CLEARING DECKS

My definition agrees with all the others.

It turns on an exclusively economic point.

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation—the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society.

1. With reference to socialism, neither for us, the observers, nor for the people that are to put their trust in socialism, is the economic aspect the only or even the most important one.

Socialists stress the economic element because of the causative importance their creed attributes to it.

They do not mean to suggest that nothing is worth struggling for except beefsteaks and radios. There are indeed insufferable stick-in-the-muds who mean precisely that And many who are not stick-in-the-muds will nevertheless, in the hunt for votes, emphasize the economic promise because of its immediate appeal. In doing so they distort and degrade their creed. We will not do the same. Instead we will keep in mind that socialism aims at higher goals than full bellies, exactly as Christianity means more than the somewhat hedonistic values of heaven and hell.

1. Socialism means a new cultural world. For the sake of it, one might conceivably be a fervent socialist even though believing that the socialist arrangement is likely to be inferior as to economic performance. 2 Hence no merely economic argument for or against can ever be decisive, however successful in itself.

2. What cultural world? We might try to answer this question by surveying the actual professions of accredited socialists in order to see whether a type emerges from them. At first sight, the material seems to be abundant.

Some socialists are ready enough, with folded hands and the smile of the blessed on their lips, to chant the canticle of justice, equality, freedom in general and freedom from “the exploitation of man by man” in particular, of peace and love, of fetters broken and cultural energies unchained, of new horizons opened, of new dignities revealed. But that is Rousseau adulterated with some Bentham. Others simply voice the interests and appetites of the radical wing of trade unionism. Still others, however, are remarkably reticent. Because they despise cheap slogans but cannot think of anything else? Because, though they do think of something else, they doubt its popular appeal? Because they know that they differ hopelessly with their comrades? So we cannot proceed on this line. Instead we have to face what I shall refer to as the Cultural Indeterminateness of Socialism. In fact, according to our definition as well as to most others, a society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be organized in the most democratic of all possible ways; it may be aristocratic or proletarian; it may be a theocracy and hierarchic or atheist or indifferent as to religion; it may be much more strictly disciplined than men are in a modern army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or only of the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite;

it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; 3 its forms of life individualistic or standardized; and—what for some of us would by itself suffice to command our allegiance or to arouse our contempt—it may breed from its supernormal or from its subnormal stock and produce supermen or submen accordingly.

Why is this so? Well, the reader may have his choice. He may say either that Marx is wrong and that the economic pattern does not determine a civilization or else that the complete economic pattern would determine it but that, without the aid of further economic data and assumptions, the element that constitutes socialism in our sense does not. We should not have fared any better with capitalism, by the way, had we tried to reconstruct its cultural world from nothing but the facts embodied in our definition of it. We have in this case no doubt an impression of determinateness and find it possible to reason on tendencies in capitalist civilization. But this is only because we have a historic reality before us that supplies us with all the additional data we need and via facti excludes an infinite number of possibilities.

We have, however, used the word determinateness in a rather strict and technical sense and, moreover, with reference to a whole cultural world. Indeterminateness in this sense is no absolute bar to attempts at discovering certain features or tendencies that the socialist arrangement as such may be more likely to produce than others, especially features of, and tendencies in, particular spots of the cultural organism.

Nor is it impossible to frame reasonable additional assumptions. This much is obvious from the above survey of possibilities. If, for instance, we believe as many socialists do—wrongly, as I think—that wars are nothing but one of the forms of the conflict of capitalist interests, it readily follows that socialism would be pacifist and not warlike.

Or if we assume that socialism evolves along with, and is inseparable from, a certain type of rationalism we shall conclude that it is likely to be irreligious if not anti-religious. We shall ourselves try our hand at this game here and there, although in the main we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.

But all this does not do away with the fact that socialism is indeed a cultural Proteus and that its cultural possibilities can be made more definite only if we resign ourselves to speaking of special cases within the socialist genus—each of which to be sure will be the only true one for the man who stands for it but any one of which may be in store for us.