Irving Howe
THINKING ABOUT SOCIALISM
Anyone writing a comprehensive study of modern social–
ism would have to put a heavy stress on the enormous damage that
Stalinism has done to the socialist hope. Insofar as both right- and
left-wing ideologues have found it convenient to identify the Russian
state-party dictatorship with socialism, they have joined to discredit
the entire socialist idea, since no humane person could want a
"socialism" resembling either the Stalinist terror or the thuggish
regimes that have come after it. What has followed from this iden–
tification has been an abandonment of radical politics, utopian vi–
sions, and often enough, any kind of politics.
Even before the rise of Stalinism there had become visible a
deep crisis of socialist thought and practice, but with Stalinism that
crisis became more acute, so that for the past several decades the
socialist experience has often entailed a dislodgment of received per–
suasions, a melting-down of ideological structures, a search for new
-or for cleansed and reaffirmed old- values that might again bring
some moral luster to the cause. For the socialists themselves this was
often a valuable, indeed, chastening experience; but for their move–
ment it brought grave difficulties. Introspection seldom makes for
public effectiveness.
It became customary for socialists of, for example, my genera–
tion to speak of their beliefs through what I'd call hygienic negatives:
"We don't mean any sort of party-state dictatorship- the very thought
appalls us . We don't mean the complete nationalization of industry;
we want instead a democratization of ownership and control, or 'so–
cialization."'
After a time such responses came to be almost instinctive, with
some of them constituting a deviation from previously-held premises
and thereby a self-criticism. Serious socialists would describe the
cooperative commonwealth in terms of its envisaged
qualities-
so–
cial, moral, esthetic. They would speak of sentiments of freedom, at–
titudes of fraternity, sometimes priorities of social allocation. They
would propose to reaffirm socialism in the realm of values whereas,
to simplify a little, the tradition in which a good many older
Editor's Note: This is excerpted from
Thinking about Socialism,
a work in progress.
