Introduction
The name
socialism serves many purposes. It is the idea of a movement striving
for more justice, more equality, more direct control of people over
their destinies--in a word, socialism stands for a better life and
freedom. It is also the state philosophy in some countries where
significant sectors of the economy have been collectivized. Yet those
who profess socialism as their philosophy and have thought about its
meaning maintain that socialism cannot be realized as a mere economic
system but implies a new style of life and new intellectual attitudes,
too. This view is represented here in Iring Fetscher's essay, and it is
assumed implicitly in the essays of Peter Christian Ludz and David
Bathrick. Is it realistic or utopian, or does it serve as a mere
ideology?
Some of the governments which use socialism as their ideology are
indeed concerned with national power rather than with the quality of
life; but their anti-imperialist stance places them in the "socialist
camp," and for that reason socialism has become an almost geopolitical
term. This perception is open to criticism on both historical and
theoretical grounds, and the opposite view is presented in Richard
Lowenthal's survey of the rich variety of socialist experience in
Western industrial countries.
In the nonsocialist world, parties using the laborite, socialist, and
communist labels range from advocates of the proletarian dictatorship
to proponents of pluralistic democracy, from those who see socialism as
the result of a protracted struggle for political, social, and cultural
changes to those who are working for the revolutionary overthrow of one
order and the more-or-less-immediate imposition of another. All,
however, agree on the general direction of the desired change:
substitution of public for private ownership in key units of
production, control of enterprise by representatives of its workers and
its clients, replacement of the free play of the market by regulation,
coordination, and direction, expansion of the public services at the
expense of private appropriation, abolition of class privileges, equal
opportunity for all and democratization of the decision-making
processes in all fields and on all levels.
Although a revolution might accelerate the course of history, such a
long list of aims can be realized only gradually. Even in countries
where revolutionary governments have swept the capitalist order into
the famous "dustbin of history," socialist values and attitudes have not
prevailed so far. In fact, opponents of socialism have pointed
gleefully to the meager results of the totally collectivized economy in
the Soviet Union sixty years after the victory of the revolution: its
"planning" has been a series of ill-assorted crash programs which even
fell short of their assigned goals, and while Soviet citizens may enjoy
greater economic security than the capitalist system can offer, their
material aspirations remain unfulfilled and the class structure is more
rigid than in the West. On the other hand, outside the socialist orbit,
a certain degree of socialization has taken place in the last few
decades under many different names, and the means of self-determination
are multiplying under governments of various descriptions.
Hence the question: Does socialism exist only where a revolution has
succeeded under the hegemony of a socialist party, or is it capable of
piecemeal realization? If so, can we enumerate any objective criteria
by which the presence of socialism can be known and, if possible, the
degree of its realization can be measured? Is it necessary to abolish
all private ownership in the means of production, or is it sufficient
to control "the commanding heights" (to use Lenin's expression)? Is it
necessary and sufficient to replace the free market by a plan, or must
the plan also increase the well-being of every citizen and afford consumers
some freedom of choice? In sum, can socialism be defined in terms of
its collectivist institutions or is it concerned with people and their
satisfactions?
Everyday usage seems to opt for the former alternative. It speaks of
"socialist countries" as those where revolution, conquest, or war of
liberation has made a clean sweep of capitalist and especially of
foreign property. The Chinese Communist Party recently confirmed this
view; it assured the Soviet Union that despite certain deviations it is
still a socialist country since its means of production are owned by
the state. The Soviet Union, in turn, used the occasion of its New
Year's greetings to allied governments to assign to each of them either
the attribute "marching toward socialism" or "building socialism,"
depending on the degree of collectivization realized in each country.
From state capitalism these systems are distinguished by the hegemony
of a party that derives its legitimation from revolution or
anti-imperialist war. But they have in common with state capitalism the
paramountcy of a development plan emphasizing autarky, defense, and
capital-goods industries rather than the consumer market. Because of a
high rate of surplus value (the ratio of investments to income), these
countries also need repressive governments, and therefore Rudolf Bahro
has called them sarcastically "the actually existing socialism," a
socialism not oriented toward people but toward production. This idea
is developed in the articles by Peter Christian Ludz, Iring Fetscher,
and David Bathrick.
In the Western countries, by contrast, socialists have always tried to
increase the workers' share in the national product and to reduce the
rate of exploitation. Though their "ultimate goal" also is a society
without classes, reform socialists approach this goal asymptotically
rather than directly. Since functional differences between people
cannot be abolished, one reduces their antiegalitarian effects through
minimum wages, pensions, insurance schemes, redistributive taxation,
public services, aids to upward mobility, and democratic controls.
Admittedly, all these achievements of the welfare state have only
modified capitalism but not transformed its basic mode of operation or
abolished the regime of property, which is the basis of class
distinction. This is brought out in Stephen Bronner's article, while
Rudolf Billerbeck's contribution shows the limitations of the welfare
state precisely in the field where social democrats have traditionally
done their best work--in municipal administrations. Neither the
nationalization of basic industries nor the municipalization of
utilities, neither public housing nor cooperative enterprises, have
eliminated the tyranny of the market or, for that matter, what Marxists
call the law of value.
The concept of socialist islands in a sea of capitalism was badly
shaken first in the Great Depression. It forced labor to revise both
its conception of reform and its strategy. Previously, labor had left
most problems of production to the industrialists and concentrated its
efforts on diverting a larger proportion of the product into the
workers' pockets. Now socialists have to think the problems of
capitalism through and help it to solve them. They became immersed
deeply in formulating financial and monetary policies, national
production goals, countercyclical intervention, regulating,
controlling, planning the development of the economy.
We are still in this period of structural reforms, also called welfare
capitalism or organized capitalism. Whether in office or in opposition,
labor is now a more-or-less-permanent partner of capital, and it is
also a captive of its new responsibilities. In return, labor has been
assured that its reform legislation would not be repealed by
conservative governments: once introduced, social insurance, socialized
medicine, full-employment laws, nationalized industries, annual wage,
pensions, public housing, codetermination (worker representation on
company boards) have been retained. In fact, some of these reforms have
been introduced by nonsocialist governments. Simultaneously, capitalism
passed into its "postbourgeois" stage, characterized by the expansion
of tertiary (service) industries, the computer revolution, the
leveling-up of incomes, the growth of public services in relation to
total consumption and of all consumption in relation to investment, the
politicization of social-economic conflicts, and the rise of
meritocracy. Capitalism is no longer what it was in the age of Marx and
not even in the age of Gompers.
Neither is labor any longer that "dehumanized humanity" which Marx
thought could help itself only through total revolution. It has become
one of the pressure groups sharing the spoils of the system and
quarreling over them. But even radical socialists and communists now
try to make their criticism constructive, and they no longer challenge
"the system" by demands which can be fulfilled only by transcending it.
The workers themselves experience a certain embourgeoisement; they do
not see themselves as "outside" society, nor socialism as the only
alternative to capitalism or the labor movement as its living negation.
As a consequence, socialism no longer appears to be the natural
ideology of a movement whose actions lead beyond capitalism by the
logic of the class war, and labor action is not necessarily linked to a
socialist philosophy. Working housewives feel no obligation to shop in
cooperative stores, working youths do not join workers' sports clubs,
the union hall is not the workers' favorite club; and though in some
areas the Communist Party can still rig up a festival, one can no
longer speak, with the Austro-Marxists, of an Arbeiterwelt, with its own book
clubs, theaters, youth groups, its "marching and singing," which was so
characteristic of the pre-World War II movement.
American socialism, as represented by Michael Harrington, also places
human values at the center of its concerns, but, in contrast to the
"Now" theorists, Harrington speaks of the socialist ideal as "of a far
future which must inspire the immediate present."
In the old days of reform socialism the movement was the message; every
step of reform or improvement was visibly and directly linked to a
demonstration, strike, or other action. Today a program is debated in
committees and adopted through a long political process almost out of
sight of the union member; moreover, the benefits that are expected
will often take time to materialize whereas the costs have to be paid
immediately. Thus action and program become difficult to relate to each
other, and the leadership must often resort to rhetorical bombast or
cant to preserve its ideological legitimation. Thus the French Communist Party
chose the question of nationalizations
to reestablish its place left of the socialists, and Italian Communist
leader Berlinguer recently tried to make a belt-tightening program
acceptable by dubbing it "revolutionary austerity," an almost Orwellian
perversion of the socialist vocabulary. When, in return for their
acceptance of austerity, workers receive "participation"--some seats on
some boards for labor bosses--another notion that was once considered a
revolutionary shibboleth is defused. Some of the problems which such a
situation creates for the "new men of power" (C. W. Mills) are studied
in Mark Kesselman's case history of the French left.
Partly from the frustrations which the new function of organized labor
creates in the shop, partly from the inability of old-style socialists
to adjust to it, isolated wildcat actions erupt here and there, forcing
the leadership to protect its revolutionary image or evoking
sympathetic responses among the more ideologically oriented militants.
At the same time, socialist intellectuals are irked by other features
of the postbourgeois society--the climate of conformism and consent,
the mass character of its consumption patterns, the ecological waste
and the intellectual desert, the arms race.
Similar issues had belonged to the socialist arsenal of concern and
criticism from the beginning, and they had never been quite forgotten.
Without doubt, however, they have risen to prominence in the last two
decades, not only among socialists but for a wider audience, notably in
the academy. Herbert Marcuse (whom death prevented from finishing an
essay intended for this issue entitled "Thirty Years after Eros and Civilization") and the New
Left gave this movement for life reform a utopian turn leading beyond
the traditional notions of socialism, and they identified it with the
marginal groups of society and the Third World revolutions--Toynbee's
"outer proletariat." Some of their ideas are reflected here in the
essays by Iring Fetscher and Stephen Bronner.
This is indeed "the state of socialism"--an ideology which is related
to reality in more-or-less-tenuous, and often even oblique, ways. The
promise of an ultimate goal does not inform policy; where there are
programs, spontaneous action is discouraged; where the movement
expresses itself in action, it is usually poor on programs; where the
socialist movement is real, it does not realize socialism. In the
countries of actually existing socialism the socialist ideology serves
as a smoke screen behind which the new ruling class pursues its power
goals.
In some countries of the Third World the name socialism merely
indicates an alignment in foreign policy and is often used as a fig
leaf for obscene power plays, genocide, and pilferage of the national
resources. But even where a genuine effort is made to achieve ujamaa, it is marred by two
flaws--the absence of freedom and the unavoidable entanglement with the
world economy. The inability of such governments to build socialism
with their own resources is well illustrated in the case history James
Mittelman presents. The conflict between national development goals and
international means appears reflected here in the conflict between the
socialist and the capitalist ideologies. I regret very much that I have
not obtained a contribution on the New International Economic Order
which would have shown the same conflict on a larger screen:
"proletarian nations" fighting for recognition as world political
factors under the flag of anticapitalism. Socialism as a state
philosophy is a static, justifying ideology within, but like fascism in
its day, it projects abroad the dynamism of an aggressive, conquering
New Order. Just as the slogan Freedom is no longer the alternative to
despotic government but refers to national independence, so is Equality
now aspired to by nations rather than by classes.
In the countries of lingering capitalism or neocapitalism, socialism
remains the ideology of an opposition which is sometimes part of the
government but professes principles transcending the status quo. It is
not conceived, however, as a stark alternative to the present system
but rather an ensemble of attitudes and policies that will modify it.
For Communists and left socialists the ultimate vision is more vivid,
but it serves as a yardstick for critical evaluation of the policies
rather than as a source of political decisions. The categories of Karl
Mannheim are still applicable: what used to be a unified and
systematized Weltanschauung
becomes a mere guiding perspective and heuristic principle. It was once
possible to say that "tactics are the future appearing as present" and
the socialist idea was a tendency in the matrix of reality; now it
stands over against reality as a transcendent ideology. As such it has
no higher standing than similar ideologies--the conservative, the
liberal, the fascist, the anarchist. But several of our contributors
make the implicit or explicit assumption that socialism has not lost
its link with the utopian tradition, which is both democratic and
egalitarian; though it may have lost the confidence that history is
hurrying us toward a rational society, it still is based on the
confidence that socialists must strive for such a society.
Contributors to this issue represent a wide range of socialist
opinions, and no effort has been made to coordinate them. But I hope
all my colleagues will concur in dedicating this volume to the memory
of Carlo Schmid, a great humanist, teacher, and liberal socialist whose
death occurred while we were going to press.
Henry Pachter
Guest Editor
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