THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
29
freedom of the Bill of Rights and security becomes slavery, vocation
forced labor, privacy concealment, the family a hutch for mass breed–
ing, the school an outpost of the state, social intelligence a technique
of rationalization, art and literacy weapons to impose conformity, the
person a subject.
As
I have already indicated, I believe that democracy can best
be realized through a socialist economy broadly conceived to include
voluntary co-operatives and certain sectors of free enterprise. Insofar
as hunger, insecurity, and gross inequalities in opportunity and living
conditions are foes of freedom, I am also convinced that democracy
can best be
defended
against the danger of totalitarianism by socialist
measures. But I do not believe that these relationships can be made
credible to those who confuse socialism with Stalinism, or immediately
persuasive to principled democrats who are unsure about the detailed
economic system necessary to strengthen democracy
in the limited
time that remains for men to decide whether the world is to become
a union of democratic states or one totalitarian world order.
And since
I am first a democrat and then a socialist-in the sense that I am
more profoundly convinced of the validity of the democratic ideals
than of any specific way of achieving them-I believe in consequence
that our main emphasis must fall upon the ideals and practices of
political democracy and those measures of socialization and social con–
trol that are easily derivable from it. This means a theory of piecemeal
socialism through the democratic process. The growth of a socialist
economy never was, and certainly is not now, a matter of economic
law but of political decision based upon the verifiable relations between
social organization, human values, and the needs and interests at
their root.
In this defense of democracy and its extension we should be
willing to accept allies from any group or class. But I confess to a
certain ,skepticism concerning the reliability of organized capitalist
groups in the struggle for democracy, and its enrichment. Although
the Leninist theory that fascism is the dictatorship of finance capital
is demonstrably false, we cannot blind ourselves to the actual help
the capitalists of Germany, Italy, and other countries, including our
own, gave to the forces of fascism. Some capitalists undoubtedly
wished that Lenin's theory of the nature of fascism were true. But it
turned out otherwise. In the nature of the case those for whom capi–
talism, either as a system of free enterprise or monopoly control, is
more important than the preservation of a democratic culture, cannot
always pool their own best interests together. The
class
capitalist
