Reflections

...Under the pressures generated by various right-wing offensives and persistent economic crises, radicalism dissolved long ago into a spasmodic campaign for social reform...

...Socialists, especially in the United States, tend to retain sentimental left-wing attachments while playing within the bounds of the existing order...

...Libertarian socialism can resonate in America because it seeks to recapture the ideas of direct democracy and individual freedom from the conservatives...

...It is not a new dogma but one that squares with our own traditions, though it marks a radical departure from notions of socialism now in vogue...

...intervention...

...We didn't read the Greeks, who revered politics as persuasion and citizen control over government, but we did read C. Wright Mills, who articulated the goal of a new public sphere...

...We are content, by and large, to fight rear-guard actions against those who would dismantle even the feeble bases of equality we have managed to establish...

...Applying this yardstick, leftists sympathized with or supported the Soviet Union because it seemed to wield powerful state weapons in behalf of economic and social justice, even if it was no paragon of political freedom...

...For the most part, the Left remains uncomfortable with a political movement that doesn't regard economic or class issues as primary...

...Demanding full employment has become a matter of old-time liberal religion...

...It should center on grass-roots democracy, the opening of public space within which to debate real solutions to our ills...

...they cut to the heart of our morality, which claims that salvation can be achieved only through hard work, that labor provides meaning to life—in short, the good old Protestant ethic that has always been among the most pernicious doctrines in the service of labor discipline...

...Since the Nineteenth Century, the socialist movement has been plagued by the difficulty of merging art with politics, of fusing everyday problems with global concerns...

...Even that limited objective can't be reached, however, if we insist that we must pull our punches...

...It has supported racial equality, for example, but it has not really made racism a central concern...

...People who talk about revolution and class struggle," said Kollantai, "without referring to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive about the refusal of constraints, have a corpse in their mouth...

...Worse still, independence is equated with virtue and no questions are asked about such issues as individual freedom...

...Here is the modernist bias of the Left, its uncritical defense of a secular, industrial conception of civilization...

...The prevailing view on the Left is that open avowal of a radical program would condemn us to even greater political marginality...

...A decade later, a few hardy souls began to warn us that disaster was at hand if we refused to stop producing carcinogens and other toxins that polluted our air, our water, and our land...

...This is the lesson of feminism, gay liberation, and the phenomenon called Green politics...

...The plain truth is that the more high-tech, the fewer the jobs and the greater the inequities in the distribution of wealth...

...After Love Canal and Three Mile Island, the realization sank in that growth was not an unalloyed blessing...

...better to stay in the mainstream than to strike out on our own and risk going under...

...The demand for jobs, income, sharing available work, and a shorter work day would replace the old saw of a full-employment economy, which assumes a rate of economic growth the United States will never again achieve...

...If not now, when will these issues enter the debate...

...Among those few Americans who think about socialism at all, most think of it as a kind of welfare-state politics within the framework of private enterprise...

...Not only has it been done in by economic crisis, but there is now a widespread understanding that the bureaucratic state has become Big Brother...

...We are not sure that democracy and socialism are possible, or that repression is not the inevitable price of revolutionary independence...

...If a guaranteed income were instituted, labor would still be performed, but employers would lose much of their leverage to exploit workers and devastate communities...

...new jobs are increasingly part-time and usually in low-paid, non-union, service occupations...

...We must not be afraid to be radical...

...The struggle over time has always been central in industrial societies, but in our day the Left has almost nothing to say about it, even as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, which launched the fight for the eight-hour day...

...domination while refusing to discuss the outcome of such a break...

...This issue alone could make the socialist project relevant once more...

...We came to hold a social and political vision of power wielded by direct producers, including the neighborhoods and the regions...

...The eight-hour day is obsolete...

...The only path for the Left if it is to advance a vital economic program is away from the politics of growth...

...But scientific developments in production and administration are making much labor socially and economically redundant...

...Because the Left instinctively reacts against Cold War propaganda, it has been unwilling to debate other societies (Cuba, Nicaragua, China, the Soviet Union) on their merits...

...And if we don't insist on them, who will...

...What we need is a new kind of socialism that will inspire us to play a more active role in American life...

...The first task of this new socialist project is to come up with ideas and proposals appropriate to the needs of the day...

...Stanley Aronowitz is a member of the sociology faculty at the City University of New York...

...Surely there is much work that needs doing—the mammoth task of refurbishing our decaying cities and countryside, building millions of homes at prices that ordinary Americans can afford, and providing such services as child care for working parents and genuine health care for all...

...If our goal is a self-managed society that assures individual freedom, then we must make a clear distinction between supporting independence and supporting those societies that achieve it...

...it has become mandatory "overtime," imposing unreasonable labor discipline and stifling radical demands for a share in the benefits of automation, computerization, and other labor-saving innovations...

...We have never learned that we can support the right of every society to determine its own destiny—whether we like it or not—and at the same time remain free to criticize those societies on democratic grounds...

...The Left cannot continue to defend the revolutionary break with dictatorship and U.S...

...With a guaranteed income, we could get down to the real work of rebuilding our communities as decent places to live, without concern for whether we can "afford" their reconstruction...

...The priests of high-tech have sold Americans a bill of goods...

...Without democratic power over the welfare state, without a deep-seated change in the way it works, the public sector will continue to slide...

...The Bolsheviks clamped down on Alexandre Kollan-tai for her efforts to achieve a revolution in productive relations to accompany the social revolution in Russia...

...While most leftists today feel constrained to defend the welfare state as our last, flawed, but best hope of retaining a measure of equity, libertarian socialists would denounce bureaucratic and hierarchical structures that delegitimized the welfare state among its "clients" long before the Right called for its dismantling...

...In the 1960s, the New Left appeared and rediscovered libertarian ideas...

...It combines a respect for the individual—for the freedom to act, dissent, disobey—with the equally American idea of the "cooperative commonwealth" (as socialists and anarchists called it at the turn of the century...

...Many of us have become so thoroughly integrated into the Democratic Party, the labor movement, and liberal organizations that the only discernible difference between us and the institutions we serve is the magazines we read...

...In the fifty years since that fight was won, not a single hour has been shaved off the work clock...

...As long as socialism was defined as a set of economic arrangements that provided security for the mass of the population, such fundamental concepts as freedom, democracy, and individual liberty were bound to take a back seat...

...The idea of democracy was rescued from its bureaucratic, representative stranglehold and restored to an earlier form—direct, town-meeting, participatory democracy...

...We need a shorter work day, but most of all we need a guaranteed income for all Americans—not at the minimum scale, but at a level adequate to assure everyone a decent life...

...At best, mainstream electoral activity can be viewed as a defensive tactic—an attempt to preserve and use opportunities to carry on education and debate...

...On foreign policy issues, the Left since the 1960s has adopted a stance of militant anti-anticom-munism...

...These ideas challenge more than received economic wisdom...

...The real goal of socialism—the transformation of the basic institutions of the society into instruments of popular democratic power-is kept carefully out of sight and out of mind...

...In the United States and around the world, socialists still have not grasped the full significance of new social movements that argue for cultural and social freedom...

...When the Reagan Administration perpetrates the Big Lie that Nicaragua is a Marxist-Leninist state, the Left remains silent because it is entirely caught up in the necessary, but incomplete, task of preventing overt U.S...

...Ecologists have leveled a second indictment against faith in growth: It devastates our environment...

...Americans had such a vivid memory of Depression hardship that they brusquely dismissed any suggestion that growth for its own sake might be undesirable and even dangerous...

...The Left should be least concerned about electoral efforts to save the welfare state...

...Some of us have fled to a privatized existence—the comfort and security of depoliticization...

...Too often, the Left is mired in a kind of historical relativism, arguing that if a society can be shown to have rid itself of imperialist domination, is making "progress" in health and education, and is raising the living standards of its people, it deserves open-throated support...

...This fond indulgence should not be mistaken for a commitment to radicalism...

...The age of environmentalism had arrived...

...What is our political vision...

...Still others are safely ensconced in sundry academic pursuits, Marxists but not radicals...

...We may argue for a certain expansion of production to serve public needs, but we cannot sustain—morally, logically, or environmentally—a program that focuses on achieving macroeconomic expansion...

...We would rediscover the distinction between "work," which once meant self-fulfillment, and "labor," which has always meant economic compulsion...

...Unfortunately, our obsession with this task has blinded us to the real challenge we face: construction of an avowed, proud socialist movement...

...Margaret Sanger quit the Socialist Party because it refused to take up the question of sexual freedom...

...The technological revolution already requires fewer jobs at each level of economic production...

...Libertarian socialism cannot yet contest for power in our country or in any other advanced industrial society, but it can provide a vision that brings substance to the opportunity of liberty...

...His books include "Working Class Hero: A New Strategy for Labor" and (with Henry Geroux) "Education under Siege: Radical, Liberal, and Conservative Debates About Schools," just published by Bergin & Garvey...

...Much of the Left in the United States subscribed to the New Deal for the same reason: Government was intervening to achieve a measure of economic and social equity...

...In the 1950s and early 1960s, virtually everyone embraced the production of more goods and services—whatever their quality, whatever their effect on health...

...Instead of seeking more growth, we should be aiming to reduce the work week...

...unfortunately, it no longer corresponds to our situation...

...This article was adapted from remarks he delivered last spring at the Third Annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City...