Reform Agenda

...Howe provides an overview of Reagan policies and the misery they have caused, while former Working Papers editor Bob Kuttner writes about jobs...

...While Adams's chapter is perhaps no more original than Kuttner's, the subject of national defense has long been off-limits to American leftists accustomed to unmitigated criticism of U.S...

...To their credit, none of the contributors to this volume offers such a simplistic and rosy forecast of the future...

...sociologist Frances Fox Piven and feminist Barbara Ehrenreich discuss women and the welfare state, and economist Robert Lekachman tackles tax reform...

...He also favors changes in the way military budgets are planned and promoted, including the establishment of a truly independent cost-analysis bureau in the Pentagon and enactment of legislation that would prohibit Defense Department personnel from going to work for contractors with whom they have dealt...

...The essays by Adams and Harrington are by far the most engaging and useful in the collection...

...Of all the items in a progressive agenda, none so readily polarizes opinion as economic planning, the subject of Michael Harrington's essay...

...According to Harrington, the cornerstone of a planning process in the United States would be the creation of a "national needs inventory" under the auspices of a broad array of local, regional, and Federal agencies (such as the Census Bureau) which would work together to develop an assessment of unmet social needs in such areas as environmental resources, housing, health, and education...

...Whether the Left can articulate such a posture is another question...

...Harrington's ideas may strike some as Utopian and others as insufficiently radical because he fails to call immediately for socialism...

...militarism...

...Most new-ideas books close on the same pseudo-upbeat note: Now that we have a viable program, we must build a political movement to carry it out...

...The draft also calls for setting up a Commission on Democratic Rights and Planning, which would use the data from the needs inventory to formulate "a proposed program of guaranteed opportunities for useful and productive employment...

...Among other changes, Piven and Ehrenreich call for a unified system of income maintenance in addition to standard welfare programs...

...Putting complex ideas into practice is infinitely difficult...

...But nowhere does Kuttner discuss the prospects for mobilizing rank-and-file workers to participate in the process of shaping and defining job-creation mechanisms...

...For the most part, however, they are not particularly original or inspiring...

...The concept of the needs inventory is already in draft legislation prepared by economist Bertram Gross (author of Friendly Fascism) for Representative John Conyers of the Congressional Black Caucus...

...But if the Left ever hopes to gain a mass constituency, it will have to face up to the fact that the United States-like any other nation—has a legitimate interest in maintaining a secure defense posture...

...The important question is not whether we will have government intervention, but who will control such intervention and who will benefit from it...

...policy in the Third World away from intervention and toward increased economic aid...

...Bill Blum (Bill Blum is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles...

...The contributors include some of the best-known names of the Left, most of whom are affiliated with the nation's largest socialist organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA...

...Adams makes a bold attempt as he describes and rebuts the conventional conservative myths about Soviet military superiority, declining U.S...

...From a technical standpoint, all of the essays are first-rate, offering a synthesis of current Left-liberal thought and a number of specific proposals for reforms...

...Just how, many concerned observers ask, can planning be reconciled with the traditional American values of democracy and efficiency...

...The latest in this series is a collection of six essays entitled rather unimaginatively Alternatives: Proposals for America from the Democratic Left, edited by literary and social critic Irving Howe...

...Lekachman advocates a range of tax reforms, including Social Security payments out of general revenues, closing corporate income tax loopholes, and restoring genuine progressivity to personal income taxes...

...The answer, Harrington argues, lies not in wholesale nationalization of industry or abolition of the market...

...We are certainly better off having publications like Alternatives than we would be without them, but the aching question of how to bring about fundamental social change remains unanswered...

...The articles on women and the welfare state and on tax reform set forth sound critiques of Reaganism and a variety of well-known antidotes...

...As corrective, he suggests the familiar remedies of greater international cooperation concerning what is to be produced and where, domestic-content legislation, work-sharing plans, and worker-retraining programs...

...Gordon Adams, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, contributes a disquisition on national defense, and DSA co-chairman Michael Harrington examines the thorny question of economic planning...

...Although he favors some public enterprise, particularly in the energy and transportation fields, Harrington basically calls for an American variant of the "indicative economic planning" that has functioned successfully in Japan and Western Europe...

...One of the happier if unintended by-products of the Reagan Administration has been the emergence of a new cottage industry in academia: the drafting of programmatic challenges to Reaganomics...

...Although such neo-liberals as investment banker Felix Ro-hatyn have floated proposals for corpo-ratist planning, the ideology of rugged individualism and the grim realities of the Soviet experience have relegated the notion of planning to the status of something akin to a social disease...

...As the father of a childhood friend once told me, "Brains is cheap...

...Since the man whom Clark Clifford once described as an "amiable dunce" took office, major publishing houses have released almost a dozen books on economic alternatives, from neo-liberal Robert Reich's The Next American Frontier to Beyond the Wasteland, the excellent left-wing collaboration by economists Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf...

...His policy proposals, all of which are eminently modest and feasible, include ratification of SALT II, a mutual ban on all nuclear weapons tests, a bilateral nuclear freeze, and a reorientation of U.S...

...defense spending, and the proverbial "window of vulnerability...

...His sensible rejoinder to such criticisms is that the United States simply isn't ready for anything more radical, and that we already have widespread government economic intervention through the Federal Reserve Board and other regulatory bodies...

...Bob Kuttner, for example, attributes our persistently high unemployment rate to three major factors: demographic shifts in the work force involving the entry of unprecedented numbers of women and young people into the job market, increased foreign competition and corporate flight, and changes in technology that seem to be eliminating high-paid, unionized production jobs...