THE PECULIAR FEEBLENESS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATS
Viereck, Peter
The Peculiar Feebleness of So With replies by Erich Ollenhauer, Norman This article by Peter Viereck is adapted from one of the most controversial chapters in his Shame and Glory of the...
...Viereck rest his case so largely on the lamentable Weimar Republic...
...He appears to overlook the fact that Hitler set up a dictatorship and yet he "failed ultimately...
...Many of our hopes of peace depend upon the United States realizing in time that it is Asian Socialism, not Asian capitalism, that should have the help —without strings—of the surplus wealth of the West...
...The only differthat Western Germany would not today have been technically able to join the free world in practical partnership...
...The answer is not only economic but psychological...
...but basically the economy healthiest for democracy is most certainly the free market and free consumer choice, that encourager of individual diversities...
...Then overboard with such dogmas as class war...
...Viereck's "docile, duped, and cheering masses in the factories" to the defense of this Western outpost against Communist totalitarianism...
...lee, because these outstanding socialists aren't the kind of socialists he means...
...Contrary to Mr...
...He 4s the author of "Meta-politicsi From the Romantics to Hitler" and "Conservatism Revisted," and three books of poetryi "Terror and Decorum," his first, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, "Strike Through the Mask!," and "The First Morning," recently published by Scribner's...
...I do not know the latest figures, but they must be rising again...
...Foul-tempered is a much more accurate adjective for the views of 90 per cent of the press on the Labor government during that period...
...America isn't nearly as much the "free enterprise capitalism" as Mr...
...In fighting Hitlerism the German Social Democrats were fighting totalitarianism, and on two fronts...
...Being democratic includes social reform...
...There is still a Democratic Party to resist any efforts to turn these great achievements in social democracy over to private ownership...
...Viereck's essay might conceivably be useful in this connection, but the tone of the article simple invites antagonism from socialists, while it will do little to help the non-socialists who might advantageously pay heed to some of his advice...
...They were aggressive about it...
...They will play again the cracked phonograph record of their hymn of revolution...
...Official surveys have shown how the tasks of basic economic reconstruction are beyond the scope of private capital, and must be done under state planning...
...But the British Tories fought the Health Service, as the American Medical Association fought President Truman's much more modest measure...
...this, rather than bigoted socialist-"baiting," is my aim in these pages...
...Equally incontrovertible is the story of decisive support for Hitlerism from "Thyssen and other millionaires," who, says Mr...
...Viereck's "democrats-period" stood by and argued...
...This does credit to their sincerity...
...They should stop worrying about it and stop denying it...
...On the contrary, with great conscious or unconscious hypocrisy, dozens of very loud voices are talking about laissez faire theory, which they do not practice, and certainly about the worship of private profit...
...But what makes his article almost amusing is its double standard...
...But the very phrase "free enterprise"—here their conditioning makes them inflexible—the very phrase "free enterprise" horrifies all socialists and also the less moderate wing of New Dealers...
...and throw out their "revolutionary" dogmas...
...But many of its social-democratic teachings have been enacted into law by our Congress...
...But our socialist allies must move to all these centrist, anti-revolutionary conclusions by their own concrete experience and by their own free choice...
...I could make a much stronger article condemning all nonsocialists for their logical errors than Mr...
...With what consequences...
...Some sentences in Mr...
...The Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston...
...Author's Note Neither democratic socialism nor democratic capitalism has an exclusive monopoly on freedom...
...Nothing they can do will make the communists stop calling them capitalist tools...
...Some of them have lived, not only to tell the story, but in association with the late Kurt Schumacher, to vindicate their principles in rallying Mr...
...Viereck has written this brief piece, it hasn't too much relation to reality...
...But one element of the story is already on record and incontrovertible...
...The success of Scandinavian Social Democrats, insofar as it is really a success, proves my point...
...It was state capitalism...
...Full socialist control of press and radio by the government, even if indirectly via newsprint, and control of most economic power by government and lack of economic power by any kind of opposition, will make democracy impossible—not in theory but in actual practice, even if sincerely maintaining every one of the outward democratic forms in theory...
...It goes without saying that I assume throughout that the distinction between democratic socialism and communist subversion is absolutely fundamental...
...TVA, Boulder Dam, and other such publicly-owned projects have become a permanent part of the life of our democracy...
...It does not do credit to their capacity for preserving liberties...
...In the long run they will have to face the need of shifting their position: from the outward leftist fringe of society toward the more conservative Center...
...Viereck is in drawing so dogmatically his "fatal statist line...
...Lack of unity does not necessarily mean "ultimate failure...
...Viereck says it would have required a dictatorship...
...become the private property of General Motors...
...Why, with this evidence before his nose, does Mr...
...It seems almost fantastic," writes a colleague of Mr...
...Their conditioned response is to dismiss it as some Wall Street plot, some insincere propaganda slogan for selfish undemocratic interests...
...Lamenting, "Protect us from our friends who embarrass us," such socialists will denounce and repudiate my praise of the unsocialistic practice...
...I do not expect to see the U. S. Post Office turned over to private ownership any more than I expect to see the armed forces of the U.S.A...
...Then the usually careful Mr...
...Some socialist Hamlet...
...They fought with the weapons of democracy and with precious little aid from anybody, including the other democracies where realization of the implications dawned far too late...
...Clement Attlee, and most French and Scandinavian socialists...
...We have a new President in the White House, but that does not mean that we shall lose these gains...
...Germany's pre-Hitler Weimar Republic is a classic case of such failure...
...The answer is simply that an inherent inner conflict condemns all social democrats to be Hamlets...
...The "natural goodness" of the mass-man is somehow to prevent an all-powerful bureaucracy from abusing politically its excessive economic power...
...The truth of the matter is that today our political and economic myths, including some of our socialist myths, do not accurately and adequately conform to realities...
...Why, to put it cruelly, is democratic socialism ultimately a failure...
...Their economic wish for collectivism requires political dictatorship to enforce...
...Overboard, and good riddance, with the Hobson-Lenin misinterpretation of capitalism as an inevitable imperialist war...
...Above all, it was a socialist government which by its deliberate decision undertook the greatest voluntary abdication of Empire in history, granting independence to India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon...
...American busy-bodies must never try to bully them into it...
...The second charge is that its program of public ownership destroys political liberty...
...The fight against totalitarianism was, and is, to Social Democracy a matter of principle...
...Viereck will find that it is democratic socialism, not "free enterprise" democracy which is considered the real alternative to Communism...
...In Europe, America can and should work with democratic socialists against communism where-ever they are democrats first, as they are in the case of Ernst Reuter, the mayor of Berlin...
...As for Mr...
...Viereck talks glibly of social reform as something not distinctively socialist that Disraeli Tories or democratic American capitalists would carry out...
...Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals...
...Also, it had a world revolution in which its colonial possessions were at stake...
...What he said might have been applied reasonably well :o the German Social Democrats before World War II...
...They want economic collectivism and political individual rights at the same time...
...ence was that our Tories were defeated...
...I do not know of any socialist movement that believes every small business ought to be state-owned...
...Unlike Bolshevik pseudo-socialism and fascist pseudo-capitalism, democratic socialism and democratic capitalism hate tyranny and are today allied against it, willy-nilly...
...At the peak of the war it bought PETER VIERECK is a good thinker and an excellent writer who has rendered very real service in the discussion of boti fascism and communism...
...Those dogmas are a hangover from an earlier century, before history established beyond challenge the unrevolutionary nature of freedom...
...Individual liberty today depends on being able to bring economic forces under voluntary democratic control...
...But social reform—Christian humanitarianism or 19th-century "Tory socialism"— ial Democrats By Peter Viereck homas, Upton Sinclair, and Morgan Thomson does not at all mean the statist "socialism" of present American and European socialists...
...Viereck suggests...
...He ignores that very important document, Aims and Tasks of Socialism, adopted unanimously by the Frankfurt conference of socialists which reorganized the Second International...
...It is the consistent, unyielding, and honorable role played by the Social Democrats in fighting Hitlerism from the start...
...a socialist asks...
...That idealists should come into power at all is a miracle...
...In spite of this, it held power for...
...Not yet daring to breathe aloud the heresy of sobriety, some socialists tacitly have reached these centrist, mixed-economy conclusions already...
...In the case of Britain's Labor Party, which came into power with'Flogging A Dead Horse' - By Norman Thomasout a dictatorship, there was an economic situation after World War II resembling the one Germany had had after World War I. The Labor Party inherited an almost bankrupt economy...
...Still a minority, these more reasonable souls are found with increasing frequency in England and Scandinavia...
...There is need of re-examination by socialists and others of old dogmas...
...I use it to mean a statism that socializes the economic and industrial life of the country...
...What he says doesn't apply to it...
...He jauntily dismisses socialist criticisms of laissez faire economics as the logical meaning of "free enterprise" by saying, "Nobody is speaking of total laissez faire nor of materialistic profit worship...
...Among the postwar shortages in Britain under a Socialist government, there was none more apparent than that of the kind of editorials he mentions...
...That depends on which half of the contradiction your social democrat stresses...
...Viereck's "Hamlets" (the Social Democrats), of course they have never been unified...
...VIERECK really ought to come down out of his liberal ivory tower and take a look at what happened in Britain between 1945 and 1951 before he expresses a belief that socialism produces only High-Minded Editorials and is incapable of taking action in any crisis...
...But what about Scandinavia...
...All this does not change the fact that, in the long run, the Hamlet wavering between freedom and statism will continue to enfeeble the socialists themselves...
...The Social Democrats must certainly take their share of the blame in Germany, but democracy was murdered there at least as much by the non-socialist democrats (and the Communists) who appeased or connived with the Nazis...
...Although The Progressive rejects Mr...
...In Scandinavia and New Zealand they have retained— and in some cases are still retaining —office longer than most governments...
...Add to this very sizable task the economic situation of a country which had lost a great war...
...Far more people voted in 1950 and 1951 at the end of the nationalizing process than at the beginning of it, and they were more evenly divided...
...Democratic socialism is young, but it has nevertheless spread the ideas of production for use all over the world...
...The Achilles heel of even the wisest democratic socialists is that they recognize no statist margin, limiting the usefulness of even the wisest social legislation beyond a certain point...
...Not communism, not Wall Street, but only the socialist Hamlets themselves worry—as vacillators always do—about the absurd "sell out" accusation...
...He concludes that because of its nature it would require a dictatorship to keep it in power...
...It is the means of making Western Germany a viable element of the international community...
...Democratic Socialist administrations have held power in many other places since...
...the American Tories won...
...In the pages which follow, Mr...
...Then why has it so frequently failed to stop either communism or fascism in Europe...
...Partly they will do so for fear of giving one more excuse to the communists to "expose" social democrats as "selling out to Wall Street...
...The Labor government wrested from private enterprise the basic industries and services in the country...
...That this accusation is a lie, is realized both by the communist accusers and by that old, toothless, moth-eaten lion of 'Anything But Feeble' By Erich Ollenhauer Wall Street, who after 20 caged years can roar forth no more than an astonished squeak on being told he "dominates" the anti-communist world...
...The present defense program, which keeps the economy at full production, is a most significant form of statism...
...In India and Indonesia and Burma—vital areas where the minds of men in the present world war of ideas are still uncommitted — Mr...
...But while many social democrats are democrats first, let us not optimistically overlook the fact that many others still are socialists first...
...Social democracy has an attractive social program for both the masses and the intellectuals...
...But not always and not basically...
...Born in New York City in 1916, he studied at Harvard and Oxford and then fought in the African and Italian campaigns of World War II...
...Viereck is professionally dedicated that the Social Democrats, once again alone, fought measures of central control in the Basic Law of 1949, when the occupation powers and the political parties now in the federal government were pressing for decentralization on such a scale MR...
...Viereck in his innocence and possible ignorance, "know better now...
...VIERECK'S chapter on Social Democracy begins with this statement: "The cause of democratic socialism, opposing both fascism and communism, contains more good will than most isms of eur time...
...It certainly doesn't accurately describe any positions which I and the American Socialist Party have taken in recent platforms...
...So let us acquit one of the major democratic socialist governments of inability to take action...
...This ar:icle is not in my sober judgment up to his high standard...
...Nobody is speaking of total laissez faire, nor of materialistic profit worship...
...Why has it failed to summon forth the energy and enthusiasm to keep itself in power firmly and long...
...Like all disillusioned idealists, is he falling into the trap of distorting the world to fit his ideals...
...The Weimar Republic was opposing the aggressive forces of both communism and fascism with "good will" alone...
...Viereck's argument is analyzed critically by four distinguished social democrats—Erich Ollenhauer, head of the Social Democratic Party of Germany...
...and here it had the Communists as opposition...
...And finally overboard, bag and baggage, with the delusion that fascism is the creation of capitalism, its shield against the working class...
...PETER VIERECK, associate professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, is also a poet and essayist whose writings have won considerable attention in recent years...
...Good will," opposing the aggressive ill-will of two extremes, is certainly not enough for the holding of power permanently...
...Viereck, Prof...
...He briefly dismisses the Scandinavians, Reuter, and Att45 per cent of the gross national product...
...A rose by any other name...
...In historical perspective I contend that Social Democracy is proving anything but feeble, and, on the contrary, is one of the world's most hopeful forces for freedom...
...II A look at the world shows how unhistorical and unrealistic Mr...
...II Compared with their stand on totalitarianism, so-called economic collectivism is not for the Social Democrats an absolute and all-embracing principle...
...It was not a humiliating failure that Weimar and the Social Democrats failed to prevent Germans frpm voting Nazi, as Mr...
...That would only make them react chauvinistically to the opposite extreme...
...both share it —and I suspect they increase their share of it in proportion as they subordinate economics to ethics and abandon the arid economics-minded-ness of either Marx or Adam Smith...
...What they do say is that the principal economic levers that control a nation's well-being should be under the control of the community...
...Fascism is not capitalism or any other economics, but a state of mind...
...Independence must be achieved by a certain date...
...Socialism is a statism that nationalizes not merely a post office here, a public utility there, but the main means of production...
...It is a surrender of the soul to evil, to the temptation of power, to the particularly murderous brand of evil that results when you substitute egotistic domineering for Christian self-restraint and when you substitute hate for mutual sympathy and substitute pre-Christian, tribal loyalties of blood for post-Christian brotherhood...
...At this stage, the ambiguous word "socialist" becomes—like Disraeli's Tory socialism or maybe Nie-buhr's Christian synthesis—a sound sense of the organic ties between free individuals...
...Viereck's contention the Social Democrats must, therefore, oppose any form of dictatorship...
...Why is most of that good will squandered without producing more than High-Minded Editorials...
...After that, ownership, whether by the government, a municipality, a cooperative, or a 'Unhistorical and Unrealistic7 By Morgan Thomson private group, will be decided according to a country's background and experience...
...They will have to say quite brutally to themselves, "Come, come, no nonsense now...
...The government has, in fact, been America's biggest buyer for years...
...Viereck has written in condemnation of socialists by the application of his method...
...Who were the Hamlets there...
...It would have been a most inadequate discussion of their failure because it leaves out of account other factors in that failure, among them the extraordinary strength of nationalism...
...Nazism set its rigid state control over more German capitalists than did all German socialist and communist parties put together under Weimar...
...The Marxists, the Bevanites, and the Schumacher wing of German socialists really "mean business" with their socialism...
...In Germany this happens to mean the creation of democratic defense against the political stupidity of the docile, duped, and cheering class where Hitler found his Thyssens and other millionaire supporters, and where his heirs are today finding new support...
...Viereck cites the Weimar Republic as proof that Social Democracy must fail...
...They went it alone when the fight came to mean incarceration and concentration camps for Social Democrats...
...Peter Viereck THE CAUSE of democratic socialism, opposing both fascism and communism, contains more good will than most "isms" of our time...
...six years without a dictatorship...
...Precisely because, from their point of view, the socialists were taking far too much decisive action...
...But Mr...
...The humiliating failure of Weimar and the Social Democrats to prevent Germans from voting Nazi tempts one to misquote Churchill: never has so little been achieved with so much effort by so many...
...Viereck's basic premise, we decided to open our columns to his views because we felt he had done a forthright job of raising fundamental questions of vital concern to all progressives...
...Central banking, coal, railways, road haulage, civil aviation, electricity, steel, and gas—20 per cent of the entire economy—were passed peaceably into public ownership...
...After becoming emperor, Augustus maintained the sovereignty of the Roman Senate in theory...
...As his literary production and his function as a professor of history indicate some responsibility for the independent assimilation of facts, I am, nevertheless, tempted to place his contribution on the debit side of the ledger in his new book...
...Broadcasting, by the way, was made a government-backed monopoly by the Tories 30 years ago...
...They jeopardize that alliance by intemper-ately denouncing each other...
...The source of their paralyzing inner conflict is that they want incom-patibles...
...The Labor government, in the face of bitter opposition from the medical profession, took the treatment of sickness right outside the commodity sector of the economy, and made it a human right as basic as "due process of law...
...and no party on earth has ever been, except under a dictator...
...Norman] Thomas, long the leader of American Socialists, and Upton Sinclair, the noted author who has been identified with the democratic Left for half a century.—The Editors...
...Here I am using "socialism" not in any watered-down sense...
...The full, detailed, and documented story of Hitler's ascendancy has yet to be assembled and told...
...First, he makes his own definition of socialism...
...Well, it can't be done...
...So much for facile theorists...
...He laid down an ultimatum...
...It will also enfeeble and demoralize any country under them...
...I found TVA when I visited it a more comprehensive experiment in democratic socialist planning than any nationalized industry in Labor Britain...
...Their sincere political wish for individual liberty requires some individualism also in all the non-political fields, economics not excluded...
...in 1949 it still purchased 17 per cent...
...A Little Child Shall Lead Them' By Upton Sinclair MR...
...Instead they put their faith (that same old Rousseauistic faith) in counterbalancing the superstate by the mass-electorate, via its theoretical "democratic controls...
...Democratic socialism, after all, is only a convenient label...
...This it is— sometimes and superficially...
...Hitler called Nazism National Socialism, but it was not socialism at all...
...Viereck and many others would like to think, and in Europe we are worried about the impact on our economies of any reduction in your government expenditures...
...But though democratic socialism is a contradiction, it is not one that necessarily leads to ruin...
...and it is not yet a failure by any means...
...Thus it had its full share of the cold war to cope with...
...The Socialist Party in the United States has failed politically to come into power...
...Why, Mr...
...But not by criticizing each other in a good-natured free debate, such as the open forum sponsored this month by The Progressive...
...The evidence in Britain is quite the reverse, even though the socialists nationalized the "main means of production...
...The very few revolutions that did take place against Hitler inside Germany came from the high aristocracy, not from the docile, duped, and cheering masses in the factories...
...so has social security, and these gains were not achieved by dictatorship...
...Each can gain by having its own doctrinaire cliches criticized constructively...
...The Peculiar Feebleness of So With replies by Erich Ollenhauer, Norman This article by Peter Viereck is adapted from one of the most controversial chapters in his Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, just published...
...The American foreign aid programs have been state enterprise on a vast and imaginative scale...
...Morgan Thomson, editor of the Glasgow Forward and Labor Member of Parliament...
...Europe's unsocialist socialism and America's classless, democratized capitalism are both in practice—never in theory—living in a thoroughly mixed-up economy, flexible and undoctrinaire, and doing very well, thank you...
...It is an irony of the history to which Mr...
...It might have been written so as to be a pertinent warning to socialists and others against the dangers of slipping into a dangerous statism, but as Mr...
...did that mean Rome was still a republic...
...It is no good suggesting they were forced to do it...
...The Tories would have stayed...
...The essence of democratic socialism is that it is wholly opposed to dictatorship...
...The Communists under a dictatorship speak of their "Socialist Soviet Republic," but they have neither socialism nor republicanism...
...Arnold Wolfers of Yale, "that some should find it hard even today to draw a clear distinction between German Socialists and German Communists, this at a time when no party is carrying on the fight against communism with more vigor and consistency than the Socialists...
...along with the concept that "good will" is an essential part of salvation from slavery...
...It becomes a sound rebuke to the laissez [aire anarchism of the more doctrinaire capitalists, yet without crossing the fatal statist line...
...It may yet be proven that "a little child shall lead them...
...To hold power under such circumstances with "good will" alone would have been more than a miracle...
...Socialist Britain mustered more than an 80 per cent poll, compared to 50 per cent in "free enterprise" America, and I venture to think that at the end of six years of socialism we had more freedom of thought, more tolerance for political non-conformity, and less McCarthyism than in the realms of the "free market...
...Surely it is an obvious answer, though perhaps not normally stated in just that way...
...You will do it your own way in America, and give it the name you choose...
...An innate schizophrenia paralyzes— (with great but rare exceptions) — their ability to take action in any crisis or to stay firmly in power against aggressive enemies who know what they want...
...VIERECK adds to my awareness of one "peculiar feebleness of Social Democrats," namely their failure to put across the true story of Social Democracy to intellectuals in America...
...They had, at the same time, to fight not only Nazism but Moscow Communism acting through puppet forces in Germany, operating in unison with the Nazis, concerting with reactionary forces, helping to arm the Reichswehr, and, in the process, fooling the intellectuals, many of whom have taken such a long time to discover the error of their ways and to recant...
...Then he asks why democratic socialism "ultimately" is a failure...
...Attlee acted...
...Viereck deals with the complex subject of classes and class conflict by dismissing "class war" in a very superficial paragraph...
...democrat" by itself already means "social-reform democrat...
...Where they do well, they are not democrats - plus - socialists but democrats-period...
...Nazism—and Mussolini's increasingly anti-capitalist "Social Republic" of 1944—would have gone still further in this direction if the Axis had won the war...
...That was 20 years ago, however...
...As his article stands, it has a certain weight against a considerable number of Marxists in the socialist movement...
...In Austria and Spain they took arms in defense of democracy and went down fighting, while Mr...
...But in Europe and Asia the method which has already proved itself in action is democratic socialism...
...perhaps by the time of his death the wise French socialist Leon Blum had also evolved to this stage...
...It means the practical assurance of democratic control of the basic resources of the nation and of the instrumentalities of national finance...
...It was a lonely fight in which the Social Democrats were martyrized in physical fact and pilloried in the world of the appeasers...
...To a very considerable extent, he is flogging a dead horse...
...His reference to Schumacher's position after World War II is less than fair...
...It required a socialist government with' the capacity to act courageously to carry through this fundamental human advance...
Vol. 17 • April 1953 • No. 4
