Re: Rorty on socialism

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â HenryC.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Alan G. Isaac" wrote:

> 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.

Without Stalin, Europe would have been under Hitler by 1943.
But then, Fassbinder's view is that if Hitler had won the war, Genrmany would be
exactly the way it is today.
Of course, one can say there is no difference between Teddy R. and FDR, but he
would not be taken very seriously.

> 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.

Counterfactuals can cut many ways.  Without the Cold War, the Soviet Block might
have less a garrison mentality and gone in more humane ways.  For example, I was
surprised to find in America a lot of saving banks call themselves "People's"
Banks.

> 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.
>

A few months ago, the NY Time reported that the term "capitalism" has totally
disappeared from college text books on economics.  Surely it does not follow that
capitalism has therefore gone out of style.

> 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.

A great number of people in the world are prepared to get rid of both "democracy"
and 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.

You know the horse and sparrow joke Galbreath used to tell about about trickling
down - if you feed the horse enough oats, the sparrow will benefit.
If one defines all wealth creation activities as captialist activitites then of
course capitalism created wealth while socialism distribute it.  But this
apologetical view is only valid within its definition.  Demand, which is very
important in captialist markets, is a socialist concept.  Market on the other hand
is not exclusivel a cpaitalist institution.

> 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.

Plato conceived a world in which the timeless ideal of morality constitutes the
perfect reality, of which the material world is
but a flawed reflection.
Marx's dialectic materailism did not say much about social justice.  He saw
capitalism not as a nemesis of socialism but its midwife.
The justice part came more from his Judea-Christian culture.

>  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.

This sounds very much like a Marxist analysis to me.
Justice in politics is a rationalization of interest.  In revolutionary politics,
the game is power.  When power is disproportionally distributed, revolution
occurs.  Political power is in large measure based on material conditions, the
distribution of wealth being a major issue.  Most revolutionary exploit social
injustice as fuel for revolution against a dysfunction system, and the
contemporary defintion of soical injustice is part and partial of that
dysfunctionality.

>
> Now that we can no longer be Leninists, intellectuals have to face up to some
> questions that Leninism helped us to evade.

Lennin's major contribution to Marxism is his analysis of imperialism as the final
stage of capitalism. Lennin combined mastery of theory with shrewd political
instinct; he attacked theoretical revisionism and gradualism while he practised
opportunistic compromises to further the utlitmate establishement of socialism.
There are living lenninists (small l) everywhere, particularly in intellectual
circles in every field, if by lenninist we mean an elite core leading the
unelightened masses and deliver them from oppression they have been conditioned to
accept as natural, for their own good based on scientific truth.

> 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?
>

There is a difference between intellectuals, who are always apologists, and
revolutionaries, who are always visionaries.
In politics, the Bismarkean syndrome is a classic example of dialectic
materialism.  Bismark instituted sweeping social reforms to defuse radical
domestic socialist pressure, and at the same time, to utilize the resultant
economic growth to promote Prussian conservative objectives of German nationalism
and empire building. The opponent of radicalism becomes the protector of radical
ideas.

> 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.
>
>

The situation is atucally more simple.  If the sight of poverty disgusts you, you
have the making of a socialist.  If the sight of poverty make you feel fortunate,
you have the making of a capitalist.  Whether you will be a revolutionary or an
intellectual has to do with your personal constitution and fate.  Academics from
bourgeois backgrounds tend to lean left out of guilt, while those from
disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be raidically left (out of identification) or
ridically right (out of self rejection).

> 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.

Funny thing: there are more socialists on Wall Street than people let on.

> 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?
>

With the re-emrgence of the radical right, most recently in Austria, the
complacent center may wish to slow down the eclipse of the ridical left.

> 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.
>

This sentiment had been widespread after the failure of the 1848 revolutions.  It
did not bring about the end of progress, nor end future revolutions.

> 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 collectedas
> Disturbing the Peace, "hope is not prognostication." Throughout those
> interviews, he emphasizes his lack of interest in underlying forces and
> historical trends.
>

Havel is a fatalist.  His problem was that he did not fight for true  freedom.  It
was given to him by geopolitical forces. He is of no great consequence.

> ...
>
> 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."
>

This is all defeatist trash.  Its central error comes from viewing epochal
concepts through the perspective of tea party vision.  Social revolutions are not
inspiring movies, or dinner parties, as Mao said.

The game has hardly begun, let alone end.

Henry C.K. Liu