| Author: | Michael Harrington | Rating: | ***** (4) |
| Date read: | January, 2010 | ||
Michael Harrington wrote this book when he was dying of cancer. He wanted to make sure the things he learned through his life of study and experience would be written down. The book was published in 1990. It contains a reasonably comprehensive and thoughtful history of socialism from about the 16th century until modern times. It also contains the author’s proposal for what is the future of socialism. The historical part was very interesting and informative to me, being almost entirely ignorant of the subject, other than my recent reading of “Socialism – A Very Short Introduction.” I found this historical part of the book well worth reading, full of insights plus comparisons of people, philosophies, countries, theories, practice, results, successes and failures.
The second part of the book is where the author makes an argument for a new socialism that incorporates both the “visionary” aspect, i.e., complete transformation of the world society and economy, and the “gradualist” aspect, i.e., the introduction of individual socialistic reforms in the existing system. He calls this approach “visionary gradualism.” He believes it must be international in scope and based on shared ethics rather than class. I tend to agree with his proposals, though whether they can actually be carried out is far from certain.
Key quotes
Page 23
In such a perspective, it might be argued, the obvious contradictions should have convinced the socialists that sudden insurrection was the only way out. But even assuming there was a majority political will for such a course–in fact, none has ever existed within a Western society–it still would not resolve the problem. Karl Kautsky formulated the issue just after the turn of the century. “A socialist revolution,” he wrote, “can at a simple stroke transfer a factory from capitalist to socialist property. But it is only gradually, through a course of slow evolution, that one then transforms a factory from a place of monotonous, repulsive forced labor into an attractive spot for the joyful activity of happy human beings.” One can seize power–but then it is necessary to run an entire, complex economy, and that cannot be done at the point of a gun. The day after the revolution, there would still be capitalist structures staring the revolutionaries in the face. What, exactly, were they supposed to do with them?
Page 108
Some years later, the Marxist Harry Braverman was to point out that capitalist technology was capitalist technology, that is, that it was designed not simply according to engineering priorities but in keeping with social values, and incarnated the inferior position of the workers in the production process.
Pages 114-115
The people are held in thrall by golden chains, by the satisfaction of false, manufactured needs; they are victimized by a technology that manipulates them every moment of the night and day; they have become visionless, conformist, programmed. At the same time, there are the less subtle, more old-fashioned forms of repression turned against the external proletariat in the Third World and the internal lumpenproletariat of minorities in the ghettos.
…
But this vision of a controlled anti-utopia–of Hilferding’s “organized capitalism” become a means of an oppression all the more terrifying because it is so subtle and benign–was certainly one of the reasons for Marcuse’s resonance among the anti-bureaucratic youth.
…
There was now an objective abundance–this is clearly a key term of all the sixties’ utopias–the clear possibility, for the first time in human history, of abolishing want on a worldwide basis. But it resulted either in the pseudosatisfactions of a programmed consumerism or in a new a vicious form of imperialism and racism.
Page 119, re: John Maynard Keynes
In a 1926 essay, which explained why he was a Liberal and not a Labourite, Keynes wrote, “I am sure that I am less conservative in my inclinations than the average Labour voter; I fancy that I have played in my mind with the possibilities of greater social changes that come within the present philosophies [of a number of prominent socialists in the twenties whom he names]….The Republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space.” And in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), he described a humane future in which “the love of money as a possession–as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life–will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over to the specialists in mental disease.”
Keynes concluded: “All kinds of social customs and economic practices affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free at last to discard.” Readers of Marx will recognize a significant echo.
These concepts were sufficiently important that Keynes repeated them at the end of The General Theory. There he talked of a future in which markets would have a significant role but capital would be socialized, in which the price of capital would all so low that there would be a “euthanasia of the rentiers.” In this setting, the economic issue would finally be solved, and men and women could get on with the serious business of life, which was noneconomic. Keynes was, after all, a man of Bloomsbury, a balletomane, a lover of the arts, and for all of his genius as an economist, he looked upon his own discipline as a necessary evil, or as a prelude. Keynes’s attitudes in this, like those of so many of his friends, had been profoundly influenced by the Cambridge philosopher and author of Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore. Keynes was to remember that at Cambridge in 1902 Moore opened up “a new heaven on a new earth” for him. The Principia taught that personal affection and aesthetic enjoyment were the summum bonum.
Page 144
More broadly, this brief summary of the Reagan and Thatcher policies points to a central paradox of the times: that even “laisser-faire” has now become statist, that in practice “free market” policies have been the work of strong, militaristic, socially authoritarian, and debt-financed regimes. Conservative governments are, in short, unwitting but dirigiste agents of an antisocial socialization, not the obedient servants of the law of supply and demand. And the choice for the future is not between an Adam Smith idyll or government intervention, but between top-down and bottom up socialization. That is why freedom lies to the Left, and not to the pseudopopulist Right.
Page 145
First of all, the immediate demands of the new socialism will be internationalist, or else the new socialism will fail.
That is true in the obvious sense that disarmament and an end to the possibility of a nuclear world war are the preconditions of every humane goal. But it also signifies that there can be no “socialism in one country” at a time when the economic and social structures of the world are becoming more international every day.
Page 146
The point is, society can clearly reward genuine, real-world innovation (but not unto the generations) without providing enormous subsidies for corporate gambling.
Page 148
The new socialism must be concerned with the character of civilization, not just with the allocation of investment. For economic and social development have now made more and more people conscious of primordial injustices that were ignored when simple survival was the central issue. The immediate task has to do with issues of gender, environment, and race that cannot be reduced to class injustice because they are posed within every class, the working class most emphatically included.
Page 150
…the vision itself is two centuries old and audaciously new: that the inexorable socialization of the entire planet, which is the future contained in our present, can become the tool, rather than the oppressor, of free women and men.
Page 187
The emergence of a global consciousness will not be the work of a decade. It is, rather, the challenge of an entire epoch of history. If the new socialists understand the complexities, they will take visionary first steps in the direction of a new world. No more. And no less.
Page 189
…the existing socialist movement, with all of its failures, remains the only serious hope for a theory and practice of freedom adequate to the twenty-first century. For it is struggling to define not simply a new social structure of accumulation, important as that is, but the first steps toward a new civilization as well.
Page 194
The issues that have just been defined — basic choices between manipulative and authentic communitarianism — will be decided not in an abstract debate over desirable futures, but in a bitter political struggle over how to meet the crises this transition will bring to the advanced economies.
It is outrageous but inevitable that this confrontation over the future of humankind will be focused, to begin with, in the societies of the privileged fifth of the race. … But it is no simple matter to reverse a carefully articulated system of planetary injustice wrought over some four centuries of history.
… That, for pragmatic reasons as well as for moral solidarity, the socialists in these economies must design their response in international terms has already been made clear. But, through no fault of their own, they will do so primarily in those nations in which the technological revolution begins.
Page 195
We are talking, then, of crises of the system, within the system, over the next half century.
Page 196
It means that the socialists are going to have to synthesize their long-run transformations of the way people live and work with short-run responses to serious economic and social disturbances, which is something they never succeeded in really doing in the twentieth century.
Page 197
If one is concerned with the truly audacious project of empowering people to take command of their daily lives, that will not be done through the expansion of bureaucratic state power. But to say that is not to give up the vision of social ownership; it is to prepare a fresh way of taking it seriously.
Page 199
Thus, one can grant formal rights for participation, but if the participant lack the technical competence to take part in the debate, that is all but meaningless. So, in the society now emerging, one has to look toward the socialization of information as well as of property.
… A fundamental proposition of the new socialism — which is also a basic requirement of the new technology — is the participation of worker representatives in all economic decision-making processes.
Page 202
… it is extremely difficult to build an island of social cooperation in an economy based fundamentally on competition at the expense of the vulnerable. Antisocial priorities are imposed by the market upon the workers even when they do have the vote on the Board of Directors. This is not to disparage all attempts at such worker ownership in a transitional effort to begin to change the nature of the system; it is to emphasize once again how hard it is to change the system when you play by the system’s own rules.
Page 204
The capitalist attack on artisanal skill, the whole historic process that created a semi- and unskilled labor force, has left a deep impression on society. Labor was widely degraded to the status of a painful means to the pleasurable end of consumption. … But the circumstances could change, and socialists should not, in any case, turn their backs on such a critical category of human experience as work.
Page 205
We should make the engineering of technology a political question, insisting that industry of every kind try to create machines that make jobs creative and interesting.
Second, there is a sense in which indifference to decision making in the workplace expresses a realism limited to a particular situation, not some deep reluctance to participate that is part of human nature. … Whenever they did feel that their participation could make a difference, they acted.
Page 217
Socialists should therefore propose a new set of statistics based on the QNP and the QIP — the Qualitative National, and International, Product. … After computing the Gross National Product, one then subtracts from it all environmental degradation, premature death, wasteful packaging, and uninformative advertising in order to arrive at a figure for a Qualitative Product. … If such a series of statistics were available, the relevant facts of political debate would be radically redefined and there would be different kinds of conclusions.
Page 219
Let me put my point most paradoxically: only under socialism and democratic planning will it be possible for markets to serve the common good as Adam Smith thought they did under capitalism.
Page 241
The American experience, however, includes a little-known history of success with implications that go far beyond medicine. The Neighborhood Health Center program was begun in 1965 under the aegis of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the main federal agency of the War on Poverty. Its premise was that the traditional organizational modes for the delivery of health-care services were not appropriate to the poor, that it was imperative to locate community centers in the immediate neighborhood of those in need. The centers were not only able to facilitate dramatic health gains in those neighborhoods; they turned out to be more cost-effective than the traditional, hospital-dominated system financed by third-party insurers. But, as Paul Starr has suggested, they were not followed up in the Nixon and Ford administrations because they contradicted conservative ideology. They experienced a brief revival during the Carter presidency and were then subjected to renewed attack during the Reagan years.
Page 246
In reality, monopoly capital produces whatever will yield the largest profit, and uses all the wiles of psychology and science to make sure that the consumer chooses what is good for the corporate bottom line, while at the same time many essential and even desperate human needs — say, for affordable housing in the decaying central cities — are not met. Above all, under the consumer “democracy” of contemporary capitalism, the votes are determined by income and wealth, and the market is thus a mechanism for transmitting the desires of the privileged.
…
But the alternative should be socialized consumer information, education, a commitment to the proposition that the people, if they are not systematically misinformed, are quite capable of making intelligent decisions for themselves.
Page 248-9
“All” that socialists have to do in order to forward that emancipatory potential is to make this process transparent and subject to democratic control. And this must be done while simultaneously winning political support from a majority of the people for the short-run governments that are the only possible agency of long-run democratic change.
Page 265
If socialization is no longer thought of as the automatic consequence of the economic development of capitalist society, as a transition from capitalist monopoly to socialist monopoly; if, on the contrary, socialization is understood as the conscious control of their destiny by the people; then it is clearly a goal that extends to all of society, not just to the economy. It involves a shift in culture, in psychology, in the very self-conception of individuals who have previously accepted a subordinate condition.
Page 266
Socialism is not an explanation of all of the fundamental problems of life, of the meaning of death, the existence of evil, and so on. Socialists may well address those questions, and Marxism, as an atheistic humanism, makes a stoic response to them. But socialism itself deals with putting an end to the unnecessary evil of the world that is caused by economic and social structures. No more, no less.
Page 272
This is one of the many reasons why a commitment to a rebirth of practical idealism, of values rooted in programs that actually change the conditions of life, is so important to the new socialism.
…
the language of a common idealism that transcends mere material interest becomes all the more important.
Page 272-3
Power had to be dispersed; some would no longer “lord it over” others. Equality was seen to be not simply a matter of justice for the individual but a means of establishing the very moral atmosphere of the nation as a whole. Solidaristic values were basic and so was communication. That vision, I think, can be found in every serious socialist thinker, even in those, like Marx and Kautsky, who shunned the language of morality out of a contempt for moralizing. Now in our fragmented world — and that was another Tawney theme — these values are not simply ethical imperatives; they are also strategic and tactical elements of a socialism that will unite, within nations and throughout the world, forces more disparate than those dreamed of by the founders of the movement.
Page 276
A similar perspective followed from Gramsci’s Marxist revisionism in which the socialist working class would play a key role in a “moral and intellectual reformation” that would embrace many classes and strata. Such a new “historic bloc” would have to be united on the basis of ethical values and not simply in terms of the material interests of a single class.
Page 277
But I insist that the political, social, and economic development of modern society points socialism toward an ethical, multiclass, and decentralized conception of it goal based on the democratization of the workplace and the creation of new forms of community, both within the nation and throughout the world.
…
It therefore requires new structures — the democratization of information and education, the vesting of real power in decentralized institutions that give the citizen a pragmatic reason for participation.
Is such a socialist republicanism possible? Can we really create a space for personal and community freedom in a modern society? No one can be sure. All we can say with confidence is that if such freedom is to come into existence, it will be the result of new global structures of solidarity and justice. Which is to say, of socialism.
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