RALF DAHRENDORF
509
economic planning, a majority in parliament, the creed of social service and
the illusion of "makeability." But (you will point out immediately) is this not
conflating two different things? There is socialism in
its
Communist version -
which collapsed dramatically in 1989 when country after country took the
word out of its official description ("Socialist Republic of ... "), and parties like
your own and those of Hungary and even of Italy sought a less offensive
label- and there is Social Democracy, which if it died at all "perished in the
dark" (thus Lord Selborne during the debate on the Parliament Act in 1911),
unnoticed by many, because to all intents and purposes it is still very much
around. Many other socialisms have cropped up in the last century and a half,
but Communism (which has also been described as "really existing socialism"
while it really existed) and Social Democracy (sometimes called,
pour epater
les bourgeois,
"democratic socialism") are the only two of any historical
weight. Their story needs to be told , however briefly, in order to sort out
what it means to speak of the strange death of socialism in the 1980s.
I suppose it
all
started in post-Napoleonic Europe, or more to the point,
in the second phase of the industrial era, notably in England and France.
Thoughtful people - bourgeois, no doubt - were upset by the plight of the
laboring classes and began to think of remedies. These had certain ingredi–
ents in common. One was that there was something wrong with the way in
which private property had come to be used; to redress such wrongs, prop–
erty had to be "socialized" in one way or another. Another feature was that
people's positions in society had become altogether too unequal; variants of
egalitarianism accompanied socialism from its earliest days. The notion that
things could, and had, to be done by deliberate planning rather than left to
their own resources, to the "market," follows naturally. The cool rationality
of such analyses was invariably coupled with more intangible and emotional
hopes for a different way ofiiving together, a sense of brotherly love, a de–
sire to break the vicious cash nexus by voluntary cooperation, and the spirit
of solidarity. An alliance of intellectuals and the working class turned this mix
into the vision of an altogether different world - Henri de Saint-Simon's
"New Christianity," Robert Owen's "New Society. " Moreover, the new
world had to be fought for by organizing either islands of a better future or
movements to transform the present.
Marx did not like these notions of the Saint-Simons and Owens, Cabets
and Fouriers, Proudhons and Weitlings. He scorned the attempt to confront
the miseries of the present with alternatives which were mere "phantasies."
Instead, he invoked the inexorable march of History with a capital
H.
The
New Society was not a desirable prospect but the necessary outcome of the
contradictions and conflicts of bourgeois capitalism. This is where the notion of
systems crept into socialism and allied itselfwith the Utopian vision which had
been there all along. It does not matter what people want or visualize for
themselves - indeed, people do not matter - for they merely execute the will
