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3 Socialism Today

      It is difficult to speak about socialism today: socialism is a key word for hundreds of millions of people and, at the same time, formidably equivocal in our economic and political language. Does “socialism” designate the program of Western socialist parties, or the authoritarian stage of Eastern communism before the withering away of the State? Does it refer to the vague demands of the Left just about everywhere in the world? In India, in Guinea? And how does it differ from neo-capitalism? Is it the doctrine of the “Founding Fathers” or the actual experience described on the ground? How are we to avoid stitching together a reformist practice and a revolutionary phraseology? We might then be tempted to give up this term on the pretext that it is out of date, that it is part of the Left’s logomachy, or that, under its cover, we are only rehashing worn out analyses. But then the danger is that we are “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” the kernel of hope with the chaff of words. How can we retain the aim and renew the analyses? My task is to rediscover these enduring aims. André Philip’s task will be to recalibrate the new analysis in line with the fundamental intention of socialism.¹

The Economic Level: Planning

I will begin by defining an initial, purely economic, level of socialism. By socialism, we understand the passage from a market economy to a planned economy, subordinated to human needs and accompanied by a transfer of ownership of the means of production to collective or public entities.

      This definition contains three aspects: it is their union that allows us to speak of socialism.

      1. By market economy is to be understood an economy in which the regulation of production and consumption occurs on the basis of profit and financially solvent need. A planned economy is one in which economic decision-making no longer depends, in the final analysis, on the ownership of goods but belongs to instruments of common interest, an economy in which the fundamental motive is the maximum satisfaction of actual needs, following an order of urgency. From this angle, socialism marks the conquest of the economy by rationality, by the very rationality that first operated in technology and in science. In the regime of planning, economic reality is “constructed,” as it were, by forecasts and decisions.

      When can we speak of socialist planning?

      The question is not as straightforward as it may seem. The concern with rationality has existed and still exists outside of socialism: post-war Keynesian interventionism did not challenge the private ownership of the means of production but only advocated rational adjustment of State interventions (monetary policy to encourage expansion, the prudent growth of public investment, the redistribution of revenue, etc.). Between this interventionism and socialism properly speaking, there is an entire range of forms of economic regulation, characterized by diverse efforts to rectify the most damaging effects of the capitalist economy based on national financial data. Among this vast range, there are all sorts of therapeutic interventions, functional plans, limited forms of planning, respectful of the structures and institutions of the capitalist system; some concern only categories of goods, others, areas of activity. The forecast then concerns the various means of balancing the economy which are possible on the basis of diverse political choices. In this way, planning can coincide with an economy that could still globally be called a market economy. In these systems, which are mixtures of injunctions and spontaneous economic activity, basic needs are no longer satisfied on the basis of solvency; the motive of social utility wins out over the profit motive. Profit can itself undergo partial socialization in the form of a reapportionment of profits or by means of fiscal policies, or finally through social programs.

The danger of these mixed economies is their incoherence. Two forms of logic vie for dominance: the logic of collective advantage and the logic of the advantages of private individuals. Public enterprises lean toward imitating private corporations and pursuing, as they do, private sector ends. Moreover, if the State is not controlled by workers, but by representatives of the non-nationalized part of the economy, the capitalist mentality will continue to be expressed, even in the heart of the public sector. Finally, there is the fear that when planning has been stripped of its social aim, it will simply be a means in the service of a purely cybernetic guidance of the economy, a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion, foreign to any concern for real human beings. This is why a second feature has to be added to the simple definition in terms of economic rationality.

      2. The second feature is the reference of the economic project to human need. This requires us to speak of a change in structure and in mentality and not simply of a change in function; a global strategic vision of economic action replaces the standpoint and the interests of small economic units. A clear vision of global priorities and decisions concerning human beings dominates the economic project. Thus, already on this level, the humanist aspect of socialism is announced, something we will return to in conclusion. The macro-decisions of the planners necessarily have an ethical character: whether to favor cultural goods over material goods, consumption over investment, etc. So many questions that fundamentally concern the fate of human beings.

3. Third feature: the collective appropriation of the means of production. This was the main point in the eyes of the founders of socialism. Why this change? Why is it that the collective appropriation of the means of production that previously was a goal is today no more than a means? Socialism’s founders spoke of a theory of alienation, centered on the idea of the direct exploitation of labor by the owner of capital (the Marxist theory of surplus-value is the best example of this theory of alienation). Property thus appeared as the immediate means of the expropriation of the laborer, deprived of the product of his work. Appropriating the means of production immediately appeared as an expropriation. In this way, the most proximate aim of socialism was the expropriation of the expropriators: property is theft, Proudhon said. Today we are less sensitive to the direct effects of the right to property, to the immediate consequences of the legal status of the ownership of the means of production: the emphasis has shifted to the influences of ownership on the power of decision-making. In this respect, property appears to be an obstacle in two ways: it is first an obstacle to governance in the general interest. The irrational intervention of profit and financially solvent needs stands in the way of reaching significant and regular rates of expansion. Under this first aspect, property is criticized in terms of a purely technocratic argument as an irrational economic phenomenon. On the other hand, property is responsible for distorting planning, moving it in the direction of a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion. This second argument has a more humanistic bent than the former one: property is an impediment to bringing out the properly socialist motive of the maximum satisfaction of human needs. But in both forms of the argument, property appears less as an instrument of direct exploitation than as an obstacle to the rationality of the plan and to the prevalence of the human motive over the technocratic motive.

      Such is the appearance of socialism to us from this first perspective. It is the idea that a system driven by the motive of social gain is more rational than one delivered over to the competition of economic units each pursuing its own profit. Socialism then appears as the system that best allows calculating the interest of the community taken as a whole.

The Social and Political Level: Democratic

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