Witnesses for Social Democracy

...The loss of belief in ineluctable progress "confronts the individual with a world that has become increasingly incomprehensible and menacing in its complexity without the support of a simplifying world view...

...The trouble is that he has already described the major episodes from this period in earlier works (to which the reader is repeatedly referred), and Rise and Fall has been published primarily to fill the gaps...

...Within months, Stalin was dead, Tito, seeking to normalize relations with Moscow, was already reversing course, and this hopeful "we" had shriveled to a lonely "I...

...for the sake of our own working class and our own people...

...Rise and Fall is a healthy antidote for those Americans prone either to lament the absence or to dismiss the importance of ideas in history...

...We favor democracy for our own sake...

...For once Yugoslavia concluded that it was not Stalinist and began developing a critique of the USSR, it had to decide what it was...

...and for the purity of our socialist and Communist being and our final goals...

...The rationing of essentials that ordinary people must put up with is unknown to them...

...It is refreshing to read someone who in this day declares with knowledge and conviction: "The 'Social Democratic consensus...

...No further autobiographical volumes are promised, but Djilas does hope to leave some sort of remembrance of the murderers and other convicts he got to know so well behind bars...

...Understanding its importance, he took the manuscript to Tito, who initially censored the crucial passages, then relented, saying: "Let it stand...

...By 1950, Djilas was writing that the Soviet system, which he identified as state capitalism, had more in common with the U.S...

...At least a memory remains...

...he can be publicly denounced in Yugoslavia—doing so is a ticket for promotion—and can't answer back...

...With the ideas of Max Weber as a touchstone, he ranges from nuclear war to world hunger to the nature of democracy...

...With some bitterness, he observes that Western commentators, blinded by a belief in monolithic Communism, expected the rapid collapse of the dissident regime...

...In milder Yugoslavia, though he has served a total of nine years in prison and is subject to constant harassment by the authorities—his most recent arrest was in April 1984— the 73-year-old Djilas continues to live in Belgrade and to write...

...To deal with it requires serious institutional adjustments—more government involvement to influence investment, stronger international economic mechanisms, a shorter work week to accommodate technological change, the extension of democracy to restore legitimacy...

...Djilas is so intent on being a witness that he never gets down to simply relating theevents.Thereareconstant interruptions as he sets the record straight...

...They shop at special stores closed to the public...

...Tito himself argued in favor of a less autocratic role for the Party...

...In our present age of Reaganomics regnant, social democracy (or, should you prefer the gnat to the flea, Democratic Socialism) speaks in a weak and uncertain voice...

...There was a thrilling interaction of ideas and events at the time, as if Hegelianism had come to life in the Balkans...

...During this Yugoslav spring authority relaxed (albeit not enough to shut down the infamous Goli Otok prison camp...

...Djilas relates that at the onset of the crisis, in 1948, Tito's stoic and patriotic outburst—"To die on one's own soil...

...This crisis erupted most recently in the '60s, and has not yet passed...

...decades of striking success prove the contrary...

...It has proved insufficient for coping with the new problems of the present age because it did not go far enough...

...That is a minor flaw, though...

...Djilas, meanwhile, was leading the way, making speeches, drafting position papers, publishing article after article...

...Djilas, the most liberal Yugoslav leader, rode this wave until the tide receded and he found himself stranded...

...for socialism's sake (for without democracy there can be no socialism...

...During a speech in 1949, he horrified a portion of his audience by suggesting that deviations from socialism had to be watched for in Yugoslavia no less than in theUSSR...

...Most notably, at the Sixth Party Congress in 1952, he declared: " It is not to please the West or the East that we advocate democracy, and certainly not to please the vestiges of the bourgeoisie...

...While Tito's defection was changing the international order, reforms within were promising a more open, Democratic Socialist state...

...Lowenthal looks deeply at problems, thinks grandly, writes out of a coherent political tradition as well as a sense of history, and prescribes responsibly...

...He discusses such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas (critically) and Daniel Bell (amicably...

...Just as, Rise and Fall reminds us that individuals still exist who have risked all in its cause, however, Richard Lowenthal's Social Change and Cultural Crisis (Columbia University Press, 252 pp., $22.50) demonstrates that it remains a philosophy very much alive...

...As the only East European country to achieve its revolution without the aid of the Red Army, Yugoslavia prized its independence and possessed the inner resources to stand up to its giant neighbor...

...Subsequently, he decried the nation's inefficient collective farms...

...The New York Times reports that the Sandinista leaders live in fancy homes expropriated from the old bourgeoisie...

...To this degree...

...TheNew Class alone has been translated into more than 40 languages...

...In short, having made history for so long, Djilas here commits the error of trying to write for it...

...Bravely, defiantly, he continued to speak out for Democratic Socialism...

...The work of intellectuals like Djilas became critical to the nation's spiritual, and ultimately physical, survival...

...Unfortunately, this story tells better than it reads...

...At least one Soviet supporter committed suicide after his views became untenable, prompting Tito to bemoan: "My officers are killing themselves because someone says the Soviet Union isn't socialist...

...They even get reserved boxes at baseball games...

...Two months later he quit the Party...

...In January 1954, the Central Committee dismissed him from all official functions...

...Other publications such as The New Class meant more trouble, sketchily recorded in the book's final pages...

...His latest work, Rise and Fall (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 424 pp., $24.95), is the fourth volume of his autobiography, covering the most highly charged phase of his eventful life—from the conclusion of World War II, through Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet Union, to his fall from grace as one of his country's four top Communists...

...RiseandFallconcludes with Djilas' release from jail in the mid-'60s, following a second term...

...has not been hit by a crisis because it was based on false premises...

...Were he a Soviet citizen, he would long ago have been executed, or exiled, or perhaps simply shut away in a psychiatric ward...

...Most of all, he argues that the West has been going through a crisis of values since the rise of National Socialism...

...When Djilas is enumerating the intellectuals he has known or detailing the receptions he received in the various Soviet-bloc nations, the narrative practically collapses into a pile of index cards...

...Because the book is not an elaborated argument, individuals unsympathetic to Lowenthal's point of view—those, for instance, who see no situation that cannot be resolved by the "free market"—are unlikely to be persuaded...

...The last quarter of the book, entitled "Rebellion," is concerned mainly with isolation and prison...

...gave him the courage to carry on against seemingly hopeless odds...

...In October 1948, he wrote the first piece that openly criticized Stalin...

...Djlas' strongest message is the old-fashioned liberal one of Lord Acton that absolute power corrupts absolutely, yet history will surely place him among the martyrs of social democracy...

...Many of the essays in Lowenthal's book appeared originally in Dissent, Encounter, Social Research and similar magazines, and like any collection it suffers from the weakness of repetition...

...But for anyone whose social thinking begins with the welfare state, who is weary of defending government interventions that should never have to be defended, these pieces area tonic...

...We've spared Stalin long enough...

...that Tito and the Soviet leadership were in secret collusion regarding the intervention in Hungary, so it followed logically that I would have to be arrested...

...It is easy to sympathize with him...

...The cult of personality subsided...

...A still-interesting experiment in worker self-management was inaugurated, and a reformist criminal code was adopted...

...Nevertheless, the book never develops a flow, or a power to match the drama of its conlent...

...Didn't Milovan Djilas describe all this almost 30 years ago in The New Classl The man who wrote the classic description of the hardening of revolutionary arteries is one of the most enduring witnesses of our time—both philosophically and physically...

...system than with Yugoslavia's...

...His first prison term, from 1956-61, was precipitated in large measure by an article he wrote for The New Leader condemningtheSovietinvasionofHungary...

...Social Change and Cultural Crisis is a matter of taste, preaching for the converted...

...Djilas was too proud a man to recant, or to become a nonperson as another socialist with a human face, Alexander Dubcek, was later to do...

...Attacking the Russians in print was one thing, directing the spears toward one's o wn comrades quite another, yet Djilas' thought had taken wing and the dangers were not immediately apparent...

...He is not permitted to publish in his native land, but 14 books of political analysis, literary criticism, fiction and the like have appeared in the West...

...Never had concepts carried such weight...

...Djilas says: "Today we know...