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Alan's message contains much to think about. I
think, however, he glosses over the failure of the USSR in a way that obscures
constructive thought. Before I make my point, I feel compelled to state my
general political economic position in a few words, lest I be dismissed as just
another Wall Street Journal reader. I am no fan of capitalism and the free
market. Some of my work (the part I like best) is an offshoot of Amin's concepts
of disarticulation, and I have no doubt that capitalism is riven by
contradictions that systematically impede collective (public) rationality and
welfare. I am personally committed to finding some form of political economic
order that could best be described as democratic socialism.
With that preface, here is the problem. It is
not just that the USSR that slid into despotism. EVERY effort I know of to
institute a collectively rational economic system has also done so, which
suggests that there are immanent and perhaps intrinsic flaws we have not
sufficiently conceptualized. People on the list will be inclined to cite
Cuba as a contrary example, and I know there are others that could be put
forward, but absolutely none are unequivocal examples of both democracy and
socialism. An accurate critique of the flaws of capitalism, which I
believe has been made from a variety of neo-Marxian angles, does not necessarily
provide a positive philosophy of equal power.
This is especially problematic because I
personally believe that the two great experiments in socialism, the USSR and
China, began with exactly the attitudes and ambitions we all would approve....
genuinely democratic and populist ideals. Lenin (and even Stalin, perhaps)
and Mao, as well as their key followers, envisioned creating societies that
would fulfill Marx's hopes for the future, but something happened along the
way. The failures can not be written off to character deficits of the
revolutionary leaders. Some argue that socialism can't happen piecemeal
and that the capitalism world system perverted these hopeful beginnings, but
this is a weak argument. I fear that the flaw is more fundamental.....
socialism (collective rationality) requires giving planners a degree of power
that may be inherently contradictory to democratic (or even populist)
principles. I hope not, because the only alternative is to patch together
some form of redistributive capitalism that will remain immensely wasteful of
human and material resources, albeit perhaps more humane and open than the kind
of capitalism currently found in the USA.
In short, I feel we need to begin with the
premise that the socialist dream is flawed, try to understand the flaw, and then
look for an answer. Rationalizing the collapse of every socialist
experiment as somehow "not counting" will get us nowhere. This
critique has to be made from within, and not by people who are convinced that
Adam Smith had it right.
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