Suchergebnisse

Lecture delivered at Rutgers university, New Brunswick, N.J., Mar. 18, 1957.

During the past two hundred years students of public affairs have been stimulated to an exceptional degree by the very evident radical transformation of life in human societies. Some have observed, named, and analysed the changes in material goods, building up an impressive structure of economic science and culminating in the popular controversy over capitalism and socialism. Others have investigated man's cultural development, though with less success in naming the elements being studied or in defining the units of measurement or valuation, but reaching a general climax of opposing nationalism to cosmopolitanism. The greatest number of observers, however, have been concerned with political changes, for if politics is not truly the queen of sciences, it has at least been thought to be so from antiquity on. Whether the subject is more difficult than others or whether too many have rushed in without appropriate training or adequate consideration of the subject-matter, it must be admitted that the heavy hand of tradition has lain heavier on political analysis than on other fields of knowledge. Students of politics have continued to use the historic names of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, discussing constitutionalism (polity, the old composite form) in Greek terms with modern instances such as checks and balances, separation of powers, fundamental law, etc. In popular controversy, however, the line of dispute has been drawn between democracy and dictatorship, which are also concepts derived from antiquity.

Translated from the Bolshevik, Sept. 15, 1947.

Socialist thought has long contained two potentially contradictory doctrines concerning the control or management of productive enterprises under a socialist régime. One of these is the idea of workers' control: the concept that under socialism workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but, direct participants in the control of productive enterprises. The other is the idea of central control on behalf of the entire community: the concept that socialism will replace "the anarchy of production" under capitalism with a central determination of the appropriate goals of economic activity. That there is possibiUty of conflict between these two objectives is self-evident. The decentralization of economic administration implied by workers' control may easily contradict the desire for centralization of certain kinds of economic decisions. Conceivably, one goal or the other might have to be abandoned, or at least seriously modified.Today, for the first time in any major industrial nation, a socialist party pledged to the maintenance of democratic institutions is undertaking the task of building socialism. The achievements of the British Labor party may well determine the future goals and techniques of democratic socialists elsewhere. It is not inconceivable that success or failure of the British experiment will determine the path that Western Europe will follow. It is noteworthy, then, that during the last decade the Labor party has abandoned the goal of workers' control; in its current program of nationalization, it is making no provision for direct control of production by workers. This modification of socialist objectives, representing a swing away from the syndicalist content of socialist thinking in the direction of Fabian ideas, was achieved only after the entire socialist movement and the Labor party itself underwent the test of a protracted internal struggle, both of an intellectual and of a practical kind.