by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
We had—and have—still other intentions. One of them is to propose intellectual relations with the more independent sections of American liberalism, in order to extend welfare legislation and human rights, further the black and women’s movements, and defend civil liberties. It is this perspective which largely motivates Part II of this book and has also been dominant in the pages of Dissent. For we have been concerned not only with political theory but also with the immediate realities of American society. We have tried, in our modest way, to contribute to the reconstruction of a democratic left in the United States.
III
Two problems of social analysis concerned us with a special intensity during these years, and I think we have made some contribution toward clarifying them—though, of course, other problems pile up, with their predicaments and puzzles. Let me say a few words about these two:
The Problem of Stalinism. A crucial, perhaps the crucial, experience of our century has been the appearance of totalitarian systems yoking terror and ideology and claiming to shape the entirety of existence: the relentless assault by the party-state upon a defenseless population in the name of a total utopia.
Stalinism seemed a cruel parody, perhaps a self-parody, of the socialist dream, and it forced thoughtful socialists to reconsider the terms of their conviction. In Russia a Marxist party had seized power; it had destroyed private property in the means of production; it had elicited overwhelming sacrifice and idealism; yet the result was a brutal and oppressive society, ruled by terror, erasing free expression, allowing the working class none of the rights it possessed even under capitalism, and in its essential quality alien to the socialist vision.
Within this society there sprang up a new social stratum: the party-state bureaucracy which found its roots in the bureaucratic intelligentsia, the factory managers, the military officials, and above all the Communist functionaries. This new social stratum looked upon the workers as material to be shaped, upon intellectuals as propagandists to be employed, upon the international Communist movement as an auxiliary to be exploited, and upon Marxist thought as a crude process for rationalizing its power and ambitions.
What was the nature of the new society that had arisen in Russia during the twenties and thirties?
A growing number of socialists concluded that the loss of political power by the Russian working class meant that it no longer ruled in any social sense, for, as a propertyless class, it could exercise power only through direct political means and not in those indirect ways that the bourgeoisie had sometimes employed in its youthful phase. Stalinism showed no signs of either producing from within itself a bourgeois restoration or of gliding into democracy. The bureaucracy had become a new ruling class, with interests of its own fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism.
This view of communist society—which Djilas popularized through the phrase The New Class—held that what is decisive is not the forms of property ownership (i.e., nationalized economy) but the realities of property relations (i.e., who controls the state that owns the property). Can the workers, in whose name power is held, organize themselves into trade unions to strike against “their” state? Can they form parties to openly challenge the domination of “their” party? As Djilas has remarked: “An unfree people can have no scope in the economic organism.”
From such theoretic analyses and speculations enormous consequences followed for socialist thought:
• There is no necessary or inevitable sequence from capitalism to socialism, as many Marxists had believed, nor is there any inherently “progressive” movement within history. New, unforeseen, and retrogressive societies can intervene in the sequence of change.
• The mere abolition of capitalism is not, in and of itself, necessarily a step toward either freedom in general or socialism in particular; it can lead—indeed, in some instances it has led—to societies more repressive than capitalism at its worst.
• Neither working-class rule nor socialism can be defined merely as a society in which private property has been abolished or the means of production nationalized; what is decisive is the nature of the political regime exercised over postcapitalist or nationalized property.
• In the long run the Communist movement may come to seem, not the vanguard of “proletarian revolution,” but a movement that could achieve success only in underdeveloped countries, where there was neither a self-confident bourgeoisie nor an advanced working class. The “historic function” of this movement came to be the provision of ideological rationales for a draconian socioeconomic modernization of backward societies.
• The idea of a total transformation of humanity under the guidance of the “vanguard party” is a corrupt fantasy which soon leads to an alternation of terror and apathy.
• Socialism must then be redefined as a society in which the means of production, to an extent that need not be determined rigidly in advance, are collectively owned and in which they are democratically controlled; a society requiring as its absolute prerequisite the preservation and extension of democracy. Without socialism, democracy tends to be limited in social scope, to apply its benefits unequally, and to suffer from coexistence with unjust arrangements of social power; but without democracy, socialism is impossible.
The Problem of the Welfare State. The welfare state preserves the essential character of capitalist economy, in that the interplay of private or corporate owners in the free market remains dominant; but it modifies the workings of that economy, in that the powers of free disposal by property owners are regulated and controlled by political organs. Within limits that need not be rigidly fixed in advance, the welfare state can be regarded as an algebraic container that can be filled with the arithmetic of varying sociopolitical contents. More important, the welfare state is the outcome, not necessarily a “final” one, of prolonged social struggle to modulate and humanize capitalist society. It would be hard to say to what extent the welfare state is the result of a deliberate intent to stabilize capitalist society from above, so that it will avoid breakdown and revolutionary crises; to what extent it is the outcome of relatively autonomous economic processes; and to what extent it is the partially realized triumph in the struggle of masses of people to satisfy their needs. At the moment—by contrast to those who feel the major need for the immediate future to be a kind of benevolent social engineering and those who see the welfare state as a manipulative device for maintaining traditional forms of economic coercion—it seems necessary to stress that the welfare state represents a conquest that has been wrested by the labor, socialist, and liberal movements.
For those of us who wish to preserve a stance of criticism without the sterility of total estrangement, the welfare state has been a somewhat unsettling experience. Here are some of the characteristic responses of leftist intellectuals in the last few decades:
1. A feeling that the high drama (actually, the vicarious excitement) of earlier Marxist or “revolutionary” politics has been lost and that in the relatively trivial struggles for a division of social wealth and power within a stable order there is neither much room nor need for political-intellectual activity. Much of this response strikes us as, by now, unearned and tiresome. The snobbism of “revolutionary” nostalgia can easily decline into a snobbism of political abstention.
2. A belief that the welfare state will, in effect, remain stable and basically unchanged into the indefinite future; that conflict will be contained within the prescribed limits and that problems of technique will supersede the free-wheeling or “irresponsible” tradition of fundamental criticism. This view accepts the “givenness” not merely of the welfare state but also of its present forms and boundaries. It thereby underestimates the need for and significance of basic moral-political criticism. If I am right in saying this, the traditional responses of the radical intellectual—dismissed though they may be in some quarters as utopian, impractical, etc.—remain quite as necessary as before. Even for making new practical proposals to alleviate social troubles
within the present society, a degree of utopian perspective and intellectual distance is required. For essential to such alleviation is a continued redefinition of what, indeed, is practical.
3. A belief that the welfare state is characteristic of all forms of advanced industrial society; that it offers bread and television, palliatives and opiates, to disarm potential opposition; and that it thereby perpetuates, more subtly but insidiously than in the past, class domination. Despite its seeming intransigence, this view strikes me as essentially conservative, for it leads to passivity, not action—and inhumane,—for it minimizes the improvements in the life conditions of millions of human beings. Minimizes, above all, the fact that the welfare state has meant that large numbers of working-class people are no longer ill fed, ill clothed, and insecure, certainly not to the extent they were thirty years ago. That automobile workers in Detroit can today earn a modest if still insufficient income; that through union intervention they have some, if not enough, control over their work conditions; that they can expect pensions upon getting old which may be inadequate but are far better than anything they could have expected thirty years ago—all this is good: politically, socially, and in the simplest human terms. To dismiss or minimize this enormous achievement on the lordly grounds that such workers remain “alienated” is to allow ideology to destroy human solidarity.
In contrast to these three attitudes, we would propose the following general stance toward the welfare state: The struggles and issues raised within the welfare state are “real,” not mere diversionary shadow plays or trivial squabbles. They matter; they affect the lives of millions. No matter how mundane the level at which they are conducted, the struggles for social betterment within the arena of the welfare state merit our concern and active involvement. That is why we write and act in relation to poverty, civil rights, education, urban renewal, Medicare, a host of immediate problems. At the same time, radical intellectuals seek to connect these problems with the idea of a qualitative transformation of society. Socialism not being an immediate option, it is necessary for radicals, while continuing to speak for their views in full, also to try to energize those forces that are prepared to stretch the limits of the welfare state and improve the immediate quality of our life. Such a dynamic once set in motion, there may be possibilities for going still further.
IV
Let your mind go back in time. At a meeting of workers in Berlin in the 1870s, a social democrat named August Bebel speaks. He advances a new vision of human possibility. He tells his audience that men who work with their hands need not be subordinate and mute, need not assume that the destinies of nations are always to be decided by superiors in power. He tells his listeners that they, too, count. They count in their numbers, they count in their capacities to come together, they count in their crucial role in the productive process, they count in their readiness to sacrifice. The mute will speak; the objects of history will become subjects prepared to transform it. This was the socialist message as it began to be heard a little more than a century ago. It was heard in England in the night schools, in the labor colleges, sometimes on the edges of the dissident chapels. It was heard in France through the more revolutionary traditions of that country, in the Paris Commune where organs of plebeian autonomy were being improvised. And even here in America, it was heard among immigrants packed into slums or sweating over railroad beds. It was heard among freewheeling sailors and lumbermen who preferred a syndicalist version of revolt. It was heard among Jewish immigrants on the East Side. It was heard among intellectuals and Christian pastors in New York who found that the promptings of thought and sympathy drove them to the socialist vision.
After more than a century, many hopes have been burned out into ashes, whole generations have perished in despair, movements have been drowned in blood, and many people in those movements have lapsed into silence. The socialist idea is no longer young, no longer innocent, and now must compete in a world of sophistication. It cannot hope to grow through mere simple reiteration of simple slogans. Yet anyone looking at the world today must be struck by the power which this idea still holds: the devotion that millions of people, mostly in Europe but elsewhere too, still give to it.
We know the mistakes and the failures of this past century. The notion that as soon as we take power, all would be well: this, serious people can no longer believe. Who is that we—which self-appointed “vanguard”? The notion that democracy, even in its most corrupted forms, is anything but a precious human conquest, that it’s just a façade for the rule of the oppressors: this serious people can surely no longer believe. The notion that social change will come about through the automatic workings of the economy, without human will or intention, just like the opposite notion that history can be forced or raped through the will of a tiny band of chosen intellectuals: this, too, serious people can no longer believe. Intellectuals today, despots tomorrow.
We know that the socialist movement declined at many points into a mere appendage of laborite institutions, and that these institutions could not bring about the changes that we want in society. We know that in some countries the socialist movement degenerated through the Communist heresy into totalitarianism, bringing a kind of “salvation”—the “salvation” of terror and fear. Yet these failures notwithstanding, there remains a living core of socialist belief, commitment, value.
At one point that living core is very close to liberalism: a belief in the widest possible political freedoms, a belief that democracy remains the foundation of all that we want. Without that democracy, nothing is possible, life becomes unbearable. But socialism introduces something new, historically and analytically. It introduces the idea that the plebes, the masses, the ordinary people can rise to articulation, rise to rulership, to power.
We have faith in the capacities of ordinary people, not to become experts in finance, not to understand the mysteries of inflation—though they can hardly do worse than the experts—but to come to sensible, humane conclusions about the major direction of social decisions. If you deny this, you deny not only socialism, you deny the moral basis of democracy as well.
Socialism also introduces a stress on communal life, on the sharing of values, the sharing of responsibility, the sharing of power. We believe the democracy that prevails, more or less, in our political process should also prevail in our economic life, in the ownership and the running of our corporations. The major economic direction of modern society, at least in the advanced nations, is toward an increasing state domination of the economy; the vision of laissez-faire has no reality, except in certain magazines. We believe the fundamental issue is this: what will be the relationship between the democratic political process and the increasingly complex economy of modern society? And the control that we want to exert upon the modern economy is not through a vast state bureaucracy, not through some fantasy of total nationalization, but rather through democratic and autonomous agencies which will represent the people who work in a given industry as well as the population at large, so that there can be a balance between particular interests of those in a given industry and the larger interests of the entire society. This commitment to the democratization of economic life is at the heart of the socialist idea today. Democracy here, democracy there, democracy everywhere. The idea is simple, the techniques necessarily complex and difficult.
With this, there goes an emphasis on egalitarianism. That word is not very fashionable these days in American intellectual life, but we will survive that too. Egalitarianism doesn’t mean that everyone has to make exactly the same each week. It does mean that the vast disproportions of opportunity and power, which bring with them vast disproportions of the capacity for human fulfillment, should be shaved down a lot.
In the last few years, we’ve been living through some disappointments with America’s quasi-welfare state. People see that partial reforms bring only partial relief, that partial reforms inadequately financed can bring unexpected trouble, that partial reforms occurring in the context of th
e market and distorted by the priorities of corporate interests and mismanaged by government bureaucracy can lead to anti-social consequences. But the conclusion to be drawn from this is not some churlish desire—impossible in the modern economy, in any case—to return to a laissez-faire or private economy. If, for instance, Medicare as we have it now leads to ripoffs by doctors, the answer isn’t to abolish it or to turn down national health insurance; the answer is to deepen the social content and democratic control of health insurance, making certain that such ripoffs don’t persist.
A lot of the traditional socialist criticisms of capitalist society—the simplest, most fundamental criticisms—still apply. We read that citrus growers in Florida are delighted by bad weather because it cuts down their crops and will keep up their prices. As long as these people have to function in this economy, I cannot blame them. It makes economic sense. But in terms of any larger social value, it’s pure insanity. We should be unhappy at cutbacks in citrus production. There are lots of kids in the United States who could use those oranges. We could all use them at cheaper prices, or we could even—there go those “socialist do-gooders”—ship them at low prices to other places. But that would mean a socially planned economy, a society that, as we used to say and could well say again, is organized for use and not profit.
Just at the time when there are so many troubles, so many social ills, when clearly the system is not working well, we can detect a new wave of neoconservatism or really reactionary thought. Conservative sages demonstrate that the poor remain poor because they are improvident: you need a Ph.D. for that. Others teach us that there are limits to social policy, more urgently felt as it happens with regard to providing employment for black youth than rescue or bounty for Lockheed and Penn Central. Still other curators of wisdom invoke the fallen nature of mankind—as if once Eve bit into that disastrous apple, it was forever decreed that humanity might rise as high as the peaks of laissez-faire capitalism but not an inch beyond. The assault on the welfare state during the late 1970s is an assault on the deprived, the poor, the blacks. But we believe that this retreat from liberalism, this retreat from the welfare state and social generosity, is not going to take care of the problems that we find all about us. A bit sooner or a bit later, we shall again, as a society, have to confront the inequities of our economic arrangements, the maldistribution of our income and wealth, the undemocratic nature of our corporate structures.
