The Future of Socialism
SIDNEY HOOK
(EDITOR's
NoTE:
This article is the first in a series on "The Future
of Socialism." Among the other contributors to this symposium will be
]ames Burnham, Granville Hicks, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell,
Arthur Schlesinger, ]r., Victor Serge, and others to be announced.
The editorial statement printed below was sent to the contributors to
serve as a basis for discussion.)
Historical experience since
1917
has put the entire socialist per–
spective into question. For nearly a century this perspective has pro–
vided both an optimistic view of history and confidence in the possi–
bility of establishing a rational human order. At the present time,
however, it has become so problematical that it can no longer serve
the Left as the basis for its political life.
The Russian Revolution has not only failed to realize the hopes
invested in it, but has actually produced a totalitarian system with a
dynamism of its own that throttles the development of socialist thought
and democratic socialist movements. The working class has so far
failed to fulfill the historic mission so often proclaimed for it by th ,
theoreticians of Marxism. Both in Nazi Germany and in Russia, to
cite the extreme examples, the workers showed themselves so little
capable of controlling their political fate that far from achieving
socialism they actually have been reduced to a virtual state of enslave–
ment; and in relatively free countries like France, post-Fascist Italy,
and the United States, the masses, insofar as they have been radical–
ized, have not been able to distinguish between true socialism and its
Stalinist perversion. At the same time, despite the lessons of two
world wars, nationalism still persists as a myth, dominating the mind
of the masses and preventing the emergence of a truly internationalist
consciousness.
As a result, the Left has fallen into a state of intellectual disori–
entation and political impotence. Many intellectuals have abandoned
socialism altogether, asserting that freedom is compatible only with
the economic structure of capitalism. Others have embraced some kind
of Machiavellian theory of history, according to which the future can-
