6

Recasting the Project:
Prologue for a Critical
Theory of Socialism

Have the courage to see clearly.

—Victor Serge

The specter is no longer haunting anything. Conditions have changed—economically, politically, and ideologically. Employing an eighteenth-century understanding of the market is anachronistic. The terrain of struggle is different and exploitation in the industrially advanced societies is no longer what was exhibited in the novels of Dickens, Zola, or Upton Sinclair. The “class enemy” is no longer the capitalist in his top hat and fur coat or the racist imperialist of old. Fighting a phantom is a waste of time: the face of the enemy is now more benign. Workers clearly enjoy tangible benefits from capitalist democracies whose resilience and productivity would have previously been considered unimaginable. The capitalist production process retains its contradictions, and its priorities are still skewed. Ironically, however, the success of trade unions and labor parties in making capitalism deliver some of the goods has subverted both their once self-evident sense of purpose and the implicit trust they commanded from working people.

With the integration of social democracy, and the degeneration of communism, the “culture industry” began tempering the ideological friction generated by a once powerful proletarian public sphere.¹ Labor parties made way for new social movements and class consciousness for a new preoccupation with “identity.” The authoritarian bent of anti-imperialist revolutions and the decrepit rule of post-Stalinist cliques in the communist world only seemed to confirm the belief that change in forms of ownership had done nothing to make work either more meaningful or power less conspicuous.² The possibility of imagining an alternative grew ever more difficult.³ Many now share the belief that socialism is not “different” from capitalism, but simply offers more of the same—if admittedly to more people.

Few any longer believe in the apocalyptic “crisis” envisioned by Marx. His economic predictions might yet come to pass, and a future heightening of more traditional class conflict might also occur. None of this, however, can any longer be understood as being prescribed by capitalism. Such a development is contingent upon political choices that do not mechanically derive from purely economic assumptions. For this reason, putting it in philosophical terms, Kant is required to temper the prophetic excesses of Marx even if Marx remains necessary in order to mitigate the transcendentalism of Kant. It is clear: no significant movement or organization firmly believes any longer that capitalism will generate its gravediggers or that its breakdown is somehow commensurate with the advance of socialism. Visions of evolutionary reform and revolutionary romanticism both lack agents capable of realizing their aims. Erosion of past gains has marked the last quarter of the twentieth century while faith in the looming breakdown, or the coming proletarian revolution, has as little justification as waiting for Godot.

Reforms and policies historically associated with the labor movement have been appropriated by its enemies: there is subsequently no sense in continuing to envision socialism as an aggregate of fixed demands which, as Engels once put it in a different context, “once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart.”⁴ By the same token, Utopia has become richer than what was imagined in the past. The sober visions of Thomas More and Francis Bacon no less than the technological Utopias ranging from St. Simon to Edward Bellamy seem boring and outdated. There are new existential and psychological issues, unimagined and unexplored technological possibilities, new concerns raised by feminism and ecology, which do not fit neatly into the old framework.

But mitigating the worst effects of market discipline, rendering public institutions accountable, and contesting parochialism remain inescapable elements of freedom. Dealing with the class structure of capitalism, in the same vein, still serves as the precondition for confronting the larger problems of an emancipated society. Advocates of socialism must prove more bold and yet more modest. Socialism was never understood in terms of Utopia. It was traditionally identified with the transition to communism. But communism is discredited and socialism can now exist only as a regulative ideal. Without a framework capable of linking it to capitalist reality, and the contradictory impulses of its own history, it hangs in the abstract. Socialism requires a theory capable of illuminating its misguided practices and its lasting achievements. Thus the need for a critical theory of socialism.

“Socialism” has been distorted in every imaginable way. It has been associated with repression and religion, provincialism and nationalism, sectarians and populists. Developing a new understanding requires linking an immanent critique of its historical development with a sense of what remains unrealized from its past. The labor movement was initially inspired by the ideals of equality, democracy, and internationalism. Of course, these derive from the still unfulfilled promises of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Only the commitment to them, however, can situate contemporary thinking about socialism within its historical tradition of theory and practice. Connecting the particular class interest of workers with the universal ideals of the bourgeoisie, shouldering the dual burden, remains the task of contemporary socialists.

A critical theory of socialism is predicated on binding principle with interest. It assumes the need to overcome an alienated relationship between social institutions and individual citizens. But it refuses to provide fixed guidelines for such an undertaking. It assumes the existence of people willing to confront moral dilemmas and choose between alternatives. This is not to deny the power of ideology. But it rejects an undifferentiated view of the concept. Both the rules of evidence and racism, for example, are “ideological” phenomena. Even while the rules of evidence can be distorted, however, they obviously contribute to constraining the arbitrary exercise of power in a way that racism does not. The class ideal, with its concern for securing the organizational possibilities of working people and their personal liberties, becomes criterion for judging the utility of the diverse ideological practices handed down from the past. Only through the class ideal can its advocates begin the work of appropriating what is relevant for their own vision.

Ideas are not reducible to the context in which they were forged. They often evidence an unfulfilled radical and even Utopian content. Ideology is more than a veil cast over the material interests of domination: it is also a mystified response to real misery. This was the point that Marx sought to make in his famous discussion of religion when he wrote:

Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people…. The abolition of religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion…. Criticism has plucked imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain that is without fantasy or consolation but so that he will throw it off and pluck the living flower.⁵

Abolishing oppression requires more than criticism: it also demands positive proposals. The major figures of the labor movement were willing to provide them. Their willingness to face the new problems posed by historical development should serve as an inspiration for theorists enmeshed in textual exegesis and academic self-promotion. Unfortunately, however, even the most important figures of the labor movement have become little more than vague memories. Perhaps that is because they sought to privilege the connection between theory and practice. This was true for Marx no less than for Kautsky, who transformed his method into a system, and those intent on developing the old approach in order to deal with new conditions. It was true for Bernstein, Lenin, and Luxemburg. But this is no longer the concern of most still engaged with the socialist tradition. They remain enmeshed in the old style. Coming to terms with the past in a critical fashion, of course, is not the same as simply breaking with it. Renewing the radical spirit of the socialist undertaking is possible only by appropriating and transvaluing the unrealized values animating the original undertaking. This means illuminating the repressed interests of working people and articulating the political and ideological requirements for initiating a response. Such is the reason socialism can now be understood only as a new critical theory with a positive intent.

Socialist Ethics and the Inverted World

Emancipation has become a contingent enterprise. Socialism can no longer be seen as the immanent product of capitalism or the unfolding of history. The claims of its founders, the economic or political arrangements envisioned by their followers, have all been called into question. Socialism is on the defensive and resistance against the modern form of capitalism is being undertaken, when it is being undertaken, not because it is somehow on the historical agenda, or because it is dialectically “necessary,” but because it is morally appropriate. The proletariat has lost its privileged status and its historical mission. Philosophical refurbishment cannot make good the failure of historical agency. Only the ethical impulse of the socialist undertaking, its original emphasis upon the protest against injustice, retains its validity.

Substituting ethics for teleology, however, carries a high price. It withdraws the certainty of “success.” The connection between capitalist crisis and socialist progress is sundered. Sacrifices demanded in the present can no longer be secured by the certain belief in a better future. The understanding of resistance changes: the introduction of an alternative is no longer assured. The systematic delineation of a future goal makes way for a critical method of inquiry. The ideal takes precedence over the material. The old bond between theory and practice dissolves. History provides no comfort. Quite the contrary. A critical theory of socialism is left in the position of rubbing it against the grain.

Theory can only speculate on the prerequisites for forms of practice whose “success” will then be disputed, once again, in terms of theory. The implication of this situation is clear: the connection between theory and practice can only be determined from the standpoint of theory itself. Or, putting it another way, political theory should perhaps speak to the concerns of practice. But commitment to such an imperative can no longer be based on the assurance that it will. The academic temptations, the possibilities for evasion, have become too great. Philosophical refurbishment cannot make good the failure of historical agency: the proletariat has lost its privileged status and its historical mission. Its movements and its political organizations have faded into history. Changed historical conditions call for reversing the traditional relation between existence and consciousness: it is necessary to privilege a new form of idealism rather than an anachronistic materialism.

Sundering the idea of socialism from any fixed institutional claims or teleological guarantees undermines its ability to serve as an all-embracing worldview. It cannot provide a solution for every private problem. Its ethic has little to say about personal or religious beliefs other than that the sacred offers no privileged insight into the workings of the profane and that religious institutions should be treated no differently from any others. A critical theory of socialism serves as a corrective for dogmatism, little more. It cannot substitute for theology or phenomenology. It must insist that establishing “truth” is less important than securing the ability to question further. This new form of critical theory will be less concerned with the experiential self-assertion highlighted by Friedrich Nietzsche than with the “open society” projected by Karl Popper.

Intent upon contesting all forms of mystification, seeking to endow choices with moral integrity, socialist ethics appropriates the insight of Thomas Hobbes regarding the inherently imprudent consequences of legislating personal opinion. Its partisans can merely project the conditions necessary for individuals to make their choices responsibly and without arbitrary constraints. Their commitment is directed toward expanding the institutional arena of personal choice and the options from which individuals may choose. Important decisions are, of course, usually influenced by economic calculation and prejudices inherited from the past. But these influences are what a genuinely socialist politics seeks to eliminate. The commitment is to process, in the same way as with liberalism, but a notion of process uncontaminated by that which disadvantages working people under capitalism or any other system of exploitation.

A critical theory of socialism is public in character.⁶ Its claims must stand open to debate and critical scrutiny. Purely private opinions or preferences, buttressed by prejudice or experience, are insufficient. Claims must be considered with a speculative view toward their political impact whether as the source of legislation, inspiration, or program.⁷ Public life thereby becomes the objective referent for a socialist ethic. Its quality is seen as having a profound impact on the sensibility of citizens and, if only for this reason, the theory cannot assume an autonomous subject divorced from the empirical realm of “necessity.” It recognizes that life choices are not made in a vacuum and that they are influenced by economic standing, political institutions, and pedagogy. The irreducible freedom of the subject is seen as receiving its definition from the context in which it is exercised.

Socialist ethics considers the personal text incomprehensible without reference to the social context. Providing a coherent critique of that context, formulating a sense of what should be done, ultimately depends upon the ability to articulate a practical criterion of political judgment. Its legitimation can derive neither from ontological claims of philosophy nor the organic tradition of a community. Justification for this practical criterion must instead prove logical insofar as any emancipatory order presupposes its existence; historical insofar as it can confront practice with an emancipatory purpose; speculative insofar as it allows for the evaluation of any given proposal; and practical insofar as it can inform an organizing principle of resistance.

Accountability of power is the practical criterion for a critical theory of socialism. Or, putting it another way, socialism is the attempt to constrain the arbitrary exercise of public power. Such a stance obviously implies empowering the disempowered and evaluating issues in terms of their potential impact on the weak and the unprotected. The critique of power without reciprocity and power predicated on bias underpins any progressive confrontation with the status quo and any understanding of a genuinely emancipated order. Such a critique begins by identifying those generalizable interests suppressed by the existing order. Only then is it possible to generate claims concerning the legitimacy of existing institutions.⁸

The accountability of power is the most basic generalizable interest of political life. It informed liberal thought and it also underpinned the original socialist understanding of democracy. Highlighting it would place socialist theory in coherent relation with what is best in the revolutionary heritage of bourgeois political philosophy. Emphasizing accountability would also help in judging past practices and facilitate the creation of a worthwhile socialist tradition capable of speaking to the current age. This foundation for political critique has been ignored for too long. Perhaps that is because history rather than philosophy justifies its validity. The past shows that the extent to which the liberal rule of law is absent is the extent to which arbitrary power and terror are exercised. The justification of its political claim subsequently relies less on the contorted philosophical arguments of self-styled “postmetaphysical” thinkers than the willingness to abandon philosophical pretenses and make reference to history itself. Indeed, from such a perspective, perhaps the greatest contribution of Marx derives from the lesser known second of the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach:

The question whether human thinking can pretend to objective truth is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the “this-sidedness” of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Anchoring discourse ethics on a “universal pragmatics,” which is content to ignore issues of power concerning how an agenda is set, doesn’t help matters.⁹ Such a stance is merely the flip side of a populist and communitarian standpoint intent on subordinating universal principles to local customs and incapable of drawing qualitative distinctions between traditions.¹⁰ History suggests that the universal principles underpinning the liberal rule of law rather than the contingency of custom best allows for the contestation of prejudice and inequality. Even the most liberal system, of course, will attempt to chain the future to the past. It is subsequently a matter of defining the terms in which specific traditions function. Kant makes this clear when he writes:

An age cannot conclude a pact and take an oath upon it to commit the succeeding age to a situation in which it would be impossible for the latter to enlarge even its most important knowledge, to eliminate error, and altogether to progress in enlightenment. Such a thing would be a crime against human nature, the original destiny of which consists in such progress. Succeeding generations are entirely justified in discarding such decisions as unauthorized and criminal. The touchstone of all this to be agreed upon as a law for people is to be found in the question whether a people could impose such a law upon itself.¹¹

The universal underpinnings of rationalism is the point on which liberalism and socialism converge. But the socialist ethic is not reducible to liberal bourgeois principles. It recognizes that constraints on liberty can have an economic as well as a political source. Socialist ethics thus inherently speaks to the connection between liberty and equality. It contests the priorities associated with the capitalist production process and, for this reason, introduces a class perspective. This is indeed the reef on which even the most sophisticated forms of “democratic theory” founder: their criteria for ethical judgment are elaborated without reference to the way their ideals are inhibited by systemic constraints on the ability to organize resistance.¹²

There has been too much posturing: belief in democracy for contemporary intellectuals has become as self-evident as the monarchy was for classical authors.¹³ There are no longer any available authoritarian political options for a progressive politics. The real threat to democracy is posed by the economic policies of neoliberalism. It has become a matter of opposing the transformation of democratic institutions into playgrounds for elites intent upon maintaining their power over decisionmaking procedures at the expense of structurally disadvantaged groups. The principal intellectual goal for a critical theory of socialism lies in breaking the popular assumption, which has only grown stronger following the collapse of the USSR, concerning the inherent link between the market and democracy.

Emphasizing the accountability of capital, understanding capital as a social institution, provides a step in the right direction. It distinguishes socialist ethics from its liberal counterparts and the more timid expressions of “democratic theory.” A critical theory of socialism brings to light not merely the arbitrary power exercised by the state and state actors, or the impact of inequitable forms of distribution, but also the biases deriving from the structure of production. Accumulation does not simply occur through individuals buying and selling goods and services: capitalism is not a flea market. It remains dependent on the contradiction between social production and private appropriation of wealth. Production is not concerned with individuality. It is instead predicated on calculability, which, from the standpoint of “efficiency,” calls upon employers to view workers as a simple “factor” of production. The individual becomes an object, a cog in the machine, and the needs of capital are given precedence over those of workers. The modern production process indeed still reflects the “inverted world” (verkehrte Welt) first described by Hegel and then by Marx.¹⁴

This inverted world is defined by the “commodity form” which, as a nation becomes more economically advanced, will ever more surely turn ever more aspects of life into ever more products for sale. Money aids in this task by acting as a universal, objective, and mathematical medium of exchange. It valorizes every commodity in terms that allow for predictability as well as the specific determination of efficiency and profit. Qualitative differences between commodities are reduced to quantitative ones so that the labor power sold by individuals on the market is ultimately evaluated by the same standard as any other commodity. And so, while the worker becomes merely one commodity among others from the standpoint of capital, money assumes a special status under capitalism: it serves both as a standard for measuring all value and as a commodity in its own right. Exchange value displaces use value. This is not a neutral phenomenon as the logistics of reduction, or the increasing uniformity of work time, might suggest. It is too often forgotten that: “behind the reduction of men to agents and bearers of exchange values lies the domination of men over men. This remains the basic fact, in spite of the difficulties with which from time to time many of the categories of political science are confronted.”¹⁵

Capital becomes the subject of the system and the end of human activity while the worker, who still produces the wealth of nations, becomes the object or means for the constitution and expansion of capital. And so, from the standpoint of the inverted world, there is a hidden truth to the popular saying that “money makes money.” Insofar as capital is the subject of the existing accumulation process, and the worker the object, economic activity becomes narrowly defined by the pursuit of profit rather than by the freely determined needs of the community as a whole. Employed privately, arbitrarily, and without democratic accountability, the purpose of capital is to garner more of itself. Indeed, while capital takes on an “other-worldly” (jenseitig) life of its own, its real (diesseitig) producers are stripped of their subjectivity.

Capital remains “alienated” in a very specific way: its accountability is restricted to its particular shareholders. Democracy is truncated insofar as the exercise of economic power devolves upon a capitalist minority. Conditions of investment and labor are arbitrarily determined while the majority of working people lack any serious input into the production process in which they are engaged.¹⁶ A critical theory of socialism is, for this reason, intent upon fusing the general liberal concerns of political life with the specific interests of working people or refashioning the dual burden of the labor movement in a modern form. It resists the “natural” identification between the “use” and “exchange” value of objects.¹⁷ It refuses to remain trapped within the logic of an inverted world.

The logic of this inverted world explains the obsession with a conception of progress unconcerned with its impact upon the environment, an individualism essentially unconcerned with its impact upon the community, and an empirical understanding of production essentially devoid of interest in the quality of life enjoyed by its producers. The dominance of this logic indeed explains the disappearance of the inverted world as an object of political critique. Such a critique would oppose viewing “use value” either as an irrelevant counterpoint to “exchange” or as some purely metaphysical essence within an object. It would understand “use” not simply in terms of profitability, or the arbitrary workings of a “free” market, but in terms of its democratic political determination.

The socialist struggle is still primarily informed by the struggle for time and the ability to enjoy it. Such is the purpose behind conceiving of “use” in a political manner. Envisioning a new logic of accumulation is of relevance only insofar as it privileges this purpose. The issue is no longer one of invoking Utopia, calling for the abolition of the state, or insisting upon the need for a “new science.” The fight for time is a prime ethical undertaking for a critical theory of socialism. It implies an ongoing project intent upon furthering a situation in which “use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.”¹⁸

It is self-defeating simply to deny the need for efficiency and the primacy of exchange value. Distasteful labor and incentives are intrinsic elements of production. Or, putting it another way, “necessity” is inscribed within the idea of work: it is a matter of mitigating its impact. Marx understood this when he became concrete in his prescriptions for the future by claiming:

the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.¹⁹

The world is not a village. Providing a serious response to this alienated reality does not depend upon inventing some new romantic vision of a decentralized community meager in its wants and needs. Control over the production process can never be complete and, from the standpoint of abolishing alienation, never radical enough. Socialism will become irrelevant if it is simply identified with the other. New strategies are necessary for rationally regulating the interchange with nature, rendering accountable the blind forces of the market, and introducing technology capable of reducing the work week under capitalism.²⁰ Or, in more general terms, policies must be invented that are capable of making the structure and direction of production matters of public accountability.

Such an undertaking reaches back to the beginnings of the labor movement and includes more recent experiments like the Swedish Meidner Plan and various others for “codetermination” (Mitbestimmung). These plans, respectively, call for compensatory takeovers of leading industries by unions and a sharing of management responsibilities so that workers themselves can have an input into setting priorities for national production. It can plausibly be argued that such plans were insufficient. But the truth is that no such plan is ever sufficient. Democracy is always insufficient. There is never enough freedom. The question is whether the existence of necessity should preclude the discussion of practical ideas. It can. The thinking of those who ignore necessity in the name of Utopia is merely the flip side of those who simply build the dependence of workers on capital into their theories. This dependence is what a critical theory of socialism must contest in the name of a new commitment to liberal democracy, economic justice and cosmopolitan principles capable of—at least—mitigating reification.

Reification and Alienation

Such dependence is predicated on the existence of the inverted world and the institutional reproduction of “reification” (Verdinglichung).²¹ The latter concept means technically that something historical and something human is being rendered calculable or understood as a “thing.” Reification eradicates normative values from the decisionmaking process and thereby depoliticizes it. The increasing sway of instrumental reason and a technical consciousness reflects the repression of ethics as a basic category of social existence.²² Insistence upon its relevance thus becomes a form of resistance against reification.

Such resistance involves more than simply articulating the positive goals generated by philosophical idealism and linking them with a critique of the material context that denies their realization. Insofar as their realization can no longer be guaranteed after all, what Hegel and Marx understood as the connection between theory and practice breaks down. An ethical decision is required in order to connect them in the first place. Even this, however, does not tell the whole story. Truth is no longer concrete: if practice no longer guarantees the validity of theory then the connection between theory and practice can only be established from the standpoint of philosophical reflection informed by what Jürgen Habermas termed an “emancipatory interest.”

Its advocates understand how different institutions can influence the general commitment to such an interest for better or worse. The same is true in terms of the economic priorities set by a society and its production process. Social conditions affect the perception of freedom and, for this reason, discussions about freedom cannot remain stuck at the level of formal reciprocity among individuals. Ethics has a radical political function, by the same token, only insofar as it makes reference to the workings of capitalism and the concrete implications of the ways in which it produces and reproduces itself.

Neoliberalism intensifies and highlights how priorities under capitalism become skewed: money still talks too loud, education is increasingly meaningful only insofar as it is associated with a better job, work life for the majority is stultifying, and commercialism infects everything from sex to religion. Above all, however, treating capital as the subject of the production process leads to an understanding of the need for regulation as an infringement on freedom. In this same vein, of course, turning workers into a cost of production is understood as a by-product of necessity. Ignored is the way in which reification intrudes upon the experience of working people, bolsters the inverted world, and thereby fosters a profound sense of inferiority and uncertainty among them. Working people are taught to distrust their own capacities and for this reason, especially with the help of the culture industry, often identify with their exploiters. Counteracting such trends should be the prime purpose informing any new socialist pedagogy.

Even when looking backwards, of course, it is important to understand: workers were never simply robots, genuine emotions between people obviously existed, and ethics was a practical part of everyday life. But reification distorts relations between people and their world. The love of a parent for a child may ultimately have nothing to do with money or the commodity form. But the expression of such love is still intrinsically connected with the ability to provide for the child on par with others. Only the most naive sentimentalists can consider such concerns irrelevant when it comes to love. A critical theory of socialism highlights such concerns in order to master them or, better, to render them unworthy as a social measure.²³ It seeks conditions in which discussion can take place without reference to the prejudices attendant on purely material forms of self-interest.

Instrumental thinking and a utilitarian understanding of self-interest have resulted in a virtual “second nature” for the individual. This second nature is more than an “artificial social construct”; it has become an intrinsic element of modern life. It cannot be uprooted in one stroke by even the most radical revolution: it grows back. Trends within the labor movement have contested this second nature if not the conditions for its reappearance on various occasions. Nevertheless, in a way, most of these romantic undertakings were misguided from the beginning.

Modern production is impossible without some degree of instrumental rationality and any exercise of authority demands a degree of bureaucracy. The real question involves less the erosion of subjectivity through instrumental reason than the possibility of rendering social institutions and public practices accountable to citizens. There will always be a conflict between the exigencies of organization and the demands of freedom. The philosophical recourse to transcendence doesn’t help matters: it is not enough to suggest that humanity will realize its self-administrative potential at a later date or that individuals will gain their fulfillment in another life.

Freedom has no destiny. Power, production, and bureaucracy cannot be ignored in order to contest alienation and reification. What demands transformation are the activities whereby people are turned into instruments for securing profit and power.²⁴ Either the understanding of reification will change in the name of reinvigorating political practice or the old definition of reification will remain in place and radical politics will remain paralyzed. Freedom must be treated concretely. Issues of power must be seen as turning on accountability, production on its priorities, and bureaucracy on the functions it can serve.

A critical theory of socialism must shift gears. Modernity is a complex phenomenon composed of different systems and subsystems with different logics and practices. Calling for simply bringing them all under a form of workers’ control is oversimplified: the welfare state tends toward “decommodifying” various needs of modern life even while new forms of institutional accountability are necessary for sophisticated scientific undertakings like space travel or gene technology. The philosophical discussions of the past have little to offer here. The old indeterminate discussions about alienation and reification have lost their validity.

The two were once considered interchangeable. But there is a difference between them: where the former is a psychological condition for which Utopia is the only response, by contrast, the latter is a condition susceptible to intervention in the here and now. New forms of critical socialist theory must prove more determinate than their predecessors and draw the distinction. This means more than simply illuminating the unacknowledged norms and interests hidden beneath supposedly neutral phenomena in favor of more generalizable norms and interests.²⁵ It also involves specifying the practices of qualitatively different subsystems within the production process and confronting them with new institutions capable of providing a degree of public accountability. Only by specifying what limits accountability and strengthens the arbitrary exercise of power in given institutional arenas of action does it become possible to speak concretely about the assault on reification.

The attack on alienation and reification can take place from diverse political viewpoints. Fascists believed that they too were attacking these phenomena given their preoccupation with intuition; anarchists surely thought the same given their attack on progress. There is a species of romantic anti-capitalism from which a critical theory of socialism must distinguish itself. That is possible only by insisting upon the rationality of normative discourse, the need to subordinate instrumental decisionmaking processes to democratic ends, and the willingness to place priority upon public goods over purely private interests.

There is no contradiction in suggesting that institutions are necessary in order to contest reification. Rendering them accountable requires civic commitment and participation. But that doesn’t change matters. Organization, bureaucracy, and power are the only means by which working people can resist being identified as factors of production. The goal of a world in which no subject is treated as a means to an end is useful as a regulative idea. But it is not realizable. A politics predicated on expanding the life options of working people, however, is a practical response to “necessity.” It implies only shifting priorities or, putting the matter differently, beginning the process of reinverting the “inverted world.” Such is the sense in which a critical theory of socialism is predicated on a permanent revolution of subjectivity.

The Pursuit of Unity and the Vagaries of Class

The time is long past when any political party or movement can claim to embody the “true” or “universal” interests of humanity. Particularly following the 1960s, it is no longer tenable to maintain that class exhausts the identity of the subject or that it can speak to the immediacy of oppression in all its varied guises. Willing to draw the implications of teleological collapse, and the failure of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent, a new generation of intellectuals sought to reassert that threatened moment of subjectivity. “New social movements” emerged among women, among people of color and diverse sexual orientations, and among those concerned with the environement. They became intent upon reformulating the spirit of resistance and the claim to freedom in existential and cultural rather than in merely economic or political terms.

These movements raised the consciousness of millions. They brought to the forefront neglected concerns ranging from the threat of ecological disaster to incest. They raised issues speaking to the experience of everyday life in new ways. They contested conformity in the name of difference and they insisted that universal values of equality not eradicate the uniqueness of those with different sexual orientations and races. They highlighted the powerful connection between cultural and political issues. They indeed gave voice to those who had been previously excluded and ignored.

But the cultural changes introduced by the new social movements occurred while an overarching attack on the economic and political gains secured in the 1930s and 1960s was underway. Organizing around goals associated with identity and the cultural transformation of everyday life, in fact, may actually have facilitated the economic and political counterattack of the 1980s. Unity gave way to division and reciprocity to often self-serving notions of autonomy. A critical theory of socialism raises the need for reflection upon these matters and the importance of dealing with their implications.

Especially following the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., organizing in the United States began to take place around transclass issues and particular identity claims. There was arguably little choice. The transition from an industrial to an information society was taking place, the old proletariat was dissolving, and a conservative assault was beginning against class-based organizations. There is nothing surprising about the inability of these new social movements to contest the effects of an accumulation process predicated on the very category that they sought to surmount. Surprising is only the willingness to explain away this development by suggesting that the new social movements were primarily “middle class” and that politics is now dominated by a “postmaterialist” discourse.²⁶

Earlier forms were concerned with civil rights, welfare rights, and the political mobilization of minorities and women. These are obviously material concerns of direct interest to working people. Highlighting the unique experiences of oppressed groups, isolating issues of usually particular concern, came later during the late 1970s and 1980s. They expressed the decline of the original radicalism and they generated a dynamic of fragmentation intent upon providing an ever greater specificity of identity claims. This made matters more complex. The dialogue expanded as recognition of differences grew. In keeping with this development, however, interest groups multiplied whose bureaucracies sought organizational autonomy. Each logically wished to privilege the problems of its constituency. And so, while reforms enabling new forms of cultural expression and curtailing discrimination in everyday life were introduced, a broader political fragmentation of progressive forces took place. Various “postmodern” ideologies arose intent on contesting universalism and legitimating the new politics. Thus, with the left lacking an appropriate political perspective on the need for unity, capital began rolling back previous legislative gains and engaging in the most concentrated growth of monopolies in world history.

Generating an alternative cannot simply rely on iterating the common dreams or legislative issues around which “the people” can unify.²⁷ Such a stance goes nowhere without taking into account the role of class, the striving for autonomy by interest groups, and the legitimate emphasis on diversity raised by the new social movements. The idea of a common purpose itself needs reformulation: it is a matter of making women’s rights, homophobia, and the environment part of a class agenda. New categories are required that are capable of illuminating and contesting structural imbalances of power. No theory can obviously guarantee the resolution of all future conflicts between particular groups organized around gender or race and others based on class interest. Whether to privilege the former or the latter, one group or issue over another, depends upon circumstances as well as the given organization in which an individual chooses to work. It is also impossible to determine with certitude whether the best way to forward generalizable principles is through some type of movement coalition or a political party transformed to meet new needs.

Political parties and social movements serve different purposes at different times. Their utility also depends upon the system in which they operate. In the United States, with its weak party structure and single-member districts in which the “winner takes all,” for example, institutions militate against ideological parties and there is an incentive for social movements to transform themselves into traditional interest groups with a bureaucratic concern for autonomy. But this does not mean that parties cannot become more ideological under given circumstances or that these interest groups cannot prove useful for radical forms of action. The important socialist activist Michael Harrington was not wrong in calling upon socialists in the United States to serve as gadflies and work within the Democratic Party. He was merely wrong in suggesting that this is the only useful political work in which they can engage and that they must exert pressure, so to speak, in a suit and tie.

The organizational question must be envisioned in a new way. There is no longer a genuine connection between the party and the movement and, for this reason, a critical theory of socialism must highlight the need to exert pressure on progressive political organizations in a publicly demonstrative way. This means, in turn, intensifying the friction between existing organizations and their mass base in creative ways. Especially where parties are ideologically converging, or the possibilities of bureaucratic redress are purposely overcomplicated, disruption can prove a tactic.²⁸ It has been shown time and again: concerted action in the streets with clearly articulated generalizable aims can produce responses beyond those available by simply lobbying legislators.

Working people no longer owe any particular party anything: it is the same with unions. Whatever their importance, without a movement pushing them, their interest in radicalizing demands dissipates and the potential for corruption grows. The passing of the classical industrial proletariat has made it necessary to fill the void with a new form of “social movement unionism.”²⁹ Class still remains the general determinant of the exploited and the disenfranchised. But its empirical content has changed along with its self-understanding. The distrust of existing progressive organizations is dangerous, but palpable. Critical theory must deal with this situation. It is now more a matter of what perspectives and values socialists should propagate than which party or organization they should join. Undoubtedly, in the future, socialists will have to work both inside and outside the existing political arrangement.

A critical theory of socialism privileges the interests of the base over those of the organization. Visions of a new party may be most suitable for inspiring activists during conservative upswings and perhaps privileging movements is necessary during periods of liberal or progressive rule. But there is also a sense in which either of these options is constraining. It may be best to consider an organizational form more structured and broader in scope than a single-issue coalition if less structured and less prone to compromise than a party. Looking back to the civil rights movement, and the poor peoples’ movement, this new form might be termed a mass association. Such an association can focus on multiple issues: it can also induce a uniquely broad and universal form of ideological enthusiasm. Its positioning between a party and an interest, however, leaves its empirical base indeterminate. There is a danger of it either reaching too far in quest of challenging the system or falling back into a more traditional coalition.

Politics is contingent. But still this contingency is structured by external factors. These are what a critical theory of socialism must investigate. Rigidly attempting to compartmentalize a complex society is hopeless: its economics, politics, and culture are interwoven. Cultural norms and political interests can obviously overlap in issues like abortion, or other concerns needing an electoral mandate. Yet the practical need exists to make rough or heuristic distinctions between subsystems. Cultural norms may serve as a precondition for mass action, but they cannot immanently address either the complex of political power or the structural logic of production. The production and reproduction of economic power, by the same token, retains its own logic and, in turn, this subsystem is protected by a political apparatus capable of coercing agreement or achieving consensus in specific circumstances. Contesting the biases of the production process is possible only if the theory in question retains an immanent point of reference.

This obviously makes the interpretation of class a matter of crucial importance. Marx had fused its structural and empirical expressions with a political purpose in his original teleological conception. As it now stands, however, the structural and empirical understandings of class have become almost mutually exclusive while its speculative or political moment has essentially been discarded. The old tripartite notion of class has lost its validity. Only its fragments are employed as foundations for the dominant interpretations.

The most popular is an empirical view of class. Eduard Bernstein believed the concept would become concrete by defining it in terms of income, lifestyle, and occupation. Its immediacy is enormously attractive. If such an interpretation is useful for academic or statistical purposes, however, it neither forwards any prerequisites for political unity among working people nor highlights the structural constraints on the development of a class politics. George Lichtheim was correct when he wrote that: “If social gradations are invariably ascribed to class differences, the real significance of class is lost and we are cast into a linguistic labyrinth where rank and status are systematically confused with the key problem of political power and its economic foundation.”³⁰

Empirical understandings of class ignore questions concerning reification and the implications of the production process. They are uncritical insofar as they fuel instrumentalism and, when translated to the new social movements, logically project a politics based on single-issue coalitions. The advantages of small cliques with clearly defined private interests as against mass movements with generalizable goals are simply accepted as inevitable. It is the same with the ways in which single-issue coalitions compete with one another over scarce resources and the attention of activists. Little mention is made of how these coalitions fall apart and then reconstitute themselves. It is almost as if radical politics were predicated upon constantly reinventing the wheel.

Structural interpretations of class serve as an alternative. Such views begin with the assumption that the capitalist production process will expand the number of those selling their “labor power” rather than any particular type of (industrial) labor. Secretaries, salespeople, service employees, as well as all those who do not “directly” produce “surplus value” now become part of the working class. According to this interpretation, the working class is not defined by any one palpable occupational activity or lifestyle, but only by the sale and purchase of time. “Class” thereby loses its nineteenth-century connotation with respect to industrial workers. The concept is made to stand in coherent relation to the modern development of the commodity form.

But the eradication of empirical differences between workers in theory does not translate into their disappearance in practice. They retain their impact outside of the structural category. The issue has nothing to do with the concerns of academic pedants who cannot differentiate between those who work as highly paid executives with stock options and those who work in underpaid service industries. These differences are obvious and lack any impact on developing a class politics. Crucial are really the middle managers and supervisory personnel. These are not the high-powered members of what has been termed a “professional managerial class,” but rather those who facilitate production without retaining any actual control over it. They are torn in their allegiances and there is a danger in simply ascribing to them common political interests or solidarity with either capital or labor. Unless the structural analysis can convincingly deal with this stratum, however, its “objective” justification dissolves. The prerequisites for generating a genuine political response to the structural imbalances of power generated by the production process are left hanging in the abstract.³¹

Of course, the looseness of this structural definition can be seen as the legitimate expression of a reality in which class position no longer dictates any particular political stance. But it is also true that the empirical definition of class is no longer self-evidently tied to the structural contradictions of capitalism. Only a tiny minority owns the bulk of wealth in advanced capitalist societies. At the same time the boundaries between ownership and control have become increasingly blurry. The “managerial revolution” has resulted in many of the rulers selling their labor power even though their interests have nothing in common with those of the ruled.

If the attraction of the empirical view of class derives from its immediacy, the structural interpretation holds out hope. The vast majority of society are seen as members of the working class and it is merely a question of appealing to them. The working class becomes “the people.” The structural interpretation of class thereby easily generates pragmatist and populist arguments: the success of a working class party can be seen as resting upon the ability to present itself as a “party of the people” (Volkspartei). There is also an obvious sense in which this claim is legitimate. But it does not invalidate the reality of a situation in which the “people” are dependent on the decisions of a class minority. The point at issue is, of course, less the insistence on using the word “class” than developing a stance in keeping with the socialist idea and the interests of working people. Such an undertaking, however, requires a willingness to divorce the interests of the “people” from those who control the great bulk of social wealth as well as their hirelings with a vested interest in fostering the exploitation of those beneath them.³² Thus, uncritically, “class” slips in the back door.

Confronting this situation is possible only by placing transformative on the political or speculative rather than the structural and the empirical moment of class. Such an interpretation is, naturally, not particularly conducive to the pursuit of value-free academic research even if the structural and empirical concerns still have a role to play. A political understanding of class depends upon knowledge of the structural contradictions and the empirical existence lived by real workers. It is merely that the political moment alone can link these other concerns and enable the concept of class to be used for practical purposes.

No less than the structural element of class, of course, the speculative moment is empirically fluid. That only makes sense: it highlights the subjective concern with class consciousness rather than objective factors. In rudimentary fashion, however, it refuses to deny the material differences of interest between bank vice presidents and tellers or small farmers and workers. The notion of class becomes meaningless without a moment of decision. Its introduction makes the structural definition more empirically determinate: when viewed from the standpoint of a general movement rather than the interests of an authoritarian vanguard, in this respect, Lenin was not totally wrong when he said that it is necessary to determine “what divides us in order to determine what unites us.”

The political ability to demarcate the interests of working people from those with an objective interest in maintaining the power of capital will define the prospects of the socialist project. The weakness of this view, of course, is that the political determination of class can only prove speculative and contingent in character: it may not even take place at all. There is indeed something depressing about all of this. But it reflects the real situation in which working people find themselves. Only from an ethical commitment to class aims lacking any guarantees of success can the decision to enter coalitions or engage in other organizational undertakings be seen for what it is: a choice rather than some predetermined or inherently “necessary” form of struggle.

Class politics remains salient precisely because all who sell their labor power do not have an interest in rendering capital democratically accountable. Such a goal obviously threatens those with genuine power over capital and who monopolize the information and resources by which it functions. Commitment to rendering capital accountable presupposes a commitment not merely to class unity, but to reciprocity among working people with different cultures and lifestyles. The concerns of gays suffering homophobia, women suffering sexism, and people of color enduring racism, cannot simply be put on the back burner in the manner of times past. A modern form of class politics cannot be understood without a sense of support for such concerns: empowerment underpins the socialist understanding of accountability.

A critical theory of socialism privileges no form of identity, but it enables those concerned with the pursuit of identity to further a democratic and egalitarian class vision without cost to themselves or others. Supporting compensatory or formal rights denied to women, gays, or other minorities is intrinsically connected with overcoming status differentials and fostering reciprocity. The critical theory of socialism requires an integrated perspective capable of combining formal equality for all groups with the interests specific to the working people in each. Giving primacy to the speculative moment of class undermines a fixation on any particular strategy. Its justification becomes nothing more than the arguments its proponents can muster regarding how it can better foster the contingent possibilities for class unity without sacrificing the interests of working people in any of the progressive social movements.

Social Movements and the Class Ideal

The class ideal is a new category. It seeks to overcome fragmentation by illuminating in a particular way the Utopian moment of unity and purpose whose existence is an ontological component of all radical political action.³³ Every major movement has projected its speculative ideal of future unity based on the redress of injustice: it never was the case that the movement was everything and the goal nothing. Crucial is only the degree to which specification of the normative content and regulating principles of the movement can take place, since only to that degree can its theory assume intellectual coherence. When specification of speculative goals and regulating principles becomes closed to critical discussion—as in the case of totalitarian movements—the theory turns into just another ideology capable of justifying any set of tactics.

Economic rationality is insufficient: predicated on self-interest, unregulated by broader ideals, it generates a moral economy of the separate deal among the various factions of the movement. Coercion is, by the same token, no longer a viable option for the imposition of unity. Only an ethical commitment remains. This is not much, of course. But then, again, it reflects the real state of affairs. Working people are on the defensive and their parties are in a state of intellectual disarray. The class ideal speaks to a new politics from below. It provides the perquisite for any sustainable progressive enterprise: a category seeking coordination among the disempowered in order to influence existing parties or unions or interests in a progressive manner.

Coordination of this sort cannot occur from the top down or from the outside in. Working people are primarily organized in social movements and, if only for this reason, women must push the class ideal in the women’s movement and people of color must foster it in their movements. Women have indeed achieved some success in organizing women workers while recognizing their special concerns as women in terms of various issues including sexual harassment by bosses and coworkers. Unions are also increasingly recognizing the way in which their members are citizens living in communities with environmental concerns. Indeed, whatever her traditional way of framing the matter, Rosa Luxemburg had a sense of what is involved when she wrote:

The proposition that Social Democracy is the representative of the class interests of the proletariat but that it is at the same time the representative of all the progressive interests of society and of all oppressed victims of bourgeois society is not to be understood as saying that in the program of Social Democracy all these interests are ideally synthesized. This proposition becomes true through the process of historical development by which Social Democracy, as a political party, gradually becomes the haven of the different dissatisfied elements of society, becoming a party of the people opposed to a tiny minority of capitalist rulers. But Social Democracy must always know how to subordinate the present pains of this colorful herd of recruits to the ultimate goals of the working class; it must know how to integrate the non-proletarian spirit of opposition into revolutionary proletarian action; in a word, it must know how to assimilate, to digest these elements which come to it.³⁴

But again the contingent character of the socialist ethic has become ever more pronounced. Not only have each of the social movements congealed into an interest group with a bureaucratic structure, whose agenda is very different from that of its base, but those individuals committed to the class ideal within those groups confront a particularly difficult challenge: they must contest not merely the prevailing orthodoxy of the established order, but often that of those with whom they are emotionally and existentially aligned. They are left with nothing more than a philosophical category whatever its practical intent.

But that intent is real. The class ideal is primarily concerned with coordinating the panoply of progressive interests competing for public attention. It cuts across the lines of identity by highlighting the needs of working people in each of the new social movements without in principle privileging the interests of any. The class ideal is an organizing tool with a transformative purpose. But there is no reason to expect that its prescriptions in theory will necessarily be translated into practice. Undertaking such a translation is itself predicated on an ethical decision informed by the willingness to contest ideology and appropriate its unrealized emancipatory values.

The class ideal derives its normative impulses from the socialist tradition. Its practical criterion of judgment remains the need to constrain the arbitrary exercise of power and its judgments are valid only insofar as they stand open to discussion and critical scrutiny. Intent upon expanding democracy, the class ideal seeks to render all social institutions publicly accountable and to guarantee civil liberties for the maximum reasonable exercise of individual freedom. Committed to economic equality, it calls for mitigating the whip of the market and the priorities of capitalist production. Projecting a new internationalism, it attempts to confront the worst implications of globalization and the limitations of the nation-state. Thus, the class ideal envisions a free political determination of economic “use” and the cosmopolitan sensibility required by a new form of planetary life.

The class ideal is a response to the failure of teleology and an understanding of dialectics in which historical outcomes prescribed normative judgments. Schiller had already said that “world history is the court of worldly judgment.” But the old song in which the end justified the means was constantly played out of key. There was always the nagging question: what justifies the end? And the only answer is the means used to achieve it. The world of necessity, political reality, may often prevent making a perfect fit between them in practice. But this doesn’t change the importance of establishing a regulative principle in theory. Erecting a plausible connection between ends and means is a prime concern of the class ideal. This concern indeed reflects the existing historical conjuncture in which theory and practice have been sundered and there remains only the ethical commitment to unite them.

Contesting capital and determining public priorities in a democratic fashion logically requires an intraclass unity itself dependent upon respect for formal democratic values and procedures. Sexism and racism are unacceptable even when employed by movements of the exploited or by parties supposedly intent upon furthering a program for the disenfranchised. The republican tradition always showed an implicit understanding of the way in which true self-rule cannot depend on oppression or exclusion. A genuine rejection of teleology implies that any new political movement committed to a socialist vision must prefigure the emancipatory outcome it seeks to realize. Attempting to realize the famous injunction “from each according to his ability …” cannot wait until the creation of socialism. There is no dialectic capable of making good a broken promise.

A critical theory of socialism must prove far more modest than the teleological theory of times past. Its skepticism will undoubtedly irritate activists, but its purpose is not to inhibit political action. It merely calls on activists to recognize that history has not conformed to the predictions of historical materialism and that no organization can be seen as incarnating the future. Workers are more fragmented than ever before and, in the postmodern era, cynicism has become the substitute for hope. Commitment is now contingent upon an ethical decision. All this raises the stakes by making clear the need for imagination in transforming reality. But it also withdraws the ability to rely on historical guarantees. Saying that is simply recognizing reality. Thus, strangely enough, the idealist interpretation of the socialist project ultimately becomes justified on materialist grounds.

Empowerment and Domination

The class ideal cannot project paradise. Socialism can only approximate freedom: it eludes every attempt to objectify and finish it. The ideal stands in asymptotic relation to the real and, if only for this reason, socialism lacks a fixed model. It is no longer commensurate with any state, party, or policy position. Socialism no less than liberalism or conservatism has been interpreted in countless ways and given numerous connotations. Looking back into Marx for an explanation of what it “really” meant doesn’t help matters. The real aim of socialism is a liberation of subjectivity that no system can ever exhaust. The matter can indeed be stated in the following way:

Can socialism be an organic whole? Those who want a perfect socialism are not socialists. They substitute a system for the fullness of humanity. They perfect institutions instead of making them fit the needs of people. Beware lest they ultimately fit people to institutions. There can never be peace between man and man’s works. But it is true that there never was less peace between them than now.³⁵

The socialist idea juts beyond its historical determinations. But those determinations and experiences must be taken into account. Economic planning and socialization have shown their limits: it was foolish to believe that the central government could regulate the production of a billion products. Market mechanisms are necessary for an effective response to changing consumer needs. It is no longer an all or nothing choice between state and market, but rather the degree of mix between them. This indeed will have profound implications for the idea of a “transition.” And, in this regard, the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer an option:³⁶ it has not only been discredited in practice, but the emancipatory character of its legitimating purpose, the final communist goal, is no longer self-evident. The institutions of both the transitional state and classless society remain singularly indeterminate in the work of Marx.³⁷ More important, however, is the insight that the abolition of private property is less an end unto itself than a means to transform conditions in which workers are treated merely as a factor of production. The real issue is less whether the state or private individuals own the means of production than whether they are used to liberate those in daily contact with them.³⁸

Arbitrary power is exercised by institutions other than the state and large capitalist concerns. This suggests the need for a proliferating set of intermediate associations between the state and the market capable of guaranteeing that a diversity of impulses are brought to bear upon the decisionmaking process.³⁹ A critical theory of socialism must insist on ever more interest groups articulating their concerns in the political process. The class ideal does not simply demand the abolition of particular interests in the name of a broader unity.

Questions remain, however, concerning the structure that best fosters pluralism and civil liberties. Republicanism is still, in this regard, not fully appreciated by many on the left. There remains a lingering nostalgia for decentralized forms of participation and, among many who look back to the radicalism of the 1960s, a longing for workers’ councils.⁴⁰ Historical experience suggests, however, that sustaining pluralism and civil liberties constitute serious problems for communitarian understandings of politics intent upon rejecting a more universal and centralized frame of institutional reference. The dangers became apparent during the revolutions of 1918–23, in Spain among the anarchists during the 1930s, and especially among the councils intent upon punishing collaborators that spontaneously arose in France and Italy following World War II.⁴¹ There is something deeply misguided about viewing power as a quantum in which less of it is good and more of it is bad: the issue is not the concentration of power, but its accountability.

Decentralized forms of local rule tend to indulge in cronyism, provincialism, and prejudice.⁴² Tocqueville indeed already recognized the potential for a tyranny of the majority over the minority in the town meetings of New England. Advocates of self-management understandably highlight the need for participation at the local level. But they often forget how this can undermine the response to powerful business concerns and they are often simply unaware of the ways in which certain industries, like the airlines, may not prove conducive to local control. Even more important, advocates of self-management tend to underestimate the difficulties associated with coordinating production as well as setting priorities and efficiently employing resources. Absent the state, whose elimination a radical commitment to decentralization foreshadows, the market is the only serious alternative for coordinating production. Since market decisions are ultimately predicated on autonomous individual choices, however, this means that the only real alternative to state coordination is no coordination at all. Thus, the potential subservience of a radically decentralized community to blind market forces.⁴³

The great struggles for political democracy and economic equality have generally been connected since 1848. A strong state capable of intervening in the market need not diminish participation. Attacks on the welfare state, in fact, have usually occurred in concert with an attack on unions and community organizations. Willingness to consider the need for a republican state and a centralized assault upon poverty, by the same token, does not preclude an attack upon apathy or a call for increased “civic virtue.” New possibilities for public involvement are an aim of every genuinely democratic form of government. There is surely a role for “secondary associations” functioning between the national state and the market.⁴⁴ But the matter of involvement must be thought through more radically. It is important to consider that:

new computer technologies and data banks could be used to make information democratically available to all individuals in society and could establish communication networks linking individuals of similar interests together, while making possible new modes for the exchange of information and ideas. New video technologies make possible new modes of media production, and provide the possibility of more control of one’s communications environment. Public access television could make possible more participatory media and the communication of radical subcultures and groups excluded from mainstream media, while satellite television makes possible nationwide—indeed worldwide—communication networks which would allow groups and individuals excluded from public communications the opportunity to broadcast a wide range of alternative views.⁴⁵

Proponents of decentralization cannot ignore the manner in which the impact of new technological developments predicated on immense investment extend beyond the sum of local interests in a national community. They also cannot conveniently presuppose the willingness of every community to contribute to the good of every individual in society as a whole: whether in the case of providing funds for natural catastrophes, parks and free public spaces in disadvantaged areas, or furthering equal participation through free child care or aid for the handicapped. The same holds true with respect to the willingness of all localities to eradicate racial or sexual prejudices. There is simply no avoiding the need to balance the concern for participation at the local level with a centralized response.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to ecology. The ongoing split between environmentalists and unions, which was addressed perhaps for the first time in the alliance between “teamsters and turtles” in the Seattle demonstrations of 1999 against the World Trade Organization, has in large part been due to the way in which the external costs of environmental legislation have been unfairly shifted to workers:⁴⁶ only the state can introduce the massive retraining programs necessary in order to decrease these costs. With respect to the environment itself, moreover, simply rolling back technology is not a serious option: leaving the regeneration of the environment to the laws of nature merely betrays a new form of the old teleological prejudice.

Investment by states and international organizations is necessary to reverse existing trends and attempt the massive repair of what has already been destroyed. Any sensible environmental policy must note that the crucial decisions about the possible effects of a product on the ecosystem must be made before, and not after, it is produced: it should be incumbent upon the producer rather than the consumer to demonstrate with some positive degree of certainty that any new article is safe rather than merely argue negatively that it is not dangerous. The burden of proof should lie with the producer. But regulating and sanctioning large firms is virtually impossible for local forms of political organization based upon direct democracy. Something different is required in order to make broader determinations about “use” and what is “socially necessary” in dealing with the environment. Indeed, the realities of a modern society make it impossible to contemplate a genuinely democratic and egalitarian politics without some recourse to bureaucratic organization and the state.

The dialectic of the universal and the particular reasserts itself. Tensions between the exigencies of centralism and local interests cannot be resolved in a single stroke. It is increasingly a matter of specifying the bureaucratic terms in which bureaucratic accountability is strengthened. Any new form of socialist politics must—again—seek to expand the role of citizen initiatives, national referenda, and diversified interests. But the emphasis upon participation should not be understood as all-encompassing. The socialist idea cannot be identified with endless meetings. It must keep in mind that individuals have the right to private lives in order to improve themselves in different ways, and—perhaps above all—enjoy their leisure.

From the struggle for the ten-hour day and the abolition of child labor in the nineteenth century to the introduction of two-week vacations in France by the Popular Front in 1936, free time has traditionally been a basic concern of working people. The new information society may offer the potential for shortening the workweek without decreasing real wages. But that potential is not being fully realized: the workweek has dropped to thirty-five hours in some nations like France, whereas elsewhere, like in the United States, it is radically on the rise.⁴⁷ Middle management and supervisory personnel are, arguably, suffering from this development the most. The web, e-mail, beepers, and cellphones are not the answer. Technology, by itself, is not the determining factor. It is rather the way it is employed, which depends upon the strength of working class organizations and, just as importantly, the pressure exerted upon them from below.

Economic developments do not mechanically translate into political victories. Simply relying upon the introduction of temporary work, the possibilities attendant upon changing occupations, the shift to the service sector, and the new forms of intellectual labor is insufficient. It has already been noted that the socialist idea, above all, rests upon the fight for time and what might be termed the “uncoupling” between income and employment.⁴⁸ Different plans abound for waging the battle: the negative income tax, full employment schemes, the wealth tax, lowering the age of retirement, and more. The decision over policy is a contingent matter. The aim of the policy is not. The struggle for time is ultimately the struggle of individuals to determine their lives beyond the bounds of “necessity.”⁴⁹

The Institutional Imperative

Contesting necessity means privileging institutional accountability over any unyielding commitment to either centralization or decentralization. The principle of “subsidiarity,” which is already being employed by a number of transnational institutions, can serve as a useful guide: it relegates only those functions incapable of being performed by local organizations to more centralized institutions. It is a question of highlighting which best serves the ultimate aim: substituting the “administration of things” for the “administration of people.”⁵⁰

No strict line can divide the two, however, so long as scarcity exists. And there should be no mistake. Scarcity becomes apparent not merely in economic terms, but also indirectly in those institutions wherein political power is unduly influenced by an imbalance of resources. The lack of “social capital” becomes apparent in how the courts of most nations unfairly treat minorities and, particularly in the United States, how people of color are disproportionately subject to prison discipline and police harassment. Civil liberties and a written constitution are obviously necessary. But they are insufficient for establishing a socialist conception of democracy. Socialists must analyze the ways in which institutions actually function with respect to their impact upon classes and groups.⁵¹

Hegel knew that progress is marked by an increasing ability to draw categorical distinctions: and this means distinctions within a particular system or regime. Just as socialism and communism have appeared in various guises, after all, capitalism and democracy can take any number of different forms. Qualitative differences exist between the policies of Roosevelt and Thatcher no less the regimes of Yeltsin and Mandela. These differences are real rather than superficial. It helps little to emphasize the structural constraints on change without a sense of what strategy might best promote class unity and institutional accountability in particular circumstances.

There are still those who refuse to distinguish between programs and between regimes. They reject compromise with the system tout court by promulgating an indeterminate vision of Utopia predicated on the withering away of the state.⁵² Refusing to speak of institutions to constrict the possible arbitrary use of power in the new order, they are content to presuppose a decisive rupture with the past that will somehow result in the harmonious unity of all particulars. They prize the aesthetic experience of “eros” or “desire” or “subjectivity.” But the manner in which such experiences should translate themselves into reality, how paradise might sustain itself, rarely becomes a fit topic of discussion: it would necessarily introduce an element of alienation, a form of institutional thinking, whose elimination is the purpose behind the entire enterprise. Such visions of emancipation base everything on the creation of what might be termed a Utopian sensibility.

Of course, it is completely legitimate to speak about an education of the senses or, better, the sensibility of individuals. This is a dominant theme in modern literature, which is far better equipped to demonstrate its importance than political theory. It underpins the “educational novel” (Bildungsroman) introduced by Voltaire, Fielding, and Goethe and then later developed by Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. Even Marx occasionally expressed an interest in such ideas and Oscar Wilde among others concerned himself with “the soul of man under socialism.” Issues ranging from developing new forms of aesthetic appreciation and the experience of different cultures to fighting against the increasing vulgarity of everyday life and cruelty to animals are legitimate concerns for those interested in forging a more decent way of life.

Dealing with the sensibility of citizens, however, should not presuppose the need for a “new man.” This idea is religious in origin: it derived from the conversion experience before it was appropriated by leaders of the great millenarian movements like Thomas Münzer.⁵³ In modernity, for better or worse, it became part of the ideological arsenal employed on the left by romantic revolutionaries ranging from Leon Trotsky to Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung. Prophecy was, of course, mixed with propaganda. But their new man was at least associated with a revolution in progress. The new sensibility of the new man was seen as having concrete prerequisites and an agent for their realization whether in the form of the religious elect, a social class, or a political party.

Utopia can still serve a positive purpose.⁵⁴ It can illuminate the limitations of our own society and our own experiences. It can inspire action no less than sacrifice even if these efforts will inevitably fall short of their goal. Utopia can project old hopes like the conquest of death and new possibilities like those associated with parapsychology. All of this has its place. The danger of Utopia becomes manifest when the wish is turned into dogma, thereby justifying any means in order to realize an inherently ill-defined end. But it also appears when the partisans of Utopia ignore the ways in which their speculations bear the scars of historical oppression. Even the most Utopian ideas can never fully escape the historical context of repression and, if only for this reason, the call for their direct translation into practice has always spelled disaster. The Utopian vision is, ironically, never Utopian enough. Thus, Utopia must remain Utopia.

Attempting to invoke the “real” revolution or a Utopian state as the practical criterion for judging politics generates a stance in which no form of radical action can ever prove radical enough. Every positive reform thereby becomes just another guise for oppression. Each concrete step made to free the individual becomes redefined in terms of its opposite: liberalization of sexuality serves the repressive power of the existing order, material affluence creates spiritual impoverishment, leisure produces increased conformity, and so on. Extreme formulations of this position have even insisted that resistance remain metaphysical in order to retain its purity. The logic is as follows:

the semblance of freedom makes reflection upon one’s own freedom incomparably more difficult than formerly when such reflection stood in contradiction to manifest unfreedom, thus strengthening dependence … only in so far as it withdraws from a praxis which has degenerated into its opposite, from the ever-changing production of what is always the same, from the service of the customer who himself serves the manipulator—only in so far as it withdraws from Man can culture be faithful to man.⁵⁵

The indeterminacy of this position undercuts its moment of truth: How certain reforms further democracy, soften the whip of the market, and contest provincialism is simply ignored. Ultraradicalism of this sort becomes pseudoradicalism. It slips a purely arbitrary definition of qualitative change into politics and thereby turns resistance, the most radical of concepts, into little more than an apolitical game of the imagination. It is indeed useful to consider that:

Radicalism is not a form of experience. Once the ground of real experience is surrendered, a hierarchy of radicalism arises. Surmounting it demands—or so it would appear—still greater radicalism…. Karl Kraus described this procedure with the announcement: We have raised our standard once again. Now, only one problem remains: no one can meet it any longer.⁵⁶

Utopia is a function of the imaginative faculty, what might be considered an anthropological desire for the best life, while socialism is a regulative ideal. Thinking about socialism as the absolute other produces only marginalization and an inability to think about the problems and choices facing contemporary society. It is self-defeating to exclude from socialist politics anything other than a revolutionary assault on the accumulation process and the state. Dreams of an emancipated future are an intrinsic part of every major movement, but these dreams are not enough. Divorcing socialism from its commitment to reform—especially in the name of a Utopia or still undefined “transition”—is tantamount to denying socialists the chance to garner popular support.⁵⁷ Infringements on the market have materially improved the lives of workers, heightened their sense of self-worth, provided them with leisure, mitigated social inequality, and constrained the arbitrary exercise of power. Such reforms made society more accountable to its citizens and, in this way, stood in accord with the practical criterion underpinning the socialist ethic and the class ideal.

The best reforms are those quickly taken for granted. They become part of the administrative apparatus in which issues are increasingly defined in bureaucratic terms: refusing to deal with this reality in favor of visions about participatory democracy and workers’ control is simply irresponsible. Advocates of socialism have a different task. They must maintain the pressure on bureaucratic organizations both in terms of preserving old gains and securing new ones. The radicalism of any particular reform, moreover, cannot be judged in the abstract. Thus, the Vichy government would use Leon Blum’s support for the forty-hour week and two-week paid vacations as evidence in his trial for “treason”—a trial that led to the extradition and incarceration of the former socialist leader in Buchenwald.

Reform is often, admittedly, a boring enterprise. The dramatic quality of politics is seemingly lost when squabbling takes place over whether dental insurance should cover periodontal work, whether drug prescriptions should be paid by Medicare, or whether the minimum wage should be raised by a dollar. But these little things have a qualitative impact on the everyday life of working people. Jean-Paul Sartre put the matter very well, though in a different context, when he wrote:

I know that certain lofty spirits make a name for themselves by illustrious refusals. They say no. What about it? These refusals are appearances which hide a shameful but utter submission. I hate the pretense that trammels people’s minds and sells us cheap nobility. To refuse is not to say no, but to modify by work. It is a mistake to think that the revolutionary refuses capitalist society outright. How could he, since he is inside it? On the contrary, he accepts it as a fact which justifies his revolutionary action. ‘Change the world,’ says Marx. ‘Change life,’ says Rimbaud. Well and good: change them if you can. That means you will accept many things in order to modify a few. Refusal assumes its true nature within action: it is the abstract moment of negativity.⁵⁸

Achieving the program of reforms associated with the welfare state constituted a set of real victories. It makes little sense to argue that the great European labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s in Austria, France, and Germany were not “socialist” enough. Sectarian criticism of this sort abstracts from the terrain of the real. The socialist tradition deserves greater appreciation for its successes. Its partisans transformed liberal politics and extended the suffrage beyond a relatively small elite. They obligated the state to interfere with the previously unquestioned rights of capital.⁵⁹ They gave workers a sense of dignity and brought them into public life. These activists, whether “successful” in the revolutionary sense or not, still provided a “victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of capital” (Marx). They gave a socialist meaning to the extension of democracy into civil society.

The problem is not reformism, but the retreat from a politics of radical reform. Just this has been lost: the ability to imagine the nonreformist impact of reforms.⁶⁰ The old understanding of the connection between reform and revolution has fallen asunder. Both are under attack. But those intent on maintaining the supercession of the old difference between “left and right” are focused on the wrong issue. The enemies of equality and the accountability of institutions on the right, ironically, often understand this better than those on the left. They know that reforms can have a radical function, that they can shake up existing institutional arrangements, which is precisely why they seek to identify the modern left with the left of the 1930s and the 1960s.

All this presupposes conditions conducive for promulgating and implementing reforms. But these conditions still do not exist in most nations. Revolution has become a dream, and a sorry one at that. But there is still a sense in which what held for yesterday still holds today: the only way to judge the need for revolution is by determining the capacity of the system to accommodate reform. Thus, its justification depends upon the ability of revolutionaries to articulate a pattern of exploitation and oppression that stands beyond any possibility of institutional redress from within the system.

Teleological guarantees concerning the emancipatory character of the revolution have fallen by the wayside. It would be foolish to ignore how its partisans have tended to equate their own needs with the people they claim to represent. The communist experience shows the danger of turning the constriction of freedom into a virtue. Never mind the talk about historical justifications, or popular prejudices induced by the dominant ideology, most have engaged in terror and the suppression of human rights. The degree of support for a revolutionary regime by socialists can only be dependent upon the degree to which its institutions evidence accountability to the public at large. Thus, no less than with reform, the validity of revolution becomes predicated on contingent judgment rather than historical necessity.

Giving either absolute priority is a mistake: each has become a tactic rather than a goal in its own right. The stakes are higher, of course, when the commitment is made to pursue a revolutionary course. Ignoring its potential costs is an expression of irresponsible adventurism. But just as there is a dogma of revolution, so is there a dogma of reform. Its advocates ignore the fact that the welfare state is still a capitalist state, that investment still remains in private hands, and that reforms are possible only if their costs do not overly threaten an acceptable rate of profits and capitalists are convinced that they face worse alternatives. Uncritical reformers, too often, refuse to discuss the implications of a situation in which it is still much easier for the rich than for the poor to organize themselves, define the agenda, unify on issues, gain access to information, and raise funds for political purposes. This dogma of reform indeed blinds its practitioners to the structural mechanisms by which welfare capitalism still privileges the capitalist class and forces working people to live lives of meaningless, debilitating, and often dangerous work.

Relativizing the status of reform, and especially revolution,⁶¹ goes hand in hand with abandoning the concept of the end of history. Both have become subordinate to the class ideal that can reveal how, within a given context, a particular approach can best approximate the goals of the socialist project: the political empowerment of working people and the lessening of their structural dependency on capital. Or, putting it another way, the choice of tactic depends upon a judgment concerning which can best further the class ideal under the conditions in which the movement must operate.

Notes for a New Internationalism

Common wisdom suggests that there is little left unfulfilled from the progressive legacy of the past other than the goal of democracy. But there is also the matter of economic justice and the need for an international response to globalization. A belief in democracy does not necessarily imply a commitment to either. Distrust of state intervention in the market was a product of the neoliberal revolution while the collapse of communism engendered suspicions of all universal perspectives. If the critique of neoliberalism in the name of economic justice has many voices, however, the discourse surrounding internationalism remains radically underdeveloped. Multinational corporations and new transnational financial institutions have turned capitalism and its commodity form into a global phenomenon: the critical theory of socialism must provide the outlines for a response.

Undertaking this challenge, however, demands a willingness to contest popular cultural assumptions and traditional political loyalties. Much of the left still stresses outmoded notions of state sovereignty and national self-determination. International institutions, where they exist or have jurisdiction at all, still remain weak in relation to the political powers of the nation-state. Many remember how slow the United Nations was in responding to various crises in Bosnia or Rwanda. The possibility of forging an internationalist response to international capitalism seems remote. Lacking an ideology capable of prescribing some worldwide convergence of interests, moreover, many question whether the interests of workers in economically advanced nations are even compatible with those elsewhere.

Nationalism and internationalism were originally fused with a republican commitment in the era of the great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century. It was more or less believed that people of every nation had the right to decide their fate in a democratic fashion. This stance became coupled with a sense of class solidarity once the socialist labor movement arose. But the connection between republican nationalism and internationalism in the labor movement collapsed with the support for World War I provided by socialists in the Second International. The fissure between internationalism and democracy quickly followed with the erection of the Comintern and the dissolution of class solidarity with the anti-imperialist revolutions attendant upon the end of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War.

An anticolonial revolutionary wave moved from India and China to Vietnam and Algeria to Cuba and the Congo. In conjunction with disgust over the integration of social democracy, and disillusionment with communism, its partisans inflamed the imagination of Western radicals. The 1960s witnessed an outpouring of revolutionary populism and romantic identification with figures like Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh. Many considered Lenin justified in claiming that the international revolution would begin at the “weakest link in the chain” and then spread to the Western nations. Nevertheless, the argument was naive even at the time. The new populism ignored the difference between an economically underdeveloped nation with a peasantry suffering under imperial rule and an advanced industrial society with its new social movements. The alliance between the two worlds was never forthcoming and, soon enough, misguided revolutionary zeal combined with frustration among a tiny self-appointed vanguard that valorized terrorism and the urban guerrilla.⁶² Internationalism thereby became a posture; identification with the economically underdeveloped nations remained purely symbolic.

The idea stands in need of reappropriation. Internationalism was always a strong ideological component of class consciousness though the institutions for pursuing proletarian unity were mostly dominated by the national interests of their most powerful members. Under present circumstances, however, this situation has changed. International institutions created by the bourgeoisie are gaining a life of their own while the appeal of internationalism among workers is, at best, lukewarm. An increasingly mobile form of capital now serves as the vanguard for internationalism while workers, ever fearful of capital flight, seem more bent upon resisting globalization in national terms. Thus, the speculative character of the class ideal assumes particular importance when applied to the prospects for internationalism.

Old-fashioned optimism is no longer warranted. No inherent compatibility exists between the needs of a particular state and others in the world community. Material interests of workers in one nation also need not converge with those in other nations. The interests of the whole are not simply reducible to the empirical interests of each.⁶³ This is true even when considering the introduction of universal labor standards. Implementing them will probably result in costs for the richest workers in the richest nations even while industrial progress will produce hardship for the poorest workers in the poorest nations. No less than with nations, so with factions within classes, there are those desirous of maintaining the status quo and others desirous of changing it. Indeed, just as new unifying forms of class consciousness will not simply result from the advocacy of particularistic forms of self-identification, new forms of internationalism will not emerge independent of support for their institutional expressions.

Traditional understandings of international revolution fall by the wayside. Marx knew that the revolution would not break out globally, but rather within national boundaries, and today the thought of an apocalyptic transformation of nation-states into a world community is Utopian in the worst sense. Even if revolution could transform the political systems and cultural values of most states, moreover, the new regimes would still have to negotiate the conditions under which an intrusion on national sovereignty might be countenanced. There has been no alternative proposal to a representative form of planetary government predicated on some notion of subsidiarity. Thus, it only makes sense that Leon Blum, Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet, and Willy Brandt—rather than more ostensibly “radical” figures—should have led the fight for internationalism in the postwar period.

Condemning “bourgeois” institutions like the European Parliament and the United Nations is less fruitful than inventing new ways of rendering them more democratically accountable to the bulk of their membership. This means highlighting the need for international unions and global interest groups capable of representing disenfranchised constituencies, such as women and gays in traditional societies, and willing to contest both international capital and national forms of authoritarianism. Mitigating national chauvinism and the arbitrary exercise of state power is possible only through further empowerment of already existing transnational organizations. Nevertheless, if the burgeoning planetary framework offers new opportunities, it also poses dangers for democracy and socialism.

Everyday people fear the introduction of yet new layers of bureaucracy. Many still cling to their national traditions and religious customs. The success of bourgeois internationalism has been accompanied by a chauvinist and provincial reaction in Austria, France, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Legitimating such movements through compromise can only prove self-defeating, whatever the temptation of immediate benefits.⁶⁴ Engaging in a purely technocratic justification for internationalism, by the same token, will also not do the trick. It will leave the new institutions and organizations with an identity deficit and a potential crisis of legitimation.

Adapting to the new political environment of the next millennium is not just an economic or organizational question, but an existential and cultural one as well. It is a matter of appealing to the heart as well as the mind. New possibilities for communication and travel, new opportunities for learning about foreign civilizations, are helping bring about the decline of established religions and provincial understandings of community. Nostalgia for a mythical community or a mythical past has grown stale. What Richard Rorty has termed “ethno-solidarity” is self-serving at best, dangerous at worst, and literally reactionary.⁶⁵ People are increasingly changing their occupations, moving more often, and meeting others with experiences different from their own. Immigration is taking place, often on a massive scale in many parts of the globe, and intermarriage is becoming a part of everyday life. Old-fashioned notions of race inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are headed for the dustbin of history and perhaps the various nagging forms of intolerance will follow suit. Traditional notions of internationalism, however, are insufficient for bringing this about. They must be complemented with the introduction of a new cosmopolitan sensibility.

Just as the assault on reification is not simply the transfer of control over property, but rather a change in the way in which workers are treated in their work life, internationalism cannot be left at the purely institutional level. It must speak to the way in which people live or, better, can live in the future. Internationalism is not simply a matter of political tactics, but of convictions. Its acceptance requires a commitment to the radical redistribution of planetary resources and a notion of human rights grounded in constitutional democracy. But it also requires a new sensibility intent upon making good the new promises for the expansion of individual experience offered by the new information society. This depends upon new educational strategies capable of inspiring a cosmopolitanism appropriate to what is becoming a new form of planetary life.

The cosmopolitan implications of internationalism call for recasting the socialist project. A new approach must highlight the ways in which the fluctuations of the international economy, along with the power of the great multinationals, stand outside the control of any state. But it must also highlight how planetary life is deteriorating in the name of progress. Entire species are vanishing, global warming is already showing its effects, poorer nations are serving as garbage dumps for the refuse of the richest, and diseases like cholera, dysentery, and AIDS are ravaging continents. Provincial ideas of nationalism and slogans of national self-determination no longer have anything to offer in the face of such issues. Of course, problems will arise: poor states and rich will, for different reasons, refuse to countenance curtailment on sovereignty. The national interest will usually take precedence over the concern with global issues. Nevertheless, it is time to envision a different world shared in common with others: economically, politically, and culturally.

Economically

A new international division of labor is making the universal implications of the commodity form ever more evident.⁶⁶ In conjunction with an increasing reservoir of cheap labor, and the new technology of transportation and communication that allows for its employment, the manufacture of a single product can occur in many production sites throughout the world. “Extended chains of production” are now being broken down into infinitely small subprocesses, which take place where labor is cheapest with respect to the particular process involved. Capital can simply fly where it pleases as the lure of production sites rather than markets generates competition among nations and multinationals. Internationally and nationally, this has also occasioned a sharp increase in competition between skilled and unskilled labor. Indeed, the ongoing transnational reorganization of capitalism goes a long way toward explaining the chauvinism underpinning the “right turn” in the politics of advanced industrial societies during the last part of the twentieth century.

Redressing global imbalances of economic power requires political institutions capable of regulating multinationals, assisting in the settlement of world debt, and extending the most basic achievements of the welfare state to the international arena. It demands innovative policies for refinancing loans, democratizing transnational financial institutions, levying taxes, curbing capital flight, and dealing with unequal development. Economic reforms of global magnitude presuppose the political power to enforce them and support is necessary for professional bureaucracies to staff transnational institutions like the United Nations and the European Parliament. Securing the accountability of such bureaucracies is possible only by new forms of international political action and a new international understanding of civic or, better, planetary responsibility. The question for those committed to the socialist idea is whether they are willing to enter the fray.

Politically

The ideas of both political democracy and economic equality remain incomplete without reference to internationalism. No less than the adjudication of conflicts between interests within a state, conflicts between nations will also demand processes and institutions for redressing grievances. No nation is any longer willing to admit that war is a legitimate part of everyday politics and each praises peace. Discussions about the “right” to intervene in the workings of sovereign states have already grown anachronistic: autarky is a thing of the past, economic intervention by capital is already taken place, and the real question involves less the rights and responsibilities of states than their conduct as members of a planetary community.

Human rights has become an accepted component of international relations. Its implications for the constraint of arbitrary power, civil liberties, and the creation of a planetary community challenge the despots and the exploiters. There has been much debate about the way human rights has been used to justify intervention by the United Nations and also, more unilaterally, the United States. But traditional ideas about nonintervention under any circumstances have lost their salience: the “right” to interfere with genocide in a particular instance, when such action has a realistic possibility of success, is intrinsically legitimate regardless of whether this same policy is being applied everywhere else on the planet in equal fashion.

Human rights converge with the class interests of working people and the poor. It is they, after all, who usually bear the brunt of authoritarian policies predicated on the arbitrary exercise of power. The potential impact on the lowly and the insulted is the principal criterion for judging any form of policy including foreign policy. The choice for socialists is clear when an authoritarian movement committed to economic reform confronts a capitalist dictatorship and perhaps even clearer when an authoritarian movement confronts a socialist democracy. Neutrality is, in the same vein, the logical course when neither side offers the prospect of either political democracy or economic reform. A judgment becomes more difficult, however, when a viable capitalist democracy confronts an economically reform-minded authoritarianism. The resulting ambivalence indeed made it possible for progressives to employ the national interest as a point of primary reference while it enabled more radical intellectuals to define their views on foreign policy in terms of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “a-communism.”

But this situation has changed. The national interest has watered down the capacity to deal with global problems even when they harbor a national impact. Choosing between human rights and national self-determination is also quite different from choosing between the interests of two superpowers. By the same token, however, fewer criteria for reaching political judgments now exist and, what’s worse, they often conflict. There is no general consensus about principles, or their translation into reality, which helps explain the radical divisions among progressives over Iraq and Kosovo. No ironclad way exists for applying internationalist principles. Support for this or that action will again depend upon a speculative judgment concerning which policy will best serve the weakest among those effected by it. Only with this aim in mind can it prove possible for a stance to be genuinely internationalist. Such a stance must prove willing to support intervention, or criticism of intervention, depending upon what has the best chance for preventing the abuse of human rights and the improvement of conditions for those incapable of raising their own voices.

Culturally

Commitment to the globe is commitment to an idea.⁶⁷ A new internationalism requires a new sense of cosmopolitan conviction. It is easy to be fooled: every nation now considers itself “democratic” and no elite is willing publicly to identify its people with the “rabble.” Traditional or provincial responses are tempting ways of protesting the manner in which the world has become dominated by a standardized set of cultural norms that have been formed in the most powerful nations and propagated by a small group of huge firms. But there is no avoiding reality. The new social movements are in the process of generating an international public sphere comprised of conferences, newspapers, publishing ventures, websites, and more. They have had an impact on the media and they have shown that it is a question of transforming the culture industry rather than abolishing it. There is no room for yet another attempt to create a closed society or for a retreat into mythological visions of the past grounded in religious intolerance, cultural provincialism, or ethnic chauvinism. The cosmopolitan sensibility is indeed the most basic requirement for beginning the task of reshaping the common inheritance from the past.

*   *   *

Socialism has become a dirty word: even its proponents fear the way in which it has been misappropriated while forgetting such perversion of intent has also been the fate of terms like liberalism, populism, progressivism, anarchism, and communism. But the hope for finding yet another word is misplaced. Perhaps the proletariat is a thing of the past, but capitalism is not. It has for the first time taken global form and everywhere its advocates are engaged in an unremitting assault on the welfare state. There is little sense in abandoning terms like “left” and “right” when neoliberals and neoconservatives are setting the agenda. The interests of working people disappear when normative categories become technocratic and slogans appeal to all of the people all of the time. Better for socialists to rediscover the radical edge in their thinking. There is a need for inspiring ideals and the most potentially radical is the ideal of internationalism.

Only with a new internationalist commitment can the socialist idea confront the lingering forms of authoritarianism and an increasingly powerful capitalist logic of accumulation. Only by recognizing the way in which socialism is no longer what it once was can the class ideal confirm the connection between the unfulfilled values of the labor movement, the moment of critique within its seemingly encrusted ideology, and the need for positive speculative proposals capable of expanding the realm of personal experience. Only with such values is it possible to conceive of socialism as an ongoing project that seeks to foster that infinite richness of human ingenuity and productivity whose possibilities can never be determined in advance.