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PARTISAN REVIEW
organizations--that "semihuman tiger or
bx,
stalking over the earth,"
Thoreau called it, "with its heart taken out and the top of its brain
shot away"-and the totalitarian state concentrates in itself all the
evil of organization by annihilating all the gaps and rivalries which
make for freedom in a more loosely organized society.
The socialist state is thus worse than the capitalist state because
it is more inclusive in its coverage and more unlimited in its power.
Organization corrupts; total organization corrupts totally. The so–
cialist state justifies itself on the ground that the concentration of
power is necessary to do good; but it has never solved the problem
of how you insure that power bestowed to do good will not be em–
ployed to do harm, especially when you remove all obstacles to its
exercise. Soviet socialism has the added disadvantage that it was born
in violence. The emotions of revolution in an industrial age can no
more be localized than the emotions of modern war itself. Violence
breeds its special hatreds and aggressions, which twist the normal
hatreds of society into new and ugly forms. The habit of violence
is hard to abandon, especially when it has worked in the past. A rev–
olutionary elite always has the wistful conviction, based on experience,
that it is easier to dispose of opposition by firing squads than by
arguments.
The trouble with anarchism is, not at all that it is wrong, but
that it is irrelevant. It may have its values as a mystique, but it is
nonsense as a way of meeting the explosive problems of an atomic
age. Its overt expressions, such as conscientious objection
in
times
of war, tend to be morally vulgar and intellectually contemptible.
Industrial organization and the postindustrial state are here to stay.
The problem is not how to escape them but how to master them–
or, more probably, how to live with them.
Is DemocrtLtic Socialism Possible?
Neither Communism, with its despotism, nor capitalism, with
its instability, nor fascism, with its combination of the two, provide
attractive solutions to the problem of how to live with modern indus–
try and the modern state. Is there another possibility? Has non-Com–
munist, libertarian socialism a future? Abstracting the question for a
moment from current political actualities, one must answer that there
is no inherent reason why democratic socialism should not be pos–
sible.
If
socialism (i.e., the ownership by the state of all significant
means of production ) is to preserve democracy, it must be brought
