Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 11:13:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Spring '92 Science and Society editorial dissent


The collection of essays in this issue, offered as models for a revived
socialism, calls for a public disclaimer on the part of a group of our
editors. While we recognize differences among these essays, and the value of
some of their arguments, we still believe that three of the pieces are
disfigured by a naive utopianism and a tendency (in places disguised with
pro forma references) to minimize what has happened recently in almost all
the "existing socialist" nations. Their common failure is not to take the
collapse of that socialism seriously enough.

One model offers "participatory planning" [Albert-Hahnel] as a feasible
substitute for the undeniable collectivism of the Marxian tradition. The
method chosen is a blithe utopianism brewed out of wholly imaginary
ingredients. Another perhaps more reasonable form of utopianism is to be
found in the attempt to pull together selected features of various societies
--U.S.-occupied Japan after World War II, Yugoslavia's "self-management,"
and Spanish regional reformism-- to build a model of "market socialism."
[Schweickart] If this model differs in significant ways from the utopianism
Marx and Engels attacked, we fail, especially in this present world of grim
power-politics, to see such difference.

Perhaps more ingenious, but hardly any more convincing, is the attempt to
stitch together those practices in Soviet planning deemed still viable to
provide a model for a new mixed socialism. [Laibman] But what sort of
Marxist inquiry is this that places once-tried planning techniques in some
ideal realm above history, ready to be taken up from the shelf, dusted off,
and started up again? By whom? Under what circumstances? The historical and
political contexts in which they have been already rejected, and the
presumed new political and ethical configuration in which they are to be
revived, are both ignored.

To set forth blueprints for a future socialism, especially at this time is
to mock what is sound and viable in Marxist social science. In an 1843
letter to Arnold Ruge Marx warned:

"Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for
all time, all the more surely, what we contemporaries have to do is the
uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the
sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with
the powers that be."

To avoid that "uncompromisingly critical evaluation" of what now exists and
is changing before our very eyes, is an evasion of the primary challenge
confronting all Marxists today. Anyone who envisions a socialist revival
must look steadily at the manifest profound failure of existing socialist
societies. That is the only real vantage point from which to consider how
any new socialism can be built. Unfortunately, three of the papers in this
issue, earnest as they may be, attempt to frame the problem of socialist
reconstruction or renewal without any such consistent perspective....

Foremost in any cogent discussion of socialist renewal must be questions of
historic and geographical agency. Who will chose among the possibly still
viable options? Who will reach for elements of a socialist future never
before tried -- but still within, nor outside of, a real world? At what
sites? For the inquiry to proceed in a Marxist manner, the agents of any
prospective socialist renewal, and their class relations, must be admitted
to a prominent place in the analysis. Will they come from the working
classes of the formerly socialist countries when they realize, probably
through bitter experience, that the Marxism once hastily discarded still
provides a key to understanding the structures of post-1989 oppression? How
will the temporary deradicalized working classes shed their illusions of
born-again capitalism? What role will be played by intellectuals, who too
often in existing socialist societies allowed the vital tenets of Marxism to
degenerate into ritual formulae, used for gaining and keeping privileges?

In thought as well as in action the revival of socialism and attempt to
rebuild socialist movements must squarely face the immense, if, hopefully,
temporary, defeat suffered by all socialists in this post-1989 period of
shocks, surprises, strange turns and sobering realities. Whatever other
contributing causes there were, the main responsibility for the collapse and
defeat of socialism must rest on socialists themselves --especially the
socialist leaders and administrators and their apologists. The brutality,
the callousness, the denial of elementary human rights and decency in
socialist countries cannot be ignored or minimized. We must not palliate the
crimes committed in the name of socialism by dwelling on the likelihood that
there have been worse crimes committed over a far longer period and against
many more people in the name of capitalism. Worse still would be the attempt
to de-emphasize socialist crimes by highlighting socialism's genuine
achievements while ignoring the context which negated them. If socialism is
to be rebuilt masses of people will have to come to the conviction of the
necessity and possibility of doing so. Intellectuals have a small but
honorable role to play in integrating in theory and practice an
understanding of past crimes, while they work toward laying the foundations
of a just socialist world. This is no time to draw blueprints for castles in
the air.




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