequence of the economic or social milieu in which it was nurtured...

...England and France did not defend Poland against Hitler's attack merely because they were capitalist countries...

...The crucial question is not so much the legal form of ownership but the operational realities of power and responsibility...

...Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism...

...Is there any scientific law which is valid for one class and not another...

...It follows that a privileged group exists in a society wherever genuine political and economic democracy is lacking...

...Does not the attack on the possibility of objective truth strike a fatal blow at the prospects of international peace and understanding...

...The first task of those who believe with Mitin in the desirability of establishing harmonious relations between man and man, and men and nature, is to introduce genuine political and economic democracy...

...It may simply take another form...

...Would the fact that the Einstein theory which together with the work of Planck and Bohr is the basis of all recent work in atomic physics, prove the advantages of capitalist democracy...

...Not only capitalist countries like Japan but socialist countries like India and Communist countries like China must control population in order to make an economical and just use of their resources...

...Attempts to get working solutions are hard enough...

...The significance of this observation to some extent depends upon whether other social systems-slavery, feudalism and socialism-are also always accompanied by wars...

...Further, if capitalism is inevitably accompanied by war, how can Communists plead at the same time that peaceful coexistence between "countries with differing social systems" is "a matter of pressing historical necessity...

...In 1949 a writer in the Soviet magazine, Voprosy Filosofii, declared: "Marxism-Leninism shatters into bits the cosmopolitan fictions concerning supra-class, non-national, 'universal' science, and definitely proves that science, like all culture in modern society, is national in form and class in content...

...Rosa Luxemburg in her critique of the Russian Revolution wrote: "Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created...

...He says that genuine harmony between Man and Nature ultimately "means that there should be no privileged group in society...

...By Mitin's logic it should...

...This assertion is demonstrably false...

...A privileged group may be defined as any group whose exercise of political and economic power is independent of control by those who are affected by the group's decisions...

...If the rulers of a socialist economy are not responsible to the workers, if they are not removable through processes which register freely given consent or disapproval after genuine legally recognized opposition parties have been heard, in effect, these political rulers "own" the instruments of production...

...Mitin's conception of evidence: 1. "History," he writes, "has also proved that capitalism is always and inevitably accompanied by wars...

...In an attempt to justify the Communist system, the Soviet ideologist Mark Mitin, in a paper presented to the International Congress of Philosophy in Vienna last September, asserts as matters of fact what clearly is not the case, and makes statements which are incompatible with acknowledged fact...

...A people cannot decide freely to establish a socialist or any other kind of order unless there exists freedom of speech, assembly and press, not only for the partisans of the group in power but for those who are in opposition...

...Although their conclusions are different, they argue like Mitin: Both go beyond the evidence...

...The most serious consequence of the Soviet belief in national, class, and, indeed, Party truth is that it makes the quest for objectivity at the very outset altogether impossible...

...This sentiment explains why the Politburo of the Communist party believes it has justification for laying down a Party line in all fields from astronomy (against "counter-revolutionary Trotskyism in astronomy" in 1938) to zoology (against "the decadent school of Mendel and Morgan" in 1948...

...The state, because of its monopoly of all economic power under socialism, can, by the use of the bread-card and work-book as instruments of coercion, crush the worker far more completely than in a democratic welfare economy in which he can profit from the competition among capitalists, the protection of his trade union and the guarantees of a manifold social insurance...

...Both of these statements cannot possibly be true...

...it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators...

...but if the whole idea of objective truth is scrapped, then the danger is increased that what cannot be solved by reasoning together will be decided by class struggle and war...

...Would the fact that German scientists were the first to develop the V-2 bombs whose principles were used, together with German technicians, in launching the Soviet satellite prove the advantages of Fascism...

...Yet Mitin assumes that political conclusions can be drawn from scientific truth and that, since political conclusions express class truths, their alleged scientific premises have also a class content...

...They hold that where they rest on a popular mandate, they should not be abrogated by dictatorial resolution in order to introduce a system of "Mother-heroines" which converts women into breeding machines to supply recruits for large armies...

...Scientific knowledge by its very nature is international and objective...

...Otherwise Communists would have to give capitalism causal credit for producing Marx...

...Obviously, the indispensable conditions of freely-given consent were totally absent in the countries of the Soviet bloc, as they were in the Fascist countries...

...This seems to me to be profoundly true...

...2. In criticizing the neo-Malthusian claim that in some countries it is necessary to control the growth of population in the interest of human welfare, Mitin writes: "Actually life on earth could be interesting and full for an unlimited number of people...

...even Stalin conceded this...

...3. Mitin asserts that since the Soviet scientists were the first to launch an artificial satellite, this establishes "the advantage of the new socialist system...

...With one point in Mitin's paper I agree completely...

...But if the laws of science do not change with national boundaries, or racial boundaries, why and how is their content affected by class interest or allegiance...

...For capitalist countries are not always at war...

...The mode of political decision is at least as important and may sometimes be even more important than the mode of economic production...

...Nor when, together with the United States, they came to the aid of the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded its territory did they do so because they were capitalist...

...As long ago as 1884, the father of Russian Marxism, George Plekhanov, wrote that, if socialism is imposed by force on an economically backward country, it would lead "to a political deformity after the image of the Chinese and Peruvian Empire, a renewed Tsarist despotism with a Communist lining...

...For unless we can agree roughly upon the facts in any situation, unless we can make some objective estimate of the consequences of a proposed policy, unless we regard statistics not as a class science but as a science valid for all classes, no intelligent resolution of problems can be won...

...There are some who make invidious comparisons between the work of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and other giants in literature, art and music, produced under Tsarism, and the mediocre works of the socialist realists produced under Communism...

...The fallacy here is the obvious one of post hoc propter hoc...

...Since power over things is power over men, especially if the use of these things, the instruments of production, is necessary for life, it follows that socialism without democracy is slavery...

...As it stands the statement is false...

...As a rule we can attribute only economic consequences to the operation of an economic system, only social consequences to the operation of social institutions...

...This has always been recognized by humanistic socialists from Marx to the present...

...In the long run "the population bomb," unless controlled, may prove a greater threat to mankind than the hydrogen bomb...

...Mitin ignores the fact that relatively humane laws which permitted voluntary control of the size of families existed in the Soviet Union until the mid-Thirties, when they were abolished by Government decree...

...Those whom he denounces as neo-Malthusians believe that these laws made good sense...

...It is obvious that socialist democracy, or any other kind of democracy, cannot be present where the dictatorship of a political party, particularly of a minority political party, exists...

...Life would neither be interesting nor full, only full of woe...

...One could argue with great plausibility that there is a more authentic causal connection between the "new socialist system" and the network of forced labor camps, between "the new socialist system" and the setting up of political satellites on earth, than there is between "the new socialist system" and the launching of an artificial satellite of the earth...

...Worse still, since differences in class truths can only be settled by ruthless class struggle, it brings the class struggle into science and makes politics the arbiter of truth...