A Footnote to Rally Fellow Socialists (1982)
Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. ‘The State’ may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
GEORGE ORWELL, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, London 1941
Régimes which depend on the suppression of all opposition and the stifling of all civic freedoms must be taken to represent a disastrous regression in political terms from bourgeois democracy. . . . But the civic freedoms which, however inadequately and precariously, form part of bourgeois democracy are the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggles. The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms; and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of their class boundaries.
RALPH MILIBAND, Marxism and Politics, London 1977
That politics as an activity is not merely compatible with what could prove to be a revolutionary form of egalitarian society but is its essential precondition, and that political means are essential if one is to move towards socialist ends.
By 1918 Rosa Luxemburg was warning Lenin after the Revolution, just as she had warned him thirteen years before, that freedom must be the means not just the eventual end of the party’s strategy; and though the time traveller, H. G. Wells, visited Russia in 1920 and at first had good words to say for the Bolsheviks, he was under no illusion that Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was either temporary or anything other than rule by a small party oligarchy. A ‘fairy story’ or fable written in 1944, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was not untimely but created an astonishingly belated popular recognition that the revolution, based on cries of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, had, once again, been betrayed. He did not argue that the fault lay in any inevitable growth of power-hungry élites (the ‘pigs’), but rather in the excessive credulity and trust of the other animals in their leaders; ‘all animals’ must be the basic power behind long revolutionary changes as well as the objects of ‘the revolution’ led by those who unhappily can become ‘more equal than others’.
Great confusion has arisen between the myth of ‘the revolution’ as a climactic event and the reality of ‘the revolutionary process’. The opportunity for reshaping societies towards greater social justice may only come either through the sudden overthrow or more often the breakdown of repressive autocracies, but the revolutionary opportunity does not guarantee the revolutionary outcome: a benign outcome needs restraint and tolerance, as well as skill and will, exercised through decades and generations. If the classical Marxist critique of capitalism was broadly correct, its theory of inevitable stages was wrong; for it failed to reckon with and guard against nationalism, bureaucratization and above all the pure power-hunger and desire for self-perpetuation among new as much as among old élites. At the least, the theory of stages needed restating in terms of possibilities, and even diluting to allow for the overlapping of the various stages. This would seem a less misleading model of the post-revolutionary world, and hence a model more open to variety and to influence by popular debate, rather than one depending on belief in laws of history wholly determined by social structure or modes of production. These always condition but they never determine human action.
Thus the debate in the first part of the century between ‘true Marxist’ revolutionaries and revisionist evolutionary Austrian and German Marxist ‘Social Democrats’ (in the sense then current) was perhaps never as contradictory and unbridgeable in theory as it seemed to the passionate protagonists. They differed about means, not about ends. And there is no inevitability about progress either through revolution or gradual change, such as German socialists and British Fabians used to argue for in the 1900s and 1920s. They both thought that by governing with the right values and by deliberate stages of economic and social planning, a socialist society could be achieved. In this they differed utterly from the new Social Democrats, either the present West German S.P.D. or the new British Social Democratic Party. They, whether from wisdom, class-interest, exhaustion or fear, no longer believe that an egalitarian society can be achieved – or should be achieved, even; they hope more modestly, if somewhat vaguely, simply to manage a mixed economy benignly with the interests of the welfare of the disadvantaged strongly in mind. They aspire to civilize, perhaps to inject a few socialist values into, not to replace, the economic dynamic of that competitive, individualistic ethic of Western capitalism which intrudes so systematically and unasked into so many aspects of social, cultural and personal life.
The social democrats are right about the primacy of liberty but they are wrong to think that it is always threatened by equality and to believe that a proper sense of individualism must always be linked to the competitive acquisition of private property. Their own project is perfectly possible, given favourable economic growth such as Anthony Crosland assumed in the 1950s and 1960s in his book The Future of Socialism. The philosopher should lament and not mock that their hour of electoral opportunity seems to come at a time of unique difficulty for their theory; whereas it is the decline of the economy in Great Britain that could also give an opportunity to the Left of the Labour Party, as seems to have happened in France and Greece.
My real intention is not, however, to debate policies or argue for causes, whether local or international. There follows not a systematic argument for true socialism but simply an argument that there is no necessary incompatibility between revolutionary and evolutionary varieties; and that, if socialism is to occur at all, it must be pursued and consolidated through political means. Ralph Miliband, whose views on politics and civil liberties I quote at the head of this chapter and whose views on this point are not untypical of many modern Marxist intellectuals in the West, the Third World and even in Eastern Europe, wrote an earlier book on Parliamentary Socialism. In it he argued that the acceptance of parliamentary conventions and evolutionary socialism had emasculated the alleged revolutionary spirit of the early British Labour movement. Apart from the fact that this no longer seems to be true (if ever it was historically), his theses can at best only apply to specific contexts. It would be a massive non sequitur to say that, because of some past experiences, socialism cannot proceed by parliamentary means; or to identify all forms of republican assemblies with the specific conservative conventions of a particular phase of the British parliamentary tradition.
Determined political socialists, however revolutionary their long-term aims, have to build up popular support if their measures are to work. When they resort, as in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, or in many contemporary states in Africa and Asia, to dictatorial coercion and control, not merely is liberty destroyed, which is obvious enough, but even mere welfare is grievously limited. The evidence is now overwhelming in the Soviet world that productivity suffers both through the sheer inefficiency and often corruption of unchallengeable centralized bureaucracies and through a massive indifference, sullenness and propensity to go slow when workers can neither change their jobs, form free trade unions, strike, nor even – if driven to that pitch – hope to revolt with any chance of success. The very working masses, as in Poland or Czechoslovakia, whose productive power is essential to progress are rendered impotent.
George Orwell once reviewed F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom:
Professor Hayek is probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are probably more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast number of people would rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue. . . . Such is our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect . . .1
Consider the many one-party States who claim to be socialist but whose dominant ideology is, in fact, nationalism. This nationalism often enables rulers to take the support of the masses for granted. But there is a world of difference between such States which can, like Tanzania, at least tolerate criticism and public debate about policies among the ruling élite and the intelligentsia, and those more common one-party States in which no public dissent is tolerated. The moral differences are the most important today because of the growing number of developing countries claiming to be ‘Socialist’; and they will become ever more so the further back into history the original struggle for national liberation fades: nationalism cannot remain for ever an off-the-peg justification for each and every arbitrary act of party, leader or President. The differences in economic efficiency may be less obvious and may be affected by a hundred and one contingent factors; but in theory (that is, in long-term tendency), other things being equal, it is unlikely that uncriticized planning can be more effective than plans that are open to public debate and which may even have arisen out of such debate. Plans that can be criticized can be modified. People who tolerate criticism are more likely to change their minds. If the plan may neither be criticized nor modified and it does not work as expected, then little is left but to impose it with coercion, suppress evidence of failure and discontent, and imprison all those who say that the Emperor has no clothes. Such desperate anti-political measures have even been dignified by a name: ‘permanent revolution’.
In multi-party régimes there may well be a consensus, indeed, which can hinder or delay the realization of socialist goals. But socialists, like anyone else, must realize that great enterprises take much time. Rome was not built in a day. If we are trying to liberate humanity and perfect human nature, we are unwise not to see this as the work of generations and to recognize the need to carry people with us, slowly, patiently, definitely, step by step. Socialists must distinguish between a consensus of values (which is extraordinarily rare in any society) and the need to reach a consensus about procedures (which is common in parliamentary democracies). These rules or conventions of the political game may be biased, quite naturally, in support of the existing system. But socialists cannot hope to modify these rules except by the rules, by persuasion or by demonstrating good fruits from political power gained by socialist parties observing these very rules. Socialists should not be surprised if their criticism of these rules is sometimes taken as a threat to ignore them; and if the very people they want to reach and uplift often reject them and suspect them of being not merely anti-establishment but anti-political. Even such a mild and democratic business as the British Labour Party’s plan to abolish an appointed and hereditary House of Lords needs balancing simultaneously with measures which appear to ordinary people to check the powers of the Government in other ways. Intellectual socialists cannot have it both ways: to hold that the mass of the people have been ‘socialized’ into conservative constitutional beliefs is not to ignore such constraints, but to demonstrate that it is in these terms that the argument has to begin and has to be won. All politics, indeed, must deal with people as they are.
The potential political and the actual productive power of the people is, indeed, more essential to socialist theory (this is the minimal core of truth in the original labour theory of value), than it is to contemporary capitalist theory. While popular capitalist doctrine still preaches the individual work ethic, that workers should work as hard as they can for necessarily disproportionate rewards and that there are jobs to be had for those who really want to work, liberal economists favour a more technical argument about the inevitability of capital-intensive industry and of uncontrolled ‘free trade’ in finance and international investment, whatever the cost in unemployment. Full employment is no longer seen as economically possible or as politically crucial: free-market theorists now gamble on the passivity of the masses if the marginal rate of mere subsistence can be found and funded coupled with investment in a type of mass-communications designed, quite literally, both to take peoples’ minds off things that matter and to create unfree illusions of helplessness (which was the satiric intent of Orwell’s ‘prolecult’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four, aimed at the contemporary mass media not at a distant future). ‘True conservatives’, or old-fashioned tories, however, while believing deeply in natural hierarchy and in maintaining inequality, yet are genuinely paternalistic: they have a sense of community and would draw the line, if they knew how, at any economic doctrines that result in mass unemployment.
The ‘new conservative’ faith in the universality of the market mechanism could well founder on the bitter, dehumanizing effect of mass unemployment. But equally socialist leaders must show sensitivity to a complex industrial world in which the workers and managers, if not persuaded freely and given time to adjust, simply will not work or will not work well, and will prove unwilling to adjust themselves to new technologies and changing social priorities. Even an advanced industrial power which attempted genuine socialist programmes all at once, too quickly and without a broad prior basis of support stretching far beyond party activists, could face some of the same problems as in African and Asian socialism: the danger of alienating élites from the masses. Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ was no answer to such a problem, but the move towards a managerial bureaucracy in China is neither socialism nor the glimmering of liberalism that some Western observers imagine.
Coercive government by party bureaucracy all too often is the crowning achievement of revolutions pursued by non-political means. The apostle Paul was right to say that ‘every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things’, if he is serious about the ‘mastery’. And coercion by mass unemployment, in Western industrial societies, also marks the failure of ‘mastery’, not its typical or most efficient mode. ‘Mastery’ involves patience with men and women as they are, as well as an ability to persuade them of what they or their children could become.
Put in simple terms, one does not, as I think Miliband now agrees, throw out the baby with the bathwater. Liberty is not hopelessly tainted by capitalism, nor is the idea of ‘liberty as we know it’ purely bourgeois, a product of the rise of capitalism – as both Marx and Hayek have argued, the one rejoicing, the other lamenting, but agreeing on this essential point. On the contrary, the tradition of free politics and of republican government long preceded the capitalist era: it was both an ideal vision and an occasional imperfect practice from the time of European classical antiquity, the memory of which, among scholars and humanists, even among fearful tyrants, never died. There could come in time a revolutionary ‘transformation of values’, certainly of the priorities we give to our many different values; humanity could discover ‘the dignity of work’ as William Morris hoped, and reject its alienation, and a common culture could arise in place of an impersonal division of labour which both separates and cripples culture and citizenship; but all this will not, except in religious myths and their ideological substitutes, come suddenly or at once. The ideas and the sense of direction already exist, but the recruitment has hardly begun, detailed maps and plans for provision along the route are not to be found, nor has thought been given about how to keep up the spirits of the army on the march – still less about what should happen if it decided to stop or turn round. Transitions are never easy. Deliberate ones have been rare. But the enterprise is possible, if conducted by free men in a freely chosen way. Personally I am a ‘moderate Socialist’, no longer a ‘moderate’ in newspaper senses: my goals are extreme and therefore I moderate and measure my means.
That the basic empirical theory of socialism is both more coherent and yet more conditional than is often supposed; and the moral doctrine of socialism is wholly consistent with the theory: both modify each other even if the roots are not always the same.
Let us grant that there are many varieties of socialism, even without each newly independent nation claiming a uniquely national form. Many, but not all, of these divisions are variations on Marx’s themes, some of which, however, would be quite unrecognizable by and uncongenial to their founder. Some claim to possess ‘true Marxism’ and interpret the texts with scholastic zeal as direct guides to action. Others more subtly and sensibly claim that Marxism is a ‘living method’ – hence prone not merely to growth, but presumably to unforeseeable accidents as well. However, there is also the decentralist, syndicalist and cooperative tradition of socialism that stems from Proudhon: this rejects the economic theory of determinism and the historical theory of stages and holds that capitalism can be destroyed from within by forming cooperative communities for production. Then there is the managerial or mixed economy version of socialism which emerged from both the German revisionists and the British Fabians: that the capitalist state can be permeated and controlled for the general welfare. Not to forget what I technically call ‘British socialism’ which has its roots in an eclectic fusion of Robert Owen’s cooperative ideas, the cultural vision of William Morris, Methodist conscience, Chartist democracy and revisionist Marxism: libertarian, egalitarian and above all ethical, placing more stress on personal exemplifications of socialist values than on public ownership or class legislation. And there is always the anarchist and communitarian criticism of and example to these mainstream socialisms. Other categories abound.
Is there a common core of meaning amid all these revolving and colliding concepts of socialism? I dare to think so. Put in the simplest and most basic terms, socialism has both an empirical theory and a moral doctrine. The theory is that the rise and fall and the cohesion of societies is best explained not by the experience and perpetuation of élites (which is conservatism), nor by the initiative and invention of competitive individuals (which is liberalism), but by the relationship of the primary producers of wealth (in an industrial society, the skilled manual worker) to the ownership and control of the means of production. The doctrine asserts the primacy and mutual dependence of the values of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’; and it draws on the theory to believe that greater equality will lead to more cooperation than competition, that this will in turn enhance fraternity and hence liberate from inhibition, restriction and exploitation both individual personality and the full productive potential of society.
The theory is not fully comprehensive: in its strictly empirical and characteristically economic form it is dangerously close at times to being purely a doctrine for the skilled industrial worker. If it speaks to the poor and the dispossessed, it assumes the kind of grounds for believing in human rights or depicting the quality of a good life that one finds in the Christian tradition and in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Attempts to explain the meaning of these doctrines in terms of the economic theory seem far fetched or fatuous. Socialist theory has no more made an entirely original contribution to ethics than it has to aesthetics or to science. Socialist theory and doctrine complement each other in practice, but neither logically entails the other, not even together are they fully comprehensive. To think that any political theory and/or doctrine must be fully comprehensive is precisely what I have argued is a totalitarian rather than a political style of thought. Marxists may write about aesthetics and ethics if they will. It is interesting and sometimes useful to see how the popularity, for instance, of cultural or moral ideas can be explained in terms of class interest and social stratification. But their origin, truth and value is never reducible simply to the economic concepts of the general theory. Russian and Chinese Communism have both gone very far in suggesting that there is a correct socialist way to do everything – from agricultural research to sexual conduct and artistic production. But this is nonsense, and its meaning is to be found neither in socialist theory nor in doctrine but in the need for uniformity in would-be totalitarian societies.
What is more surprising is that there is no distinctively socialist theory of political institutions, though the doctrine is rather simply democratic. What kind of political institutions does socialism need? Most of the answers come in conventional republican or democratic terms, except that people will or should participate more, make more use of these electoral or parliamentary or informative devices. Few liberals would quarrel with this; indeed this is liberal doctrine, only the rival theories predict different results. Only the commune and the soviet have emerged historically, and then so briefly, as distinctively socialist institutions. But few think that the spirit of Marx’s somewhat inconsistent but passionate championing of the Paris Commune of 1870 as the very model of a classless society, still haunts the Soviet Union, even though the Czechoslovak revisionists in 1968 in the ‘Prague Spring’ invoked the memory of the Commune as if someone in Moscow still cared or could be shamed. But certainly when socialists talk about ‘taking over the State’, whether by parliamentary or other means, to use it for socialist policies, usually the cross-current of a somewhat contradictory argument arises – one which stresses small-scale things, local communities and industrial democracy as being both the school and the final resting place of socialist values.
Yet socialists do have a distinctive attitude to political and social institutions. They are sceptical that institutions of State or those set up by the State in democratic but non-socialist régimes are always as neutral as they claim to be. This is a healthy scepticism, so long as everyone is aware that they are normally dealing with relative, not absolute, degrees of bias or with well meant but impossible attempts at pure neutrality. But if socialists expect ‘fair play’, they are foolish. Their opponents sometimes seem to believe that they mean what they say more than they do themselves. But if they try to change the rules, say of the press or broadcasting, to get ‘fair play’, they should remember the suspicion with which the majority of their fellow countrymen still view them, and will continue to do so precisely because they aim to change the known world. This is a large enterprise and to hurry or to proceed at unrealistic speed can be as fatal as simply accepting the rules or trying only to be as humane as possible to the crew in a leaking ship set on the wrong course. Socialists must convince people that change is possible and desirable, yet not hope to convince them by the refining and reiteration of abstract and sometimes incomprehensive socialist theories, but rather by reawakening traditions and memories of successful popular protest and by argument appealing to existing common beliefs and common interests. Is it fair, for instance, that opportunities for work and rewards for labour within the present system should be so accidental and disproportionate? Yet until some idea of a just reward is firmly established, people in jobs and ‘reasonably well off’ will simply not accept the principle of equal needs. The rules must be changed by the rules. Theory will guide what policies and priorities to select, but to change the present world we must both understand it, and respect people as they are, not simply as they ought to be and can become.
Socialist theory when applied to history can demonstrate that great changes are possible, but must also comprehend that everything cannot change at once and that social systems are rarely as systematic as either classical Marxist or classical liberal theorists have supposed. Marxist theories of a complete indoctrination or ‘socialization’ by education or the media can induce a quite unnecessary despair or rage for violent change. But these ‘systems’ are in fact full of imperfections and inconsistencies that, as conservatives often complain, give too many unexpected opportunities to the politically literate radical. Even in the industrial world, mixed economies are not simply façades: they are indeed remarkably mixed. The mixture can be worked upon and varied. Differential advance in different sectors is possible, despite the preconceptions of systematic theory. And in pre-industrial societies there was often a remarkable lack of congruence in the relations between rulers and ruled, the rulers often being an alien aristocracy, speaking a different language, taxing the peasantry ruthlessly but rarely trying to mobilize them or to change or proselytize them in any way. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ was an autocratic adage; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson alleged that peasants ruminated that ‘Kings may come and kings may go, but we go on for ever’. And in non-industrial societies in the modern world (which is virtually to say ‘the Third World’) the case is much the same: the ruling élites are now at least of the same nation as the mass of the people, but their culture and way of life can be very different.
The ideas of free citizenship and of political activity had their origins in what were, broadly speaking, the aristocratic cultures of Greece and Rome, or among the merchants and bourgeoisie of England, France, Holland, Scotland, Sweden and the German and Italian ‘free cities’. Even in those societies it was always difficult to prevent any public example of liberties being exercised among the few from exciting the emulation of at least some of the many. Example or mimesis is a basic social mechanism. The source and enduring myth of republican ideas and institutions was in the slave-holding cultures of Greece and Rome; but this does not taint the seed. In many ways the classical ideal of free citizenship is not so much superseded by Marx in his critique of capitalist society, as assumed by him. If all this was not part of his own cultural preconceptions, it would be hard to make sense of his fragmentary, undeveloped but important accounts of what is this autonomous human personality that can be emancipated from the alienating, competitive conditions of an industrial society where man seems divorced from the fruits of his labour. In his early Critique of Hegel, for instance, he wrote that ‘the essence of man is the true community of men’ and that ‘men, not as abstractions but as real, living, particular individuals are this community. As they are, so it is too.’ Marx was much closer to both the classical and humanist traditions and to the French enlightenment than many of his most famous disciples.
Thus it is historically false to identify most of the characteristic political institutions of modern ‘liberal democracy’ with the rise of the capitalist market. Here the theory is often in error. Capitalism accelerated the spread of such institutions for their instrumental use both to liberate new productive forces and to impose new types of control on the working class. Even so, the political and educational concessions involved in establishing a manipulative façade of free institutions proved more important than either side once thought, ultimately threatening any simple class control of the system. The skilled working man demanded by the new factories and the new technologies was a very different human animal from the peasant typical of the agricultural mode of production in autocracies. He had to be literate, for one thing, and was dangerously concentrated in cities, for another, even in capital cities. It was difficult to stop him from organizing, even in restraint of trade, without denying him the skills that the economy required. He was a constant threat to the State precisely because its power and wealth came more and more to depend upon his power and abilities. Small concessions in the franchise always proved the thin end of a wedge. And many of the new weapons of control proved double-edged. His new masters had to educate him and quite naturally sought to control that education and to limit it; but so many teachers were now needed that they were both hastily trained and hard to control completely. They began to constitute a new intelligentsia or at least a special subsection of the middle class, open to new secular ideas or still full of old evangelical ones; and even the oldest ideas of those who taught them were heavily contaminated, through Latin and Greek, with the classical myth of free citizenship. Several generations of school children in Western Europe must have believed that long before the French and American Revolutions (which their teachers would rarely mention, let alone discuss), there was something rather like these revolutions going on all the time in Greece and Rome. And gradually ideologies of progress began to replace myths of the ‘good old days’. When the pupils emerged from the partial dark of such utilitarian school rooms, they often saw rudimentary democratic institutions existing already.
Some leaders of opinion like John Stuart Mill argued that the mass of the people should come into their own and exercise political power, if and when they were fully educated; and that if they were fully educated, they would – which has not happened. Others sought to postpone that fearful democratic dawn by restricting education. But the very demands of capitalist technology for skilled and literate workers, quite apart from radical and socialist agitation, heightened the crisis and the demands, if not for new political institutions, at least for popular access to existing ones.
That socialist theory is distinctive but not comprehensive can be seen even in the narrowest claim that control of the mode of production controls all else. To many Marxists economic determinism is almost a banality. Engels said: ‘We make our own history, but in the first place under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these the economic are finally decisive.’ If we must read the words with Talmudic or hermeneutic closeness, the first phrase and the last are of equal importance. If we see these ‘finally decisive’ economic conditions as outer limits on human action, then there is still much history we can make for ourselves; but if we see these ‘definite presuppositions and conditions’ as with us constantly and immediately, permeating all our thoughts and limiting our ability to think otherwise, then we can make little history for ourselves: history is then, indeed, ‘the recognition of necessity’. Without socialist doctrines or values, more often assumed rather than asserted by Marx and Engels, there would be a pessimistic not a progressive conclusion.
Marx himself said, ‘The mode of production in material life conditions the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.’ Since he does say ‘general character’ and ‘conditions’, and does not here talk about specific features or causal law and necessity, the claim is unexceptionable. We are conditioned but we are not determined. Within these conditions there must be, indeed, as most contemporary Marxists now admit, a ‘relative autonomy’ of the political, of the State, even of ideology (it is not always easy to explain the growth, let alone the continuance, of ideologies in purely economic terms). But to believe both that economic determinism is false and (more arguably) that Marx and Engels were either not economic determinists or not consistently so, is not to license any kind of idealist fantasy in politics. Marx did establish a mode of thought that all socialists share: first consider what follows for the organization of a society and for possible changes within it from establishing who owns the means of production and how; then consider all other relevant factors, consider how the mode of production must be modified in the interests of the working class.
Although there is common ground between Marxists and democratic socialists, five things especially have either discredited classical Marxist theory in the eyes of democratic socialists or have made them highly sceptical: (i) its lack of a clear ethical doctrine; (ii) the unwillingness of some Marxists to think in anything but rigid economic categories; (iii) a lingering habit of viewing the texts of Marx and Engels as sacred dogma rather than as often the most fruitful starting point (among others) for speculation; (iv) the inability of many Marxists to take pains to write plainly and to express the theory clearly in common parlance (indeed some seem to imply that they have an esoteric, inaccessible knowledge – the usual justification for autocracy); and (v) the common Marxist confusion between the fertile idea that theory and practice always modify each other, are never wholly distinct, and the false idea that in any given situation only one true policy or party line is backed up by theory.
It is always irritating to be told in argument that a rival or alternative policy is ‘necessary’, ‘scientific’ or simply ‘objective’; and this belief is corrupting to those who hold it. Marxist theory, like any other theory, has a characteristic view of what policies it thinks are most likely to work; but there are simply too many variables in actual social situations, also too many conflicting perceptions and values involved, to make any one policy taken from the book definitively correct. If socialists are marching towards a new Rome, they should be well aware that all roads do not lead there; but that even given a strong will and a true sense of direction, there are always alternative routes, indeed room for false starts and new attempts, not any single royal road of theory and practice. Policies must emerge from the interplay between ethical doctrines and empirical theories in the hands of people who can develop from experience as well as knowledge good political judgement.
The other socialist traditions have commonly shown better political judgement and have had more to say about actual and possible policies than have most Marxists, even if their theories have been less systematic and more eclectic. Democratic socialist doctrines, however, have had much more to tell us than the Marxist tradition about specifically socialist values and thus the priorities of policy they help to define.
That Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are still the basic socialist values; that all values modify each other; that many other values are held in common; and that the maximization of these values can only evolve, neither will this come suddenly nor only come after ‘fundamental changes in social structure’ – such changes themselves need changes in values. Nothing determines, everything conditions.
Values are important. When ordinary people have said that they no longer know what socialism stands for, it is unlikely that they are thinking either of details of policy in manifestos or striving for ‘the correct theoretical perspective’. Whether we are followers of Labour Parties, Social Democratic Parties or ‘true’ socialism (of various kinds), values are always involved. Those who ‘unmask’ the ‘hidden curriculum’ in education, can themselves be bitten as they bite, or at least asked to come clean whether they believe their holy selves to be ‘value free’ or simply to be right. Not all hidden values are oppressive, many are benign. There is no objection to people believing that they hold the right values. Everything depends on how values are held and asserted and on how they are related to other values.
Any values to be realized in the practical, political world keep company with other values and occasionally contradict them. Some values are asserted as procedures and some as goals: we may be sure what we want to do, but equally sure that it should not be done that way. Because no single practice or policy follows from theory in any circumstance, it is our values that mainly decide what alternative policies to follow.
Two schools of thought, however, seem unwilling to discuss what values we should hold, and often seek to avoid talk of values at all: determinist Marxism and managerial pragmatism. But Marx himself in his early writings, as we have argued, seemed to take for granted both the classical tradition of free republican citizenship and a view of human nature found in Kant. He did not believe either, like many of his disciples, that all present values are simply class values and would be wholly different in a classless society. Even when he produced a formal theory of ideology, which seemed to say the all values are products of class or of modes of production, his argument still presupposed that these precapitalist, republican values are continual animating forces. Freedom as action, like scientific knowledge, was plainly a special category, and together they form the presuppositions of the theory of ideology, not something to be explained away by that theory. Nonetheless, the theory of ideology notoriously opened the door to the belief that all values and ideas are systematically related products of class and the mode of production, and can thus be manipulated by the State or the Party; only in a post-revolutionary society will values and human nature become autonomous, ends in themselves.
This theory is a relative and sometimes salutary truth: we always need to think of the sociological context of ideas, both to understand their historical meaning and their political possibilities. But as a ‘necessary logical framework’ or as ‘scientific laws’, these propositions are misleading and untrue. Because they are untrue much of the contemporary academic literature of the ‘sociology of knowledge’ (Marxist epistemology) is less threatening or challenging than time-wasting, a jargon-ridden arena of pharasitical sectarian jealousies with little or no relevance to political practice.
The other schools of socialist thought that fight shy of values are the pragmatists or social democrats, those who make a cult of being purely practical and of accepting the present system, if administered with decency and humanity. Consider, for gross example, that former leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, who wrote two big books on his administrations, The Labour Government, 1964–70 and Final Term, and another on The Governance of Britain, all without once discussing, even rhetorically, theories, doctrines or values of any kind (let alone socialist). He obviously believed that pure description is valid and held a pietistic belief that everything he did, because he held high office, was interesting or of value. To be purely practical in this sense is simply to accept uncritically the existing values of society – so many of which are, indeed, specifically managerial and capitalist, stressing the virtues of acquisitiveness, competition, self-reliance and efficiency. But pure pragmatism is simply impossible, either a self deceit or a public deceit. Wilson’s implicit values seem to be conservative ones: a dedication to the business of simply keeping the ship of state afloat, with little hope or care about direction. Now this is a political achievement of a sort in stormy and troubled times; but it is an unnecessarily modest one for a Labour leader. When he claimed that he was ‘blown off course’ by uncontrollable international economic events, which events were real enough, few people believed that he was by then on any course at all except running with the wind for survival. Politics is not mere compromise and survival. I have called it ‘creative compromise’. People like Wilson give politics its bad name.
Social democrats (in the new sense) profess to be pragmatists, but in a less narrow sense than Wilson’s. They may indeed have certain future-looking values, though differing amongst themselves about these. But their predominant values are procedural: about how things should be done, not about what should be done. For they either lack imagination about the possibilities of deliberate social change or simply believe that only relatively minor technical adjustments are needed in the mix of a mixed economy. Many people indeed sympathize with these humane and limited viewpoints or are frightened of going beyond them. Yet the decline of the British economy and the growth of mass unemployment owes much to pragmatism: the lack both of any sense of direction and of positive values, such as equality and fraternity. Most social democrats and pragmatists simply assume or claim that ‘means’ constitute ‘ends’, that social justice is simply a matter of procedural values – like liberty, tolerance and electoral reform.
Procedural values are important, both for understanding politics and for politicians to be at least sufficiently empathetic to understand the minds of their opponents and what they are really up against. Elsewhere I have tried to characterize basic procedural values and named them as ‘respect for reasoning’, ‘respect for truth’, ‘toleration’, ‘fairness’ and ‘freedom’.2 But these do not of themselves constitute a particular political doctrine, only the presuppositions of any genuine political education and of all doctrines that are political – socialism included.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are the specifically socialist cluster of values – if one treats ‘cooperation’ and ‘community’ as closely related to ‘fraternity’. Only equality is specifically socialist in itself; liberty and fraternity, however, take on a distinctively socialist form when the three are related to each other. And the three values themselves presume that individuals are both the agents and the objects of values, although individualism, as I will suggest, can take on a specifically socialist form.
Liberty
Liberty deserves almost fanatic support from democratic socialists; a truly socialist movement is so committed to more liberty and to more open government that at times it can seem almost incoherent among the multitude of small, good causes who run across the stage of the movement, whether scripted or not, and find support in the wings. And at times it can seem almost paranoiac in its belief that anything less than totally open government is likely to be concealing oppressive weapons behind every lazily or habitually closed door. Liberty, by itself, is indeed an exuberant and unpredictable thing. The actions of free men are always unpredictable. This is why bureaucrats dislike citizens, and this is the unavoidable tension between the theory of socialism and its moral beliefs. Some ‘libertarians’, who call themselves socialist and who join socialist movements, seem to believe that anything goes as long as it is an authentic action of an untrammelled personality. If I bite, I bite freely and splendidly. Such political ‘street-theatre’ is a cross that any democratic socialist movement in a free society must bear as cheerfully as it can. But true socialists are concerned with judging morally the social consequences of individual actions quite as much as with writing accounts of human action in social terms; even here values must be asserted clearly. Bad social conditions do lead to increased delinquency, for instance, but this does not justify delinquency – it only affects our theories of how to diminish it and our views on sentencing policy. True socialists examine how even the most ‘authentic’ individual actions, whether of violent protest or colourful self-assertion, can affect the equal rights of others or diminish rather than enhance fraternity.
Liberty is not, we have argued, to be abandoned either as a bourgeois concept or on account of its origins. But it need not remain in the narrow nineteenth-century tradition of ‘freedom from’, simply of not being interfered with by the State or powerful neighbours. Sir Isaiah Berlin has eloquently argued, in his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, the danger of thinking of liberty in other than negative terms: if we give any positive content to liberty, ascribe to it any objectives, then we end up, all too often, crying out like Rousseau to ‘force people to be free’ – as it were, ‘here is your Welfare State, damn you (or bless you); now you are free!’. The warning is salutary. Reformers need to be careful. In any possible society, socialist societies included, people may not like what they are given and must be free to challenge by public debate (or by turning their backs on it all) both values and policies. But even our good negative liberties ultimately depend on positive political action. The positive assertion of liberty is needed to open doors, to create an open society; but then we do not just sit admiring so many choices of ways forward or back, we need to choose, by free and open debate, the best doors to go through – perhaps never, indeed, completely shutting any. People who use their liberty to avoid political life are more often done down than left in peace. The price of liberty is even higher than eternal vigilance, as Lincoln said: it demands eternal action. Freedom needs its antique, republican, pre-liberal cutting edge restored in modern conditions: freedom is positive action in a specific manner, that of a citizen acting as if among equals; and not merely to preserve rights (says the socialist) but to extend them.3
Socialists must add the egalitarian assumption to liberty that not merely must all men and women be treated as citizens, but they must also be helped to count equally as citizens and, above all, be expected to act as citizens. Liberty in this positive sense does not deny liberty in the more liberal, negative sense: it subsumes, complements and extends it. Citizens in socialist societies must have rights against the State as well as a duty to work for commonly agreed purposes. R. H. Tawney long ago argued the complementary nature of rights and duties in his great essays The Acquisitive Society and Equality.
Thus talk of socialist liberty as being completely different from bourgeois liberty is melodramatic nonsense. Many left-wingers who are libertarians both at heart and in their personal behaviour get themselves trapped in their writings in that bad piece of Marxist logic, that only in the classless society after the revolution can there be true liberty – until then all we have is capitalist liberty and an ‘oppressive tolerance’ (a phrase of the late Herbert Marcuse). ‘Thank God for small mercies’, say men actually living in oppressive régimes. Socialists must always try to extend liberty to more and more people and to more and more activities in whatever circumstances possible. They must at least try to persuade those who think that liberty is being left alone in comfort to watch the television or to cultivate one’s garden that governments rarely leave people alone or treat justly those who will not stand up for themselves and combine politically.
Often the most convincing anti-socialist arguments come not from liberals who dogmatically believe that liberty depends on the free working of the market mechanism, but from liberal élitists who think that liberty is all very well for the likes of us but an impossible proposition en masse, for the likes of them. They fear not so much an egalitarian political tyranny, whatever their rhetoric, as a debasement of their culture. Perhaps they flatter themselves too much to think that it is their culture that popular politicians wish to universalize and hence debase or vulgarize. Their real defence is that their culture is itself a free activity, irrelevant to political considerations except in totalitarian régimes, unless they themselves try to make it so by claiming éither that educated élites should rule by virtue of their culture, or should have their culture specially subsidized by the State. The argument in Britain, for instance, that the existence of private education is the absolute test case of freedom, would be more impressive if the private schools were not so brazen and correct in arguing that their education constitutes a good investment. Property rights and educational rights are, indeed, closely linked in both conservative and liberal doctrine. ‘The liberal bourgeois is genuinely liberal,’ said Orwell, ‘up to the point where his own interests stop.’ But he also said, what his fellow socialists did not always welcome, ‘liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear’.
‘In so far as the opportunity to lead a life worthy of human beings is needlessly confined to a minority,’ wrote R. H. Tawney, ‘not a few of the conditions applauded as freedom would more properly be denounced as privilege. Action which causes such opportunities to be more widely shared is, therefore, twice blessed. It not only subtracts from inequality but adds to freedom.’4
Malinowski also assumed that freedom was something positive. If philosophers defined its meaning negatively, he saw it as part of human action and a basic mechanism of social adaptation.
Those who attempt any definition of freedom in terms of negative categories and in terms of an absolute and unlimited absence of trammels, must be chasing an intellectual will-o’-the-wisp. Real freedom is neither absolute nor omnipresent and it certainly is not negative. It is always an increase in control, in efficiency, and in the power to dominate one’s own organism and the environment, as well as artifacts and the supply of natural resources. Hence freedom as a quality of human action, freedom an increase of efficiency and control, means the breaking down of certain obstacles and a compensation for certain deficiencies. . . . The instrumentalities of freedom we find in the political constitution of a community, its laws, its moral norms, the distribution of its wealth, and the access to such benefits as health, recreation, justice, and religious or artistic gifts of culture. To scour the universe for possibilities of freedom other than those given by the organization of human groups for the carrying out of specific purposes, and the production of desirable results, is an idle philosophic pastime.5
As liberty is maximized it will become more participative and positive, more distinctively socialist. Yet always free participation will bring many voices not one; refusal to hear criticism can be no more a virtue in socialist societies than in conservative; and no multiplication of opinions, however democratically contrived, can guarantee ‘truth’ or sensible decisions about means or ends. ‘Participatory democracy’ like ‘liberty’ is a necessary condition of social justice, but far from a sufficient condition. What is it all for?
Equality
Equality is the value basic to any possible kind of socialism. Without a real desire to achieve an egalitarian society any democratic socialist movement loses its dynamic and lapses back into mere pragmatism. But the concept has notorious difficulties and is often parodied: a literal and exact universal equality, whether of opportunity, treatment or result, is almost as undesirable as it is impossible. Nevertheless an egalitarian society is both conceivable and desirable. Certainly some societies are remarkably less unequal than others; but by an egalitarian society is meant a classless society, one in which every man would see every other man as a brother, of equal worth and potential, a genuinely fraternal society with no conceit or constraint of class to limit fraternity. It would not be a society in which everyone was exactly equal in power, status, wealth and acquired abilities, still less in humane end-products of happiness; but it would be a society in which none of these marginal differences were unacceptable, were regarded as unjust by public opinion – a public opinion which would itself become, as differences in living standards gradually diminished, far more critical and active, far less inert and fatalistic than today. These margins would remain perpetually ambiguous, open, flexible, debatable, irreducible to either economic formula or legislative final solution; but less intense and less fraught with drastic consequences once poverty and unemployment are as antique as slavery.
No difficulties about the concept are so great as to warrant abandoning it or treating it as pure ritual of the socialist church – unless one wants to abandon it. One difficulty is that socialists want, rhetorically and politically, to make something sound positive which is philosophically best stated in negative terms. There is no ‘complete equality’ which can ‘finally be realized’, unless genetic engineering were to come to the aid of economic planning (with about equal accuracy and predictability, one would suspect). But there are so many unjustifiable inequalities. If we believe in the moral equality or the fraternity of all mankind, then all inequalities of power, status and wealth need justifying. The boot should be worn on that foot. Inequalities can be justified but only if these inequalities can be shown to be of positive advantage to the less privileged. Some inequalities can be justified, many not – particularly if one adds the vital condition of democratic citizenship: actually to ask the disadvantaged and to depend upon their reply. No precise agreement is ever likely to be reached or, if so, only for a particular time and place. Nor can philosophy supply incontrovertible criteria for what is an unjustifiable inequality. Each case will be equal on its merit and opinions will differ. But the important point is to see that inequalities of reward and power are unjustifiable in principle unless only thus can some clear public benefit follow.
Here I have followed the arguments of John Rawls in his monumental work, A Theory of Justice (1972), and of W. G. Runciman in his Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966). Some socialists have misread the implications of their arguments as merely a radical form of liberalism. But even if that was their intent, if in fact all inequalities were constantly called into question, criticized and forced to justify themselves, then one would be in an egalitarian society. The vast differences in power, status and wealth that are in fact acceptable to most people in a class conscious society, will grow less tolerable as income differences diminish and as an egalitarian spirit grows by argument, agitation and example.
Equality does not mean sameness. Men not robots animate an egalitarian spirit. The idea that even a strict and absolute equality of condition would destroy human individuality and character is not so much a tory nightmare as a science fiction fantasy. The fears of tory and ‘market liberal’ authors that high taxation and state intervention will destroy individuality, these are literally absurd.6 Do they really think that man is so artificial and individuality so fragile? Can they really not imagine that everyone could have roughly the same standard of living, equal status and equal access to the processes of political power and yet still retain individuality? Or can they, more understandably, simply not imagine how their fancy selves could adjust to such a society? For some people genuinely believe that individuality, character and culture only exist among the prosperous and well-educated, and that ‘the masses’ are, as the natives used to be, ‘all the same’.7 Masses can be generalized about but not the educated and the gentry. It is the saddest fate of the poor to have their individuality removed from them in principle as well as threatened in practice. Charles Dickens and George Orwell had a different view of the matter: they actually romanticized poverty as a school of eccentricity and character.
R. H. Tawney in 1931 (long before Rawls) first argued that equality was best seen simply as the negation of socially imposed inequalities:
So to criticize inequality and to desire equality is not, as is sometimes suggested, to cherish the romantic illusion that men are equal in character and intelligence. It is to hold that, while their natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilized society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organization, and that individual differences which are a source of social energy, are more likely to ripen and find expression if social inequalities are, as far as practicable, diminished. And the obstacle to the progress of equality is something simpler and more potent than finds expression in the familiar truism that men vary in their mental and moral, as well as in their physical characteristics, important and valuable though that truism is as a reminder that different individuals require different types of provision. It is the habit of mind which thinks it, not regrettable, but natural and desirable, that different sections of a community should be distinguished from each other by sharp differences of economic status, of environment, of education and culture and habit of life.8
He argued that a socialist society would have more diversity in it, not less, when he expressed
. . . straightforward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain. The socialist society envisaged . . . is not a herd of tame, well-nourished animals, with wise keepers in command. It is a community of responsible men and women working without fear in comradeship for common ends, all of whom can grow to their full stature, develop to their utmost limit the varying capacities with which nature has endowed them.9
Now ‘less unjustifiable inequality today!’ and ‘no unjustifiable inequality tomorrow!’ may not be slogans that ‘warm the blood like wine’, but that may be just as well. For ‘Onwards to Equality’ is a slogan more likely to warm the hearts of party activists than those whom they need to persuade. No one value, be it liberty, equality, fraternity, love, truth, reason, even life itself, can at all times override all the others or be sure never to contradict them. Equality could certainly be maximized in a totalitarian society; but only at the expense of liberty so that genuine fraternity is destroyed. The political socialist, having a theory of society, looks at values together, in their social setting and in relation to each other. He no more postpones liberty until the classless society than he reserves egalitarian and fraternal behaviour and example until the classless society. If he does, he will not get there; and when he does, classlessness by itself will not have solved all problems and removed all possibilities of oppression.
The political socialist as egalitarian need not get drawn into this parody argument which assumes exact equality of income and wealth: that is somebody else’s nightmare not his dream. Literal-minded distributive socialism is very hard to find – since the time of the Gracchi and their heir, Graccus Babeuf, at least. ‘Soak the fat boys and spread it thin’, may be good populist rhetoric, but most people know how thin it would be unless new productive forces arise. Industrial relations are bad, not because the men on the shop floor believe that the cow can be milked without being fed; they are bad because men think that it is unfair or unjust that they should be restrained in their wage demands while their bosses actually write to tell newspapers that people with high incomes have no incentive to work harder unless income tax is cut and their children can freely inherit all their wealth. Workers, oddly, use their eyes and see how much patriotic restraint is practised by those who at least try to look like ruling classes.
Socialists claim that with greater equality there can be greater fraternity, hence greater cooperation, hence greater productivity – since wealth basically comes from the worker. Power and status also count for a lot and so does having a worthwhile job. Real managers like to produce, but the English upper middle class prefer banking to industry.
So much scope for action (and alternative action) remains in the business of moving towards a far greater equality. This is not to be represented as jealous levelling but rather as a constant, aggressive questioning of the reasons for, and the justifications of, both the existing distribution of incomes and wealth, and the present divisions of responsibility between ‘workers’ and ‘management’. Such questioning could prove as popular as it is right. More important for socialism than abstract arguments about formal ownership is progress towards taking all wages and income out of the market and determining them by representative arbitration and open comparison of relativities. Public policy should work towards complete openness of all incomes. Many differences can be justified. But they need to be. We need to develop this as a whole new branch of applied social philosophy rather than of traditional economics. Socialist theory began as a critique of the theory of wages in the classical economics of Adam Smith and Ricardo: simply that they are unjustly determined in market economies. Free trade unions need free collective bargaining, indeed, as a great but minimal achievement in a market economy. The result, however, is not social justice in any sense, still less ‘equality’, precisely because trade unions rarely constitute even a majority of the working population, even before long-term mass unemployment returned to mixed economies. In a socialist and egalitarian economy their collective power will concentrate on reaching agreement about national procedures for arbitrating wage differentials as part of the whole complex of real income, not on a multiplicity of local or industry-wide conflicts with employers. Half-way houses will be many in the evolution of an egalitarian society: wage, welfare and tax structure will all take a long time to come together (many still do not see the need nor perceive the connexion), and different institutions will evolve in different societies. But the essential step forward must be the establishment of a national social wage. Set a level not simply to avoid the pain of poverty but to create equal opportunities for full citizenship and participation in everything that is held to be part of the good life;10 and limit top incomes to a level that does not create life styles or opportunities for inheritance that frustrate the objectives of egalitarian policies. Neither minimum nor maximum can be decided a priori; they are a matter for continuing experiment and open debate.
If economic equality is a relative concept, there is one definition of equality that could and should be absolute: the differential rates of mortality between social classes – inequalities of life and death. The matter is flagrant. Even in a still relatively prosperous country such as Great Britain in a reasonably good year, 1971, the death rate for adult men in social class V (unskilled workers) was, according to official figures, nearly twice that of adult men in social class I (professionals). The ‘neonatal death rates’ (death in the first month of life) were also twice as high, and for the period from one month to one year, actually five times higher.11 And national comparisons of infant mortality and death rates in poorer and richer countries tell a far more ghastly tale. By a common definition of ‘less developed’ societies, the average lifespan of men and women taken together is 42 years, and in developed countries it is 71. Quoting these figures, a philosopher discussing possible justifications of violence says: ‘It is not too much to say that what we have before us are different kinds of lifetime.’12 The ‘Brandt Report’ on world poverty and ‘North–South’ relations simply and prudentially argued that the disparities were so huge that soon the peace of the world will depend on a massive reallocation of resources.
The gaps between the social classes even in a relatively wealthy country like Britain are great not merely in the precise matter of death but in the more general incidence of ill-health. In his Galton lecture in 1975 Sir John Brotherston (a former Civil Servant) remarked: ‘For the most part the evidence suggests that the gaps remain as wide apart as a generation ago and in some instances the gaps may be wider.’13 Thomas Hobbes based his philosophy of political obligation on the alleged necessity of individuals to surrender all power to a State that could effectively minimize the chances of violent death. A modern Hobbes might set his sights higher and see the power of the State at its highest when it can maximize the life expectancy of its inhabitants, and at its most precarious when it fails to do so. Certainly if there was no difference in the death rate between social classes, we would know that we no longer had social classes. This is a fairly obvious definition of a classless society: one in which ‘life chances’ are equal. Ralph Dahrendorf has recently written a book on Life Chances which oddly forgets about death and says little about poverty; but equality of opportunity in Dahrendorf’s good liberal senses is not equality enough if it perpetuates, sometimes even increases, such real differences in life span. If free governments will not move towards such equality, small wonder that some would tear them down irrespective of liberty. Life and death are intrusive matters.
So an egalitarian spirit arises out of protest as well as reason. But reason must tell us that true equality is no more but no less than the removal of all unjustifiable inequalities; and that it is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for democratic socialism. ‘Equality’ needs to be related not merely to liberty but to that most rhetorically potent but philosophically least defined of values, ‘fraternity’.
Fraternity
‘Fellowship is life,’ said William Morris, ‘and lack of fellowship is death.’ Whereas a huge literature exists on ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, ‘fraternity’ is the least defined of the values of the Left. Nothing is decided by arbitrary definitions. Rather let us simply ask ‘when do we find what we ordinarily call fraternal behaviour?’ Surely it is when we are performing some common task, work or even a team game, which we agree needs doing and is done in such a way that each of us has something to contribute? A group of men and women who want to get the job done in time and in the right way, a football team, a group of people organizing a meeting, a good committee, an army with high morale in battle, a nation at war, all these furnish examples of situations in which fraternity is helpful, situations which appear to generate fraternity. Note that fraternity does not always involve liberty – it can, better that it does; but fraternity can exist under coercive command as much as by voluntary cooperation.
So it would appear that if fraternity is an attitude of mind, it is one associated with activity. Fraternity is not radiating an abstract love of humanity: it arises from people working together towards common ends. For instance, I am doubtful how much it means for me to say that I feel fraternity towards ‘Prods’ or ‘Tigs’, Blacks or Whites, unless I am actually working or mixing with them. We may love Blacks, respect them or simply tolerate them; we can even treat them as equals (insofar as we have occasion to be with them at all); but fraternity must at least involve working on common tasks together or living together (like brothers in a family, with their jealousies and independence as well as bonds of circumstance and affection).
The metaphor of brotherhood needs exploring. Actual brotherhood is commonly an odd relationship of affection and rivalry, even jealousy; so fraternity does not necessarily involve men and women being literally equal, still less treating everyone the same. Perhaps fraternity is closer to friendship than to love. Friendship is not a total identification with another and it is rarely, if ever, consistent with trying to make another into some other image than their own – whether the image of an ideology, the image of God or one’s own. Why doesn’t she agree with me in everything when I love her so much? Fraternity must surely accept people, even friends, as they are – warts and all. By all means seek to involve them in common tasks, and to influence them; but then seek neither to condemn their inadequacy, nor to be jealous of their superiority, nor to avoid being influenced ourselves. If we are to experience genuine fraternity, we must take each other as we find each other, not in fancy dress. We cannot say that there can be no genuine fraternity until the classless society or until ‘we are reborn in Christ’ – or in Marx for that matter. Fraternity, like friendship, implies simplicity and lack of ostentation and pomposity, but some restraints nonetheless, for we are dealing with other people. There is a difference between ‘making oneself at home’ in someone else’s house, and acting ‘as if it belonged to one’. Similarly, if fraternity is treating people equally, this does not mean that one treats everyone as if they are, in all relevant aspects, equal. W. G. Runciman drew an apt distinction between ‘equality of respect’, which should be universal, and ‘equality of praise’, which becomes empty if universalized: men do have different talents and aptitudes which should be recognized. The only limitation on praise and reward is that no talents or aptitudes can justify social hierarchy. To a brother I must be neither servile and acquiescent nor censorious and condescending.
So fraternity must involve, firstly, common tasks and activities, and, secondly, an exultant recognition of diversity of character. Fraternity implies individuality not sameness; but, of course, like the socialist ethic in general, it is also concerned with how individuals can work together and contribute best to the common tasks of a reforming society, living in and creating actual communities. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ But can fraternity cut across class lines? Is fraternity compatible with inequality?
The answer is sometimes. Fraternity can – for a moment – cut across the most rigid class lines in the most inegalitarian societies. This is the fraternity engendered on great occasions, be they wars, battles, long marches, last stands or even Labour Party annual conferences. The fraternity of great occasions, however, of Sturm und Drang, of Struggle and Passion, is inherently temporary – unless the pressure is artificially kept up, as when Trotsky advocated ‘permanent revolution’ to ensure the monopoly of power of the Communist Party (in the right hands) and Chairman Mao advocated, even as Machiavelli and Jefferson had done, that every generation should experience the intense comradeship of revolutionary renewal. Sometimes a kind of fraternity is engendered in new nations between the leader and the masses which is real and elevating for a while, but which if continued indefinitely becomes a deliberate fraud: the illusion of the leader as father or as big brother which disguises dictatorship, lack of liberty and continuing gross inequality.
Such false ‘fraternity’ can lead in wholly terrible directions. Erich Remarque wrote of the ‘false fraternity of the trenches’ in All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet even release from that compulsive and deadly fraternity left years later (as many other interwar writers also noted), a sense of loss, a deep psychological void. Some sought to fill this void from very different sources, including both the Communist Party and the Fascist movements. The Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s tried, even short of war, to recreate this wartime atmosphere of blood brotherhood or false fraternity. A once-famous book by an apostate Nazi, Von Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism, argued the paradox that at first people did not march with the Nazis because they agreed with them and shared their values, but they marched because they wanted to gain a feeling of brotherhood and wanted to agree with them. Camping, drilling, marching, demonstrating, rioting and beating up Jews or Communists gave them the very experience of fraternity they desired so much. They did it for that reason.
Such fraternity of great occasions is not what democratic socialists want; nor is it one that could not apply to any group of men, irrespective of class, race, nationality, religion or intelligence: we want a fraternity for all seasons and for everyone, self-willed and enduring. Fraternity without liberty is a nightmare, fraternity with liberty is humanity’s greatest dream. But if fraternity is hard to find in liberal contexts, small wonder that some people may seek it in violent actions, whether motivated by despair or ideology.
In modern society, fraternity is too often only recognized in emergencies. It would be idle to pretend that those who are ordinarily able to purchase what they want (and constantly to invent new wants) are likely to feel any real sense of brotherhood with those who have to struggle all the time to purchase what they need. Rather than brotherhood, the favoured ones are more apt to perceive threat from the disadvantaged – I could wish with more reason. Any abstract fraternity they might feel is empty of real content while their lives do not touch, while their sons and daughters so rarely intermingle and intermarry, while their ordinary relationships with each other are guided by the social distance arising from exploitation and work, command and obedience. The upper classes (while often ‘fraternal’ among themselves) call for sacrifice and belt-tightening from ordinary wage-earners, but not from themselves. They admit the working classes to be patriotic insofar as they act ‘responsibly’, especially in matters of wage restraint and when the unemployed do not kick back. They approach the working classes in times of economic crisis rather as Shakespeare’s Henry V spoke to his common soldiers on the eve of battle:
For he today who sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.
However, there are strong contrary signs of hope. While sociologists point to a declining sense of fraternity and mutual aid in traditional working classes (which is itself a relative and not irreversible matter, especially as the lesson of hard times begins to sink in), others point to an increased fraternity in the younger generation. Despite the class bias of higher education, for instance, most students for over a generation have begun to act in a more classless manner in their dress, speech, life style generally and patterns of friendship. Many try valiantly, some successfully, to sustain this even in the world of commercial and industrial work. And they see themselves as part of a wider largely working-class youth culture, whose music and dress may not have universal appeal, and may be subject to commercial exploitation, but which is nonetheless egalitarian in spirit. This ‘youth culture’ has now spread throughout the Western world, and tries hard to make links with the Third World consciousness, however artificial, absurd and tentative these links at times can be; and it even penetrates Eastern Europe and is a cause for worry in the Kremlin itself. All this has happened without any conscious government policy, often in the teeth of ruling classes and educational authorities. Schooling everywhere is less dragooned and more informal – even in the private sector that tries so hard to resist change and maintain a proper sense of hierarchy. It only needs to be given a sense of political purpose.
Contemporary women’s movements are especially rich in ‘fraternity’. The incongruity of the word in this context should indeed make one pause. I myself do not believe that a sensitive use of a historically male-dominated language is necessarily sexist. Some might argue that the very use of ‘fraternity’ helps perpetuate assumptions that male dominance is natural. It could. Personally I rejoice in how much fraternity at its best is exemplified in women’s groups working together for common purposes as equals. But I grant two things to those who have more than nominal worries: the one is that the Fascist perversion of fraternity, the aggressive brothers’ band, is indeed a strongly male image, is in many ways a revealing caricature of psychological stereotypes of manliness, aggression, competitiveness and xenophobia; and the other is that ‘sisterhood’ in some ways is truly a less ambiguous image of what I am trying to convey by ‘fraternity’. Think simply of any group of women spontaneously ‘rallying round’ to help and support one another in need or trouble. ‘Sisterhood’ then has all the connotations of support, care, practicality, grace, sensitivity and empathy needed for the best definition of politically minded socialists working together. In principle it would be no more strange for men to say ‘liberty, equality, and sisterhood’ than for women to say ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Indeed it might be salutary, for ‘sisterhood’ makes a clear moral point; the concept would then be liberated, indeed, from its less happy associations with ‘a brother’s band against the world’ rather than with good human groups able to relate as equals to all others. In terms of sheer comprehensibility, however, it still seems to me, on balance, more sensible to try to de-sex, even to feminize, old ‘fraternity’, rather than to pause to rewrite most languages or to impede them with more neologisms. Thus I repeat (but with this qualification) that amid the anti-fraternal competitiveness of capitalist society, women’s groups are especially rich in counter-examples of ‘fraternity’, truly conceived.
Again those who talk as liberals or social democrats of the need for more worker participation in industry and ‘co-ownership’ and those who talk as democratic socialists of the need for industrial democracy or cooperative ownership of industry, have in common a sense that there is a vast energy and know-how ready to be released if the men and women who do the hard work could influence or control the work. And in Great Britain the ‘old tories’ or true conservatives in the Conservative Party have a sense at least of the need to preserve communities and community values, unlike the ‘market liberals’ in their party who seem willing to see communities disintegrate in favour of a model of a purely individualistic, competitive and careerist society – a capitalist system which, indeed, never fully succeeded in destroying the fraternal institutions of working-class life. The task of good government is to create a sense of common purposes and problems that must be solved together: fundamental economic and social policies which actually need widespread support to work for the overriding purpose of creating greater equality and a genuine, active liberty or common citizenship for all in each country and gradually for all mankind.
If more genuine fraternity or sisterhood existed, worries about literal equality and marginal differentials could be less acute. Literal equality would not guarantee fraternity unless there was also a sense of common purpose; and existing degrees of inequality must make fraternity in everyday life excessively difficult. The duke and the dustman, the dictator and the poor peasant, may indeed feel themselves to be members of one nation, but that nation then will be based on a sense of hierarchy, condescension and deference, not on brotherhood: at best only a poor and dependent cousinhood. In Beethoven’s Fidelio the King is converted to the principles of French Enlightenment and suddenly proclaims: ‘Let all men be my brothers’. Nice of him, but it’s no good. The master and servant relationship is mutually corrupting. For while there are dukes, dictators and millionaires, such gifts are a sham and a deceit, something never let go of and always returnable. True fraternity can be encouraged by governments and leaders but it cannot be imposed: it must have roots in popular institutions and struggles. Oppression and common enemies can indeed stimulate fraternity; but the only way to maintain fraternity in such conditions is to continue oppression or war (even if the government is now called Communist rather than Czarist).
Both the Communist Party and the Fascist movements of the 1930s sensed a profound human need when they cultivated their emotions of fraternity simultaneously on a very small and local scale (the primal image of the brother’s band, organizing in shop-floor cells or in neighbourhood militias) and also on a vast scale (the Movement itself, even for a while the international movement). We need both. The experience of fraternity is learned in small groups; and learned best in small groups which fulfil a variety of roles – working, governing themselves and providing as many of their own services as they can: the image of the commune and of industrial democracy. But it must be extended to all humanity – certainly beyond the nation, otherwise the world will only see the deadly rivalry of East and West replaced by fear of war between North and South. And yet fraternity must be extended in such a way that the large scale does obliterate the small. We do indeed need both.
Consider one example of a problem of balancing the large with the small, for the matter is not easy when brought down from principle and rhetoric to practice. In Great Britain we are now a multi-racial and multicultural society – whether we like it or not (in fact we always have been, with Scottish, Welsh or Irish compatriots). Few people now seem to favour complete assimilation of immigrants: that everyone should be English. Most people now talk, albeit vaguely, of a pluralist society and the integration of different communities. We recognize that different cultures can live side by side. But can this be an excuse for gross inequalities between them in standard of living and life-chances? The socialist answer, indeed any humanitarian answer, is obvious. Yet can this good recognition of diversity be an excuse for minority cultures sometimes to restrain their members by force, especially their women and their children, from leaving? This problem is more difficult. Surely no amount of communal fraternity can excuse injustices and restrictions on freedom in the light of general principles of liberty, equality and justice? It is hard to know where to draw the line in practice. Some lines must be drawn in public law, but after much debate, bringing these matters out in the open, neither suppressing nor denying them. We must protect greater cultural differences than we have tolerated or known in the past, but we must also protect freedom, especially the possibility for individuals to move during their lifetime from one culture to another and sometimes back again. Both the old nation and the new sub-cultures have to make political and social adjustments: such adjustments are only unjust if the majority use their power imperceptively and inflexibly – unpolitically. If the majority fail to conciliate the minority they may (in a narrow sense) be acting democratically, but they are storing up the kind of trouble for the future (as has happened in Northern Ireland) that can make democracy unworkable.
Socialists must always remind themselves that economic planning will never by itself create a more fraternal society. Simple arithmetical equality could conceivably create even fiercer competitiveness. We must not oversociologize. Social conditions can help or hinder but they cannot guarantee more fraternity, nor, fortunately, always destroy it – as men on strike in hard times show us. Fraternity is an ethic that can grow if believed in freely and practised. It goes with simplicity, lack of ostentation, friendliness, helpfulness, kindliness, openness, lack of restraint between individuals in everyday life and a willingness to work together in common tasks. It doesn’t only go with fierce memories of the trials and struggles of a movement’s early days or with the happy unison of party meetings.
Yet fraternity does not mean no leadership: it only means no permanent class of leaders tomorrow and no noblesse oblige today – no condescension, no giving favours; but rather, leaders receiving trust on account of peculiar skills of both empathy and action which are being used for common and popularly decided purposes. Fraternity does mean creating by public policy, as well as by individual example, common purposes and cooperation both in working life and in leisure. A fraternal society would be one in which there was far more popular participation in all decision-making. Fraternity is frustrated by gross inequalities of income and by the acquired and encouraged acquisitiveness of capitalism: ‘the rage for the accumulation of things’, as Orwell once remarked, a rage that is obviously never satisfied and which thinks that it only can be satisfied by the exclusion of others.
Nor is fraternity, like the socialist views of positive freedom, necessarily incompatible with individualism, unless brothers simply push too hard – this needs to be said for it worries so many people. If, of course, one builds into the concept of an ‘individual’ all that Professor Hayek does in his Road to Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laissez-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance. Hayek’s individual will obey the law out of utilitarian self-interest; and that law is not able, though it may rashly try, to change the ‘laws of economics’. But less cluttered, more general and more humane concepts of ‘the individual’ should raise no problems for socialists or others. All we need to say, anthropologically, is that mankind is unique and that one aspect of that uniqueness is that each member of the species is unique; and, philosophically, that every man must be treated as an end in himself never as a means to an end. Having said this, there is no greater reason in principle why human beings should not act with fraternity towards each other rather than with aversion, with cooperativeness rather than with aggression or competition. Both images are induced cultural achievements and owe more to nurture than to nature.
Socialism does, however, have a distinctive modulation of this general view of homo sapiens. Socialists, after all, stress sociability. Some, like Kropotkin and the anarchists, benignly ‘cheat’ by building into their account of human nature a cooperative spirit of ‘mutual aid’, just as some social biologists will picture natural man as ‘red in tooth and claw’. Stressing sociability as a cultural achievement, some socialists go overboard in seeing social classes as more real than individuals; so that, once again, true individualism can only exist after that mythic, almost eschatological event, the Revolution. There is no need to go that far. Some suggest, for instance, that it is better to talk of individual human identity rather than conservative ‘character’, Marxist ‘class identity’ or Rousseauistic ‘personality’. Many people today take for granted that the main object of ‘a liberal education’ and of personal life is to develop something called ‘personality’. ‘Personality’ implies that I am myself at my best when I am performing spontaneous, unique and ‘authentic’ acts all over the place. Many libertarian Socialists hold this view, but it is a view hard to reconcile with the socialist stress on sociability and cooperation: ‘personalities’ are very good when challenging established conventions, they are less helpful in creating new conventions of social justice and in working together.
My ‘identity’, however, implies something both individual and social. It is individual because it is uniquely mine, but what it actually consists of is a series of mutual recognitions with other people in a social context.14
It is no use my believing that I have a true but suppressed personality unless I can show some signs of it recognizable and tolerable to other people. And you cannot expect me to take your personal attributes seriously unless they are presented in terms recognizable and tolerable to me. Individualism must be limited by deliberate sociability. Yet sociability is a wider concept than social class. Class in a class society is inevitably a very important part of my identity but it can never be a sufficient account of my individual identity, just as the theory of social class works quite well with aggregate predictions, but is useless to explain ‘the exceptions’ of individual behaviour, which are often so crucial. Individuals should by collective action cultivate fraternity with tolerance as they move towards an egalitarian society.
That what tempts some socialists into authoritarian attitudes and commonly allows even democratic socialist movements to be misrepresented as authoritarian is the lack of a sense of time-scales and of theories of incremental progress.
Politics is a process fully compatible with what could prove to be, in the end, a revolutionary society. The application of socialist values would indeed be revolutionary in contrast to any form of government that exists at the moment, though some base-camps are better prepared than others. But it should be obvious, from history, sociological knowledge and commonsense, that such a transformation cannot occur overnight. When an evolutionary revolution is attempted in countries with long established representative institutions, many conventions are a brake upon progress: but the price of trying to ignore such brakes, experience suggests, is simply too great. When a revolution (as an event) occurs in countries which have not had such a tradition, it is desperately difficult for those in power to see the need to create genuine representative institutions if they even appear to impede the speed of social advance. But such is life, or rather society. All I argue is that in neither condition is democratic socialism impossible. Perhaps some Marxists in both kinds of circumstance truly believe that liberty fatally obstructs progress and that parliamentary institutions are incompatible with socialism; but the Russian leaders’ reaction to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and to Poland in 1981 did not follow from such theoretical considerations: theirs was the sadly normal reaction of autocracy faced by popular challenge. In the Soviet Union it is quite clear that liberty has not been consciously and momentarily sacrificed for equality; on the contrary, and from the very beginning, Communist government suppressed criticism of all kinds. Without liberty the popular demand for equality has withered away into a new kind of social stratification based upon party membership and office-holding, largely determined by competitive examination and interview.
Any consideration of the time-scales involved in industrialization in Western Europe, or of the bad consequences of an imposed, rapid industrialism from the top, whether on the Stalinist model in Russia or on the Meiji model in Japan, must convince socialists and their opponents alike that the enterprise is a long one. Even after violent revolutions, old attitudes survive to an astonishing extent; it is as misleading to underestimate the changes in post-revolutionary Russia as it is to ignore continuities. And from a base-camp established amid representative or parliamentary institutions, the time needed for the establishment of a socialist society may appear desperately long. But the built-in political necessity of socialist governments having to carry with them an enfranchised public opinion, as well as an already organized trade-union movement, guarantees that each move of the camp further and further up the mountain will be on solid ground, less likely to slip backwards or simply to get stuck.
The rhetoric of socialist politicians, particularly when the Left-wing struggles for control of a party and a movement against the Right, invariably promises more than is possible in a brief time: the ‘life of the next Labour Government’, even wildly absurd claims about bringing in ‘fundamental and irreversible socialist legislation’ in ‘the first session’ of a new Parliament. Even if they could, the results would be disastrous: great changes can only come in stages.
Do people believe such rhetoric? Most of it is for internal party consumption. Rhetoric is both the curse and the joy of politics. The press are perhaps ungenerous to take rhetoric too seriously, and to imply so wickedly that politicians will do as they say. Journalists are not philosophers. But serious socialist leaders should not promise more than they can fulfil in the short term. The short term is the period of building a base and support for social change. Short-term legislative measures must respond to immediate problems and be popular or at least widely acceptable in the country at large (especially if they need a response in the behaviour of working people to work at all, as so much economic and social legislation does). But short-term measures should be consistent with middle-term theories about how to achieve long-term goals, such as an egalitarian society; or at the very least, amid the often desperate contingencies of politics and economic events, not inconsistent with those goals.
The middle period is the period of trying to change attitudes and values, by persuasion or by the removal of institutions whose main function is to maintain privilege and social stratification, be it private education, private medicine or the investment policies of banks and pension funds. Even the removal of some of these institutions is unlikely to work in a socialist direction unless it is done gradually, or unless enough people who work in them are at least willing to serve the new system unobstructively. In retrospect it does not seem to have been a very bright idea of Great Britain’s Labour Government of 1945–50 simply to replace the management of so much industry by Civil Servants, without the generation of socialist managers and engineers that was by then the forgotten part of the great vision of Shaw, Wells and the Webbs, the role they cast for the new Polytechnic institutions. Middle-period planning and transition plainly requires at least a generation simply because of the need for changes in attitude; it is not possible in the life of any one or two Parliaments.
Yet amid short-term legislation, middle-period strategies have to be canvassed. People have to be convinced of and made familiar with the new ideas. Educational change has to be undertaken in the short-term programme to provide the personnel and the skills for the strategy of the middle-term structural changes. But such changes and the strategies themselves have to be debated, speculated about, before they can be established. And all the time the long-term values are to be asserted and refined: what will the social differences of the sexes be or the role of cultural minorities in a classless society? A socialist movement needs moral philosophers as well as economists, or rather needs to popularize both modes of discourse in a speculative not a dogmatic spirit. ‘The ethically desirable must be the sociologically possible.’ The bounds of present possibilities can be extended, but only over time and by debate, not edict.
For a socialist movement simply to campaign on long-term values would be absurd. For it simply to campaign on immediate reforms of the present system is not socialist at all (simply desperate patchwork on a worn-out garment). It needs always to campaign on three different levels: (i) short-term tactical reforms within the system to build a basis of popular confidence for advance; (ii) middle-term strategies to change the system; and (iii) long-term persuasion to work a new system in a new spirit. Manifestos would look very different if written in this manner (more socialist and less Chartist). But even if it may be a long time before institutions will exhibit socialist values, socialists can. Part of persuasion is reasoning but part is example.
Government must work through stages, but individuals can simultaneously work amid short-term limitations, plan for middle-term change and speculate on the future, without hypocrisy or self-deceit. Young civil servants or managers are not ‘selling out to the system’ if they implement policies which they think are mistaken, or work within institutions they think to be regressive, so long as their criticisms are made and are heard within or without the workplace. They can help change the climate of expectation and should hope to use their knowledge, and expect to be consulted, in formulating middle-term strategies. Social-workers are not ‘shoring up the system’ if they help people in trouble: they are helping people in trouble. With socialist policies they may be able to tackle problems in better ways, they may have fewer problems, but they must convince not desert their clients. Teachers are not betraying children by following an existing bad syllabus, so long as they use every opportunity they have in the present system to change it or at least to refuse to moralize it. If socialist policies and greater social equality diminish both the feeling of hopelessness and the class labels of learning, however, there may be greater motivation, more learning and less teaching. Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage. But with socialist policies wage differentials may count for less and their skills may be used to better effect. It is not romantic in the least to think that ‘industrial democracy’ could be more efficient than private ownership: it is a serious hypothesis to be tested gradually and assessed in many different ways. Working ‘within the system’, efficiency has to be proved, but in being proved the assumptions of our existing definitions of ‘efficiency’ can be challenged: is capital intensive machinery really less costly than labour intensive processes of work? Someone has to pick up the bill or pay the cost of labour-saving that becomes unemployment.
As well as the classes, there are the sexes. A woman is not necessarily selling the pass to prove herself as good as a man in a man’s world, not unless she rests content with the individual achievement and fails to use her position to try to change the assumptions of that world. Women today are less and less content to work for men in the home, they too work for wages because they need to, or even when middle-class women do not need to, they then work to prove their independence and equality. Expectations of radical change already exist and need but to be built upon. Pressure groups have modified both public policy and public opinion even within our present society. Some women may not have to wait for the classless society to act like equals and to be treated as equals. But equality of the sexes without social equality will be hampered by class differences of opportunity. Progressive middle-class women should beware of imposing their values on working-class women. They campaign, to take an example important for women, to have their babies ‘at home’. Being individualistic, they do not like being bullied and categorized in hospitals; and middle-class women are also, on average, healthy so less at risk outside hospital. But they should not (thinking of time-scales) make a cult of home-birth and imply that other women are unnatural not to do so, until such time as bad housing conditions and poverty no longer make infant mortality so dramatically different between the social classes. But middle-class women should not be ashamed of making differential advances to equality in education and employment, for instance: such example is likely to spread.
Advance must be by ‘small steps’, certainly; but steps if they really are steps should have high rises as well as broad treads, and need to be placed on top of each other, not scattered surrealistically over the landscape as opportunity knocks or according to who holds what Ministry. Nonetheless in both short-term and middle-period planning differential advance can be made. The idea that societies are systems (whether held in Marx’s or Hayek’s form) is a highly abstract one and should not be applied too literally to practice. Every plan must be flexible enough to allow unexpected opportunities to be seized on one part of the line, costly attacks abandoned for the moment at another, so long as there is a general move forward.
Socialist movements in the west have commonly lost confidence in their leaders’ will or ability to move towards a socialist society. The rank-and-file party activists are often grossly unrealistic, often in too much of a hurry (and anything of this kind made in a hurry is not likely to last); but if they are it is at least in part the fault of leaders who are so pragmatic that they both lose sight of and can never talk with conviction about either middle-term restructuring of institutions or long-term attainment of socialist values.
Perhaps this has all fallen between advocacy and defence. But what I would advocate as a socialist has to be defended both against those socialists who are impatient of political means, and sceptics who think that socialism is inherently anti-political or anti-libertarian and that social hierarchy, poverty and mass unemployment is the price that all must pay for the culture and liberties of some. In the long run people will not accept that citizenship can be fully practised other than among equals.
1George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. III (Harmondsworth 1970), p. 114.
2See my ‘Procedural Values’ in Bernard Crick and Derek Heater, Essays on Political Education (Falmer Press 1977).
3See the critique of Berlin, ‘Freedom as Politics’ in my Political Theory and Practice (London 1971).
4The last words of the Epilogue to the last edition of R. H. Tawney, Equality, 4th edn. (London 1952).
5Bronislaw Malinowski, Freedom & Civilization (London 1947), pp. 59 and 65.
6For example, Sir Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumption, Equality (London 1979).
7For example, Roger Scruton, The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (Manchester 1981).
8R. H. Tawney, Equality, 4th edn. (London 1952), p. 57.
9R. H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition (London 1954), p. 101, quoted by Christopher Hampton, Socialism in a Crippled World (Harmondsworth 1981), an eloquent protest against the separation of the cultural from the political.
10See Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living (Harmondsworth 1979).
11See the ‘Black Report’, Inequalities of Health: Report of a Research (DHSS London 1980), p. 1.
12See Ted Honderich, Three Essays on Political Violence (Oxford 1977). He takes the figures from Simon Kuznets, ‘The Gap: Concept, Measurement, Trends’, Gustav Ranis, ed., The Gap Between Rich and Poor Nations (London 1972), p. 34. In his Violence for Equality (London 1980), he sternly and easily dismisses most justifications of social violence; but insofar as huge inequalities, always resulting in great differences in life expectancy, are deliberately maintained by any government, then he considers that there is always a residual possibility of justifying violence philosophically. The argument is difficult and esoteric: but Honderich simply points out that governments have a greater opportunity (thus moral duty) to end misery without violence than most revolutionaries have to create justice through violence.
13Quoted in the Introduction to the ‘Black Report’, op. cit.
14I tried, very tentatively, to develop this notion of sociability limiting individualism in my Crime, Rape and Gin: Reflections on Contemporary Attitudes to Violence, Pornography and Addiction (London 1974). Here I paraphrase Kathleen Nott in her The Good Want Power (London 1977): ‘. . . two postulates: (i) that “identity” is a discernible fact; (ii) that becoming aware of it and accepting it as a fact either for oneself or for others entails a principle of mutual recognition’. But I do not think she would like my socialist gloss on her, since her sub-title is ‘An Essay on the Psychological Possibilities of Liberalism’.