Rorty on socialism

["Alan G. Isaac" <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This may interest some on pkt
(and infuriate others).
Alan Isaac

Richard Rorty, "For a more banal politics".


Excerpted from the article:

"In the wake of the events of 1989 and 1991, it has become clear that American

leftist intellectuals stand in need of a new political vocabulary. Visitors
from postrevolutionary Eastern and Central Europe are going to stare at us
incredulously if we continue to use the word "socialism" when we describe
our political goals. Indeed, given the suffering they have endured under
regimes
that called themselves Marxist, our Eastern European friends are likely to
feel that Marxist rhetoric is no more respectable than Nazi rhetoric.  Just
as we would be justifiably suspicious of anyone who spoke of "Hitler's
excesses," so our colleagues in Czechoslovakia and Hungary will be outraged if

we
continue to speak, as many Western intellectuals still do, of "Stalin's
excesses."  We will have to stop repeating Trotsky's claim that Stalin
betrayed a promising revolution and begin to see Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin
as Vladimir Nabokov did:  as three ruthless gangsters, distinguishable only by

their facial hair.  We are all accustomed to thinking of World War II as a
good war, but many of us are not yet prepared to think of the Cold War as a
good war.  Yet this is just how the Czechs think of it. The Czechs and the
Slovaks would be as outraged by the suggestion that the West should have
avoided the Cold War by coming to terms with Stalin in 1948 as the French
would be at the suggestion that Britain and the United States should, in
1941, have followed through on Chamberlain's betrayal of Benes by betraying de

Gaulle.

It is going to take a long period of readjustment for us Western leftist
intellectuals to comprehend that the word "socialism" has been drained of
force--as have been all the other words that drew their force from the idea
that an alternative to capitalism was available.  Not only are we going to
have to stop using the term "capitalist economy" as if we knew what a
functioning non-capitalist economy looked like but we are going to have to
stop using the term "bourgeois cultures" as if we knew what a viable
non-bourgeois culture in an industrialized society would look like.

I am saying these things not as a triumphant Reaganite but rather as someone
who kept hoping that some country would figure out a way to keep socialism
after getting rid of the nomenklatura. Even now, I am unwilling to grant
that Friedrich von Hayek was right in saying that you cannot have democracy
without capitalism. All I will concede is that you need capitalism to ensure a

reliable supply of goods and services, and to ensure that there will be
enough taxable surplus left over to finance social welfare.  The only hope for

getting the money necessary to eliminate intolerable inequities is to
facilitate the activities of people like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, and even
Donald Trump and Armand Hammer--not to mention George Babbitt and "Rabbit"
Angstrom.  Public virtues, as far as we can presently see, will continue to
be parasitic upon private vices.  Nothing remotely like a "new socialist man"
seems likely to emerge.

We will have to work hard to free ourselves of the Marxist vocabulary to
which many of us in academia still cling.  But I hope that we shall go
farther.
I
hope we can admit that we have practically nothing in the way of a
"theoretical basis" for political action and that we may not need one.  As
Karl Popper pointed out forty years ago, Plato and Marx share a certain
resemblance.  Both thought that they understood deep underlying forces,
forces whose direction determined the fates of human communities.  Plato
claimed to
know that justice could not reign until kings became philosophers or
philosophers kings.  He claimed to know this on the basis of a searching
inspection of the human soul.  Marx claimed to know that justice could not
reign until capitalism was overthrown and culture decommodified.  He claimed
to know this on the basis of a deep understanding of the movement of
history.  I hope we have reached a time when we can finally get rid of the
conviction
common to Plato and Marx, the conviction that there just must be large
theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice. I hope we can learn to
get along without the conviction that there is something deep--such as the
human soul, or human nature, or the will of God, or the shape of
history--which provides a subject matter for grand, politically useful
theory.  We should accept the fact that from here on in we are going to have
to
be as
crudely experimental as the new governments of Poland and Lithuania are
being forced to be.

Now that we can no longer be Leninists, intellectuals have to face up to
some questions that Leninism helped us to evade.  What is behind the sense of
loss that comes over us now that we are forced to conclude that bourgeois
democratic welfare states are the best we can envisage?  Is it sadness at
the thought that the poor will never get all the way out from under the rich,
that the solidarity of a cooperative commonwealth will never be attained?  Or
is
it instead sadness at the thought that we intellectuals turned out to be less
relevant to the fate of humanity than we had hoped?  Was our thirst for
world-historical romance--for deep theories about deep causes of social
change--caused by our concern for human suffering?  Or was it at least in
part a thirst for an important role for ourselves to play?

Whatever the answers to these navel-gazing questions, I think that we
Western leftists can best acknowledge the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 by
resolving
to banalize our vocabulary of political deliberation. I suggest that we start
talking about greed and selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology,
about starvation wages and layoffs rather than about the commodification of
labor, and about differential per-pupil expenditure on schools and
differential access to health care rather than about the division of society
into classes.  I suggest that we stop assuming that the function of the
intellectual is radical criticism that attempts to penetrate down to the
realities beneath the appearances. I hope that we can stop using notions
like "mystification" and "ideology," notions that suggest that we are in a
position to see through mere social constructions and discern something that
is
more
than a social construction.  It would be better simply to say:  perhaps we
can construct a better society than we have now--better not in the sense of
conforming better to the way things really are but merely in the sense of
containing fewer inequities.  From this point of view, the only kind of
criticism of existing institutions that will count will be reformist rather
than radical--the kind that sketches a concrete alternative institution, an
alternative that does not presuppose the existence of a new kind of human
being.

So far, I have been suggesting that we intellectuals should react to the
recognition that we may always have market economies by taking less interest
in philosophy and more in reform legislation, less interest in academic
politics and more in electoral politics, less interest in the criticism of
ideology and more in formulating scenarios for change.  But I have to admit
that something very important has been lost now that we can no longer see
ourselves as fighting against "the capitalist system."  For better or worse,
"socialism" was a word that lifted the hearts of the best people who lived
in our century. A lot of very brave men and women died for that word.  They
died for an idea that turned out not to work, but they nevertheless embodied
virtues to which most of us can hardly aspire.

Still, the image of Lenin at the Finland Station, an image that captured the
hearts of our grandparents, cannot be retouched and revived.  That image is,
in today's St. Petersburg, the memory of a nightmare.  In the minds of our
grandchildren, that image will form a triptych along with that of Hitler at
a Nuremberg rally and of Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia.  The

image of Aleksandr Kerensky is going to blend with that of Tomas Masaryk,
and that of Hans Beimler with that of Horst Wessel.

So what now will fire the imagination of the international left?  What songs
will the next generation of hopeful, idealistic students sing now that
nobody wants the International Soviet to be the human race?  What cry will
rally
young people who have realized that what their grandparents used to call
"the bourgeois revolution" is not going to be succeeded by a proletarian
revolution? That what their grandparents called "petit-bourgeois reformism"
is, at least in the industrialized democracies, the only political
alternative we have left?  That revolutions against Third World oligarchies
are unlikely to throw up any better institutions than those the industrialized

democracies have already developed?  What heroes or heroines, and which
triumphant
events, will fill the minds of the leftist university students in 2010?

I have no confident answer to such questions, but I shall offer a tentative
one:  perhaps the image of Lenin will be replaced by the image of Vaclav
Havel, and the events of October 1917 in St. Petersburg by those of 1989 in
Prague.  For of all the revolutions of the past three years, the Velvet
Revolution best fulfills the intellectual's hope to act together with the
workers, successfully joining forces to overthrow tyrants.  Havel's
magnificent honesty has made him the symbol of everything that Lenin was
not.  It is not hard to hope that Havel's writings will set the tone for the
next
worldwide surge of social hope.

What is so surprising and refreshing about Havel's tone, to my mind, is that
he seems prepared to go all the way in replacing theoretical insight with
groundless hope and trial and error. As he says in the interviews collected
as Disturbing the Peace, "hope is not prognostication." Throughout those
interviews, he emphasizes his lack of interest in underlying forces and
historical trends.

...

Scientific socialism, Lenin thought, gave us the tools to formulate,
and demonstrate the truth of, just such prognostications. But the end of
Leninism will, with luck, rid us of the hope for anything like scientific
socialism,
and for any similar source of theoretically based prognostication.

And yet many of us are still, alas, on the lookout for a successor to
Marxism--for a large theoretical framework that will enable us to put our
society in an excitingly new context.  We hope that this new context will
suggest something to say that will be less banal than "people ought to be
kinder, more generous, less selfish." My own hunch is that there may be
nothing less banal to say.  There may be no middle ground for exciting
theoretical work--no middle ground between that sort of banality and
attempts to sketch concrete, workable alternatives to present sociopolitical
arrangements.  Rather than dreaming of a spiritual renewal, I think we would
be better off assuming that whatever improvements occur in the next century
will be no more dramatic than those that occurred in ours -- that the best we
can hope for is more of the same experimental, hit-or-miss,
two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back reforms that have been taking place in
the industrialized democracies since the French Revolution."


Richard Rorty, "For a More Banal Politics".
_Harper's_.  1992.  Vol. 284, No. 1704.  (May)
pp. 16-21.