The Meaning of Social Democracy

...the compulsory abolishment of unemployment through forced labor hardly deserves to be hailed as a giant step in the fight for freedom...

...All the institutions of welfare and social security, all the organs of economic planning, all the social instruments for the more rational use of land and natural resources, for preventing waste and pollution, can be built only at the price of a growing state bureaucracy and of restrictions imposed on the autonomy of smaller economic and regional units...

...The economic advantage this society enjoys consists in its being able to keep its failures, or some of them, a secret by producing false statistics or none at all...

...their claims are based on the human rights idea, which cannot possibly be defined in what have become anachronistic terms...

...It has no ultimate prescription for the total salvation of mankind...

...This leads us to the often discussed question of double standards in assessing political regimes...

...The trouble with the social-democratic idea is that it does not stock or sell any of the exciting ideological commodities that totalitarian movements—Communist, Fascist, or Leftist—offer dream-hungry youth...

...One easily notices the persistence of absurd old cliches in journalistic jargon all over the world...

...Similar clashes are clearly unavoidable in most of the \ allies we cherish...

...It matters not what is behind the slogans—the apparently incurable short-sightedness of big business or the out—moded Leftist inhibitions of the liberal lobbies...

...A system that wants to leave no domain of human existence, including human memory, out of its control, is compelled to apply the huge machinery of the lie to all forms of expression and to give false names to everything it produces...

...In today's world the Soviet internal regime is probably the most potent single factor likely to trigger off a global war (which is not to say that is the actual intention of its rulers...

...Another case of conceptual confusion that there is perhaps no need to dwell upon, since it has been repeatedly criticized recently, is the Left/Right distinction...

...And, fortunately for us, civil liberties are the necessary condition of productive efficiency...

...Yet in the case of the Soviet system, as I have suggested, we have additional reasons for our discourteous behavior: Unlike the case of Uruguay, South Africa, or for that matter, Albania and Cambodia, the Soviet internal regime is obviously linked with the never-saturated hunger of an imperialist state for new areas of domination...

...It is sheer absurdity to say, for instance, that in Cuba or China "people have less freedom, yet more equality": they have none, quite apart from the distribution of welfare and the access to scarce material goods...

...The working class, adulated in slogans and kept quiet by the police machinery, has neither power nor moral or economic reasons to help the ailing economy...

...Under the ideological rubbish there is real despair...

...Having concentrated an enormous power without responsibility—an accumulation of power exceeding anything known in history—the ruling class, by virtue of its very position, generates permanent mismanagement and huge waste, and the attempts to set up the all-encompassing planning system end fatefully in all-pervading chaos...

...slavery is economically efficient only during the earliest stages of technical development, and political slavery is an enormous obstacle to productivity...

...Still, if it is true that among the values of social democracy freedom is the condition of all others, it is misleading to apply the name "freedom" to anything people need or claim...

...Obvious as the position of those who display their moral indignation according to their political allegiances might be, it is true, on the other hand, that our concern with the internal conduct of regimes of various countries is usually prompted by other considerations as well...

...There are no such things as reactionary tortures and progressive tortures, Left labor camps and Right labor camps, censorship for oppression and censorship for liberation...

...No artificially concocted ideals or mirages can be imposed on anyone...

...Certainly, nowadays one hardly finds people who explicitly endorse the Stalinist slogan of old that the measure of "being Left" is one's attitude toward the Soviet Union...

...Briefly, there are many well-justified claims which ought not to be confused with each other, for such a deliberate confusion is one of the ideological instruments to glorify oppression and violence...

...In the world as it is, full of misery, hunger and oppression, this much at least seems to be clear: Neither technical devices alone nor political measures alone are sufficient to bring about the hope for a peaceful and more equitable order...

...There is no unemployment in concentration camps, and concentration camps do not become the abode of freedom...

...East Europeans are well aware that America has no wonder-making contrivance to force changes on oppressive regimes and to reverse immediately the situation of countries robbed of their national independence and democratic institutions...

...Nobody knows how this price can be avoided, but the outcry against big government heard throughout the democractic world proves that it is heavy...

...they should not try to expand their ideas into a sort of all-embracing worldview with ready-made catechisms...

...This admittedly involves wearing out the most aggressive expansionism, encouraging by all nonviolent means the diversity and variety within Soviet dependencies, and opening access to truth to the peoples who were thrust into spiritual slavery...

...To put it another way: Social democracy defends freedom because it is a value in itself, the most precious treasure of life, and because it is the condition within which most of the other things it defends can flourish...

...It is consoling, though, that nowadays one hears more and more voices of people who have reached the conclusion that the old-fashioned theory that the purpose of our schools is to teach is not an entirely absurd one after all...

...Or on the side of the Cambodian "liberators" who managed to convert the entire country into a concentration camp after murdering all those suspected of being literate...

...It must be restricted by the principle of the inalienable rights of individuals, which no majority verdict may abrogate...

...It is both common—sensically true and abundantly proven by the experience of Communist states that a political system operating with built-in information barriers, burdened with an obsessive secretiveness, using the criterion of political servility in promoting managerial cadres, and not having to respond to the needs and wishes of the population except under the threat of desperate revolts, is bound to be chronically sick in terms of the production of wealth...

...Among the values included in the social-democratic idea, even the value of majority rule cannot be accepted as an absolute...

...Nevertheless, social democracy is ready to uphold both planning and autonomy, and it is right...

...Pollution is a matter of a rational reckoning of risks, of gains and losses...

...Are you asking if 1 am on the same side as the guardians of Gulag and invaders of Czechoslovakia...

...It might sound impertinent for someone like myself, who is only a superficial and casual observer of the American scene, to comment on this subject, yet similar trends, more or less advanced, are noticeable in many highly developed areas of the world...

...Something more is needed that cannot be a by-product of institutional and technical improvements: the reorientation of both individual and collective value attitudes This is admittedly a generality that does not yet entail any well-defined and feasible proposals...

...There is apparently agreement that the process of spiritual self-mutilation of youth we witnessed in the late '60s is not over, although its forms have changed, and that it can be traced to the collapse of the value system young people have inherited from us...

...Here the point is not that we should make chimerical claims and demand that political criteria not be applied to political actions...

...Strategic idea" does not imply war planning...

...it cannot promise the fireworks of the final revolution to settle definitively all the conflicts and struggles...

...It is not fun...

...The social-democratic idea admits the inescapable truth that many of the values it honors restrict each other and can be put into practice only through often painful and awkward compromises...

...But the roots of the problem obviously go deeper...

...Zero pollution is obviously impossible without the utter destruction of civilization, since the survival of the human race depends largely on industry...

...His calls for a democratic transformation of Communism led to his expulsion from the Party in 1966, and to the loss of his chair at the University of Warsaw in 1968...

...Consequently, the question "Which side are you on, Left or Right...

...The reply will perhaps not be beyond our reach if we are prepared to confront all the sides of the question...

...We have to admit that the principle of majority rule must be constrained by the principle of individual rights, and that the human rights concept is valid irrespective of the majority's decrees...

...It requires the commitment to a number of basic values for example, freedom, equal opportunity, a human-oriented and publicly supervised economy—and it demands hard knowledge and rational calculation, for we need to be aware of, and to investigate as deeply as possible, the historical and economic circumstances in which these values arc to be implemented...

...This readiness to behave like importunate meddlers ought to be applied evenly, of course...

...He is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Montreal, Yale and California...

...Remember, though, that in World War II the same slogans were launched to explain why the United States should not join the fighting...

...People who define themselves by the so-called Left tradition are, as a whole, more guilty of resorting to double standards, not because they are naturally immoral, but because their socially inherited reflexes render them more hypocritical, because they have always employed moralistic language, while in many countries the conservative establishment has pretended much less to be guided by moral ideals and more freely admitted a concern with matters of realpolitik, raison d'eial, and trade...

...Still, perhaps we can show more modest things and more modest goals which can give meaning to life...

...Then the slogan meant: Let Hitler swallow the whole of Europe...

...When I had the opportunity for the first time to visit the United States at some length in the late '60s, what struck me was that in the then frequent discussions about the social role of the school nothing seemed to be certain except one thing: that what school was not about was giving the pupils knowledge and intellectual skills...

...Nazism and Europe are not our business...

...just as the political and economic powers of the Communist exploiting class support each other, so do the political and economic enslavement of the working society...

...The value of freedom has to be seen as the core of the social-democratic idea, for without it all other values are empty and inefficient...

...Well, if social democracy has any meaning, it is precisely not to forget that...

...what may be demanded instead is that political criteria not appear under the guise of moral norms...

...Not in spite of, but because of, the fact that the question of how to avoid the danger of global war and how to design a workable disarmament scheme has to have unconditional priority, it is of paramount importance that democratic countries exert peaceful, yet firm and unremitting pressure to advance the gradual and nonexplosive disintegration of totalitarian regimes...

...Therefore it must not promise measures that are supposed to bring simultaneously the efficiency of high centralization and the freedom of decentralization...

...it is difficult and unrewarding, and it does not suffer from self-inflicted blindness...

...The concept of democracy would be a parody of itself it if implied that anything endorsed by a majority is acceptable—that, for instance, 51 per cent of a population is acting democratically if it decides to massacre the remaining 49 per cent...

...At the same time, they must not evade the crucial question: What went wrong and what is wrong with the set of values we were brought up with, why have so many people not found these values life-supporting, why are they not ready to die for them...

...In terms of human rights the assessment is clear enough...

...That so many local issues almost automatically acquire a global meaning is something we cannot escape, and America clearly cannot shed the responsibility for the world order it has helped to shape for many decades...

...If we accepted the principle of unconditional majority rule as the sufficient mark of democracy, Hitler's rule in Germany, for a period clearly supported by the majority, would appear as a model democracy, as would all the populist or quasipopulist dictatorships which made claims to represent the majority and then represented it axiomati-cally and indefinitely because critics were slaughtered or silenced...

...Mendacity is not an accidental blemish on the body of Communism: It is the absolute condition of its health, of its life, more so than in non-totalitarian tyrannies...

...Some aspects of this confusion may be accounted for by our inability to cope with changes that otherwise are obviously positive—the staggering growth of knowledge and the rapid extension of schooling...

...these are three ways young people escape a world they feel they do not fit in any longer...

...it has invented no miraculous devices to bring about the perfect unity of men or universal brotherhood...

...The recent record of various military dictatorships in Latin America has been arguably worse than that of European Communist states in such essential points as the scale of tortures and government-initiated assassinations...

...in other words, that the roots of disarray in affluent open societies are in our minds, rather than in the price of oil...

...One cannot take satisfaction in the fact that this breakdown has found puerile, absurd or sometimes barbaric outlets, or that it was politically expressed in the pathetic fudge of the New Left, which had no solutions and no alternatives to offer...

...yet the material ability to travel, important though it might be, does not derive from freedom...

...it is not itself a freedom...

...Such slogans might be all right insofar as they express simply the trivial rule that foreign-policy issues may not be used as a pretext for neglecting or disregarding a just and democratic domestic order...

...it means a long-term policy that seeks global order without the risk of global war...

...If I am on the side of the policemen who two years ago savagely tortured hundreds of Polish workers, and a few years earlier slaughtered a still unknown number of dockers in Polish ports in cruel revenge for their protest against increasing poverty...

...Incidentally, this utter scorn for knowledge and logical abilities, for anything that one can acquire only through long and disciplined work and that cannot be converted into amusement, this used to be called, grotesquely enough, "liberalism"as if liberalism consisted in self-satisfied ignorance, or as if it specifically reflected the ideology of spoiled upper-middle class children...

...The scope of freedom is defined as the area within which individuals may make decisions as they wish, unrestricted by law, and though it is obviously the case that the freedom to decide is of no use for those whose choices are anyway determined by the lack of material power, the degree of power is not to be confused with the extent of freedom...

...Or are you asking whether I am on the side of those German terrorists who in a hijacked airplane designated all the passengers with Jewish names for slaughter...

...But this generality is good enough to pose a permanent challenge to social democracy if it wants to remain equal to its best tradition and to its very name...

...There are many justifiable claims that do not derive from freedom and should not be said to...

...Leftist moralists who demonstrate before the embassies of South Africa and Iran and seem to believe that Vietnam and Albania overflow with democratic virtue appear grotesque...

...But there are grounds to suspect that much more is involved: a lack of confidence among older generations in the intellectual and moral standards we inherited and, as a result, the loss of a strong will to convey these standards to our successors...

...There is no point in talking about equality in the absence of freedom, for one of the most important goods in today's world is the free access to information and the participation in power—both denied to a majority in despotic systems, totalitarian or not...

...We have to worry about man's survival in the first place and about the whales in the second: The nature-worship ideology is incapable of taking up the challenge of the modern economy...

...To be sure , no political party or movement may claim to have found a successful therapy for the moral void...

...it believes in no total, easy victory over evil...

...no, we are both entitled and duty-bound not to leave the oppressors quiet on the pretense of the non-interference principle...

...But a not-negligible difference between Uruguay and the Soviet Union is that the Uruguayan regime, abominable though it might be, poses no threat of world-wide expansion supported by mighty military machinery...

...For people who cannot afford to travel, freedom of international travel appears of little meaning, to be sure...

...We do admit—and I believe it to be a traditional element of the social-democratic approach—that no country in the world may maintain that its political regime, however oppressive, is protected from the eyes of outsiders...

...Political movements, except for totalitarian ones, are anyway not capable of providing solutions for metaphysicial and religious worries...

...Yet I do believe that it is spiritual, rather than economic, recession that threatens us...

...Various states and political movements are quasi-automatically being called Left (or "Marxist") if they get Soviet weapons...

...Nonetheless, these labels are still widely employed without anybody providing us with intelligible criteria of how they are defined, and these labels carry the suggestion that the entire world of political ideas, movements and regimes forms a continuous spectrum in which every unit may be located according to the amount of "Leftist" or "Rightist" components it contains...

...Moreover, ecological slogans may be, in fact often are, exploited to manipulate people for various political purposes only marginally related to the welfare of butterflies, let alone of people...

...It has an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions that produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed, and vindictive envy, yet it is aware of the narrow limits within which this struggle is being waged—limits imposed by the natural framework of human existence, by innumerable historical accidents, and by various forces that have shaped for centuries today's social institutions...

...That is the reason why the nonviolent antitotalitarian movements in Soviet-dominated countries go beyond the Left/Right categories...

...The governments that do business with both Chile and the Soviet Union cannot be accused of using double standards...

...Much as we are aware of social disasters caused by large-scale unemployment—economic waste, criminality, human suffering—the fact is that being employed is a condition enabling people to use their freedom in various ways...

...In this article, adapted from his address to the recent national convention of the Social Democrats, USA, Professor Kolakowski describes the possibilities and the limits of humane political action...

...some others are labelled Right once they want to shed the foreign yoke if this yoke happens to be Soviet...

...Much as we might be appalled at the sight of man-made natural disasters that endanger both the human future and the existence of birds, fish and trees, we must not forget that ecological slogans alone, isolated from the complexity of modern life, can no more contribute to rational proposals for economic organization and political reform than the belief in economic growth as the supreme or exclusive objective...

...to say that since we are not saints ourselves, we should forget the oppression elsewhere amounts to saying let us forget the oppression...

...and that there are viable possibilities to offer in place of withdrawal from the world, putting one's own reason to sleep, or sinking into despair (three aspects of each of three false cures I have mentioned...

...The worldwide degradation of educational systems and the uncertainty about their function is a particularly glaring symptom of this disarray...

...pretensions and with an "ultimate goal...

...It might turn out that after all most of our traditional values are neither dead nor obsolete, even though they were probably very badly ordered...

...has to be rejoined by another question: "What do you mean by asking if I am on the Left side...

...drugs, false mysticism and revolutionary daydreams are three main pseudo-cures for a genuine disease that cannot simply be dismissed by pointing out the inef fica-cy of the medicaments...

...Here is a regime that is supposed to be ruled by, and get its legitimacy from, an ideology with universalis...

...I am one of those who see no reason to give credence to the prophets announcing the decline of Western civilization, the ruin of democratic institutions, and the victorious return of barbarism...

...The answer can only be: "Hell, no, I am not on the same side and I do not care a damn about being called Left if this means to applaud or excuse the violence, oppression, tortures, exploitation, and invasions provided only that the hangmen and the exploiters get their weapons from an anti-American source, this being the unspoken ideological criterion...

...it is right as long as it keeps unceasingly in mind that these two principles run counter to each other and in no conceivable society will they be fully achieved...

...thus all areas of life and all past and present events must be depicted as elements of the triumphant march toward this goal...

...The conclusion is simple: If the Left/Right distinction is to have any recognizable sense it has to be redefined completely and applied only to movements and attitudes within the democratic segment of the political spectrumun—equivocally excluding all terroristic organizations, totalitarian ideologies, and police and military regimes, no matter what they call themselves...

...Ultimately, the new generations have to seek out ways for themselves to rediscover the meaning-giving life forms...

...To say that social democracy is not simply a political lobby voicing the aspirations and grievances of workers, underdogs and the oppressed, but a better human community as well, is neither controversial nor very enlightening...

...It is clearly essential to keep one's own population in ignorance, fear, and isolation, if one wants to use it as a helpless and inert tool for imperial purposes—if, for instance, one needs soldiers who, as in the case of Czechoslovakia 10 years ago, either did not know which country they were in or believed that they had been sent to a Czechoslovakia that had requested aid in the face of an imminent invasion by German fascists...

...We should admit that we have no prescription for the perfect world, hold no secret of happiness and no clue to the riddle of the universe...

...What they expect from America is not miracles, but a consistent strategic idea...

...This is why we, the people from the somewhat exotic Central and East European plains, do believe that in exposing and opposing Soviet despotism, we stand up not only for the regional interest of lands forcibly incorporated into a predatory empire as a result of the Yalta agreement, but for a better and safer world order as well...

...Freedom is negatively related to law, not positively to power...

...The tendency to escape is sometimes expressed in slogans like "the fight for democracy begins at home...