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PRAXIS I N T E R NAT I O NA L

Editors

Richard J. Bernstein

Mihailo Marković

Managing Editor Lucius Outlaw Assistant Managing Editor

Editorial Secretary Shirley J. Averill

Edwin GofT

Editorial Board Andrew Arato, Shlomo Avineri, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard J. Bernstein, Norman Birnbaum, Tom Bottomore, Reginaldo di Piero, Franco Ferrarotti, Iring Fetscher, Zagorka Golubovic, Carol Gould, Jiirgen Habermas, Andras Hegediis, Agnes Heller, Ulf Himmelstrand, Joachim Israel, Marcos Kaplan, Karel Kosík, Heinz M Lubasz, Steven Lukes, Michael Lowy, Mihailo Marković, Gyorgy Marius, Ralph Miliband, Stefan Morawski, Oskar Negt, H. Odera Oruka, Jean-Michel Palmh r, Gunnar Skirbekk, Svetozar Stojanovic, Rudi Supek, Ljubomir Tadic, Charles Taylor, Edward P. Thompson, Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, Marx Wartofsky, Albrecht Wellmer, Kurt Wolff. Subscriptions

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Institutions £26 £32 $65 $74 Praxis International is published quarterly, in April, July, October and January, by Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, England. Uiited States Mailing Agent, Expediters of the Printed Word Ltd., 527 Madison Avenue, Suite 1217, New York, N.Y. 10022, U.S.A. Second class postage paid at New York. Orders, remittances and subscription enquiries should be addressed to the publishei. Praxis International offers below-cost or free subscriptions to individuals who are unable to pay standard rates. Application for these subscriptions should be made directly to the Editors. Praxis International welcomes unsolicited manuscripts in English, German or French. The maximum length of manuscripts is 6000 words or 20 double-spaced :yped pages. Two copies of the manuscript should be submitted, one copy sent to Richard J. Bernstein and one copy to Mihailo Markovic. Manuscripts will be returned only if sufficient postage (or international coupons) is sent with the manuscripts. The twelfth, revised edition of the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style is the authority on matters of style. Contributors are requested to follow the Manual or a recent issae of Praxis International in preparing their manuscripts. Richard J. Bernstein Haverford College Haverford, PA 19041 U.S.A. © 1981 Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd.

Mihailo Marković Vladete KovaCevića 12 11040 Belgrade YUGOSLAVIA ISSN 0260-8448

CONTENTS THE CRISIS OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY Claus Offe, Some Contradictions of the Modern Welfare State

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Johannes Berger, Changing Crises-Types in Western Societies

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György Markus, Planning the Crisis: Remarks on the Economic System of Soviet- Type Societies

240

Mimmo Carrieri and Lucio Lombardo Radice Italy Today: A Crisis of a New Type of Democracy

258

Article Nancy Fraser, Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions

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Critical Reviews Marx Wartofsky, The Unhappy Consciousness: Leszek Kolakowski‘s Main Currents of Marxism

288

Alain Brossart Un retour à Marx contre le „marxisme“ des fonctionaires

307

Abstracts

317

Notes on Contributors

Inside back cover

ERRATA Volume 1 No 1 April 1981 Ljubomir Tadić Sozialismus und Emanzipation The following errors should be noted in this article: page 64, paragraph 1: the last three lines of the paragraph should read Zivilisation und Kultur die allseitige Entwicklung der Personlichkeit bewirken, jener Beziehungen, innerhalb derer die “freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung für die freie Entwicklung aller ist“. page 64, line 8 from the bottom: for zugestanden read anerkannt

SOME CONTRADICTIONS OF THE MODERN WELFARE STATE Claus Offe The welfare state has served as the major peace formula of advanced capitalist democracies for the period following World War II. This peace formula basically consists, first, in the explicit obligation of the state apparatus to provide assistance and support (either in money or in kind) to those citizens who suffer from specific needs and risks which are characteristic of the market society; such assistance is provided as a matter of legal claims granted to the citizens. Second, the welfare state is based on the recognition of the formal role of labour unions both in collective bargaining and the formation of public policy. Both of these structural components of the welfare state are considered to limit and mitigate class conflict, to balance the asymmetrical power relation of labour and capital, and thus to overcome the condition of disruptive struggle and contradictions that was the most prominent feature of pre-welfare-state, or liberal, capitalism. In sum, the welfare state has been celebrated throughout the post-war period as the political solution to societal contradictions. Until quite recently, this seemed to be the converging view of political elites both in countries in which the welfare state is fully developed (e.g., Great Britain, Sweden) as well as in those where it is still an incompletely realized mode!. Political conflict in these latter societies, such as the U.S.A., was not centred on the basic desirability and functional indispensability, but on the pace and modalities, of the implementation of the welfare state model. This was true, with very minor exceptions, up to the mid-seventies. From that point on we see that in many capitalist societies this established peace formula becomes itself the object of doubts, fundamental critique, and political conflict. It appears that the most widely accepted device of political problem-solving has itself become problematic, and that, at any rate, the unquestioning confidence in the welfare state and its future expansion has rapidly vanished. It is to these doubts and criticisms that I will direct our attention. The point to start with is the observation that the almost universally accepted model of creating a measure of social peace and harmony in European post-war societies has itself become the source of new contradictions and political divisions in the seventies. Historically, the welfare state has been the combined outcome of a variety of factors which change in composition from country to country. Social Democratic reformism, Christian socialism, enlightened conservative political and economic elites, and large industrial unions were the most important forces which fought for and conceded more and more comprehensive compulsory insurance schemes, labour protection legislation, minimum wages, the expansion of health and education facilities and state-subsidized housing, as well as the recognition of unions as legitimate economic and political representatives of labour. These continuous developments in Western societies were often dramatically 219

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accelerated in a context of intense social conflict and crisis, particularly under war and post-war conditions. The accomplishments which were won under conditions of war and in post-war periods were regularly maintained, and added to them were the innovations that could be introduced in periods of prosperity and growth. In the light of the Keynesian doctrine of economic policy, the welfare state came to be seen not so much as a burden imposed upon the economy, but as a built-in economic and political stabilizer which could help to regenerate the forces of economic growth and prevent the economy from spiraling downward into deep recessions. Thus, a variety of quite heterogeneous ends (ranging from reactionary pre-emptive strikes against the working class movement in the case of Bismarck to socialist reformism in the case of the Weimar Social Democrats; from the social-political consolidation of war and defense economies to the stabilization of the business cycle, etc.) converged on the adoption of identical institutional means which today make up the welfare state. It is exactly its multi-functional character, its ability to serve many conflicting ends and strategies simultaneously, which made the political arrangement of the welfare state so attractive to a broad alliance of heterogeneous forces. But it is equally true that the very diversity of the forces that inaugurated and supported the welfare state could not be accommodated forever within the institutional framework which today appears to come increasingly under attack. The machinery of class compromise has itself become the object of class conflict. The Attack from the Right The sharp economic recession of the mid-seventies has given rise to an intellectually and politically equally powerful renaissance of neo-laissez faire and monetarist economic doctrines. These doctrines amount to a fundamental critique of the welfare state that is seen to be the illness of which it pretends to be the cure: rather than effectively harmonizing the conflicts of a market society, it exacerbates them and prevents the forces of social peace and progress (namely, the forces of the market place) from functioning properly and beneficially. This is said to be so for two major reasons. First, the welfare state apparatus imposes a burden of taxation and regulation upon capital which amounts to a disincentive to investment. Second, at the same time, the welfare state grants claims, entitlements, and collective power positions to workers and unions which amount to a disincentive to work, or at least to work as hard and productively as they would be forced to under the reign of unfettered market forces. Taken together, these two effects lead into a dynamic of declining growth and increased expectations, of economic “demand overload” (known as inflation) as well as political demand overload (“ungovernability”), which can be satisfied less and less by the available output. As obvious as the reactionary political uses are that this analysis is usually meant to support or suggest, it may well be that the truth of the analysis itself is greater than the desirability of its practical conclusions. Although the democratic Left has often measured the former by the latter, the two deserve at least a separate evaluation. In my view, at least, the above analysis is not so much false in what it says but in what it remains silent about.

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For instance, to take up the first point of the conservative analysis: isn’t it true that, under conditions of declining growth rates and vehement competition on domestic and international markets, individual capitalists, at least those firms which do not enjoy the privileges of the monopolistic sector, have many good reasons to consider the prospects for investment and profits bleak, and to blame the welfare state, which imposes social security taxes and a great variety of regulations on them, for reducing profitability even further? Isn’t it true that the power position of unions, which, in turn, is based on rights they have won through industrial relations, collective bargaining, and other laws, is great enough to make an increasing number of industrial producers unprofitable or to force them to seek investment opportunities abroad? And isn’t it also true that capitalist firms will make investment (and hence employment) decisions according to criteria of expected profitability, and that they consequently will fail to invest as soon as long-term profitability is considered unattractive by them, thus causing an aggregate relative decline in the production output of the economy? To be sure, no one would deny that there are causes of declining growth rates and capitalists’ failure to invest which have nothing to do with the impact of the welfare state upon business, but which are rather to be looked for in inherent crisis tendencies of the capitalist economy such as overaccumulation, the business cycle, or uncontrolled technical change. But even if so, it still might make sense to alleviate the hardship imposed upon capital - and therefore, by definition, upon the rest of society, within the confines of a capitalist society - by dropping some of the burdens and constraints of the welfare state. This, of course, is exactly what most proponents of this argument are suggesting as a practical consequence. But after all, so the fairly compelling logic of the argument continues, who benefits from the operation of a welfare state that undermines and eventually destroys the production system upon which it has to rely in order to make its own promises become true? Doesn’t a kind of “welfare” become merely nominal and worthless anyway that punishes capital by a high burden of costs and hence everyone else by inflation, unemployment, or both? In my view, the valuable insight to be gained from the type of analysis I have just described is this: the welfare state, rather than being a separate and autonomous source of well-being which provides incomes and services as a citizen right, is itself highly dependent upon the prosperity and continued profitability of the economy. While being designed to be a cure to some ills of capitalist accumulation, the nature of the illness is such that it may force the patient to refrain from using the cure. A conceivable objection to the above argument would be that capitalists and conservative political elites “exaggerate” the harm imposed upon them by welfare state arrangements. To be sure, in the political game they have good tactical reasons to make the welfare state burden appear more intolerable than it “really” is. The question boils down then to what we mean - and how we measure - “reality” in this context. In answering this question, we will have to keep in mind that the power position of private investors includes the power to define reality. That is to say, whatever they consider an intolerable burden in fact is an intolerable burden which will in fact lead to a declining propensity to invest,

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at least as long as they can expect to effectively reduce welfare-state-related costs by applying such economic sanctions. The debate about whether or not the welfare state is “really” squeezing profits is thus purely academic because investors are in a position to create the reality - and the effects - of “profit squeeze”. The second major argument of the conservative analysis postulates that the effect of the welfare state is a disincentive to work. “Labour does not work!” was one of the slogans in the campaign that brought Mrs. Thatcher into the office of the British Prime Minister. But, again, the analytical content of the argument must be carefully separated from the political uses to which it is put. And, again, this analytical argument can, often contrary to the intentions of its proponents, be read in a way that does make a lot of empirical sense. For instance, there is little doubt that elaborate labor protection legislation puts workers in a position to resist practices of exploitation that would be applied, as a rule, in the absence of such regulations. Powerful and recognized unions can in fact obtain wage increases in excess of productivity increases. And extensive social security provisions make it easier - at least for some workers, for some of the time - to avoid undesirable jobs. Large scale unemployment insurance covering most of the working population makes unemployment less undesirable for many workers and thus partially obstructs the reserve army mechanism. In sum, the welfare state has made the exploitation of labour more complicated and less predictable. On the other side, as the welfare state imposes regulations and rights upon the labour-capital exchange that goes on in production, while leaving the authority structure and the property relations of production itself untouched, it is hardly surprising to see that the workers are not, as a rule, so intrinsically motivated to work that they would work as productively as they possibly could. In other words, the welfare state maintains the control of capital over production, and thus the basic source of industrial and class conflict between labor and capital; by no means does it establish anything resembling “workers control”. At the same time, it strengthens workers’ potential for resistance against capital’s control the net effect being that an unchanged conflict is fought out with means that have changed in favour of labour. Exploitative production relations coexist with expanded possibilities to resist, escape, and mitigate exploitation. While the reason for struggle remained unchanged, the means of struggle increased for the workers. It is not surprising to see that this condition undermines the “work ethic”, or at least requires more costly and less reliable strategies to enforce such an ethic. My point, so far, is that the two key arguments of the liberal-conservative analysis are valid to a large extent, contrary to what critics from the Left have often argued. The basic fault I see in this analysis has less to do with what it explicitly states than with what it leaves out of its consideration. Every political theory worth its name has to answer two questions: first, what is the desirable form of the organization of society and state and how can we demonstrate that it is at all “workable”, i.e. consistent with our basic normative and factual assumptions about social life? This is the problem of defining a consistent model or goal of transformation. Second, how do we get there? This is the problem of identifying the dynamic forces and strategies that could bring about the

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transformation. The conservative analysis of the welfare state fails on both counts. To start with the latter problem, it is extremely hard today in Western Europe to conceive of a promising political strategy that would aim at even partially eliminating the established institutional components of the welfare state, to say nothing about its wholesale abolition. That is to say, the welfare state has, in a certain sense, become an irreversible structure, the abolition of which would require nothing less than the abolition of political democracy and the unions, as well as fundamental changes in the party system. A political force that could bring about such dramatic changes is nowhere visible as a significant factor, right wing middle class populist movements that occasionally spring up in some countries notwithstanding. Moreover, it is a well-known fact from political opinion research that the fiercest advocates of laissez faire capitalism and economic individualism show marked differences between their general ideological outlook and their willingness to have special transfers, subsidies, and social securityschemes abandoned from which they personally derive benefits. Thus, in the absence of a powerful ideological and organizational undercurrent in Western politics (such as a neo-fascist or authoritarian one), the Vision of overcoming the welfare state and resurrecting a “healthy” market economy is not much more than the politically impotent day-dream of some ideologues of the old middle class. This class is nowhere strong enough to effect, as the examples of Mrs. Thatcher and - hypothetically - Ronald Reagan demonstrate, more than marginal alterations of an institutional scheme that such figures, too, have to accept as given when taking office. Even more significant, however is the second failure of the conservative analysis - its failure to demonstrate that “advanced-capitalism-minus-thewelfare-state” would actually be a workable model. The reasons why it is not, and consequently why the neo-laissez faire ideology would be a very dangerous cure even if it could be administered, are fairly obvious. In the absence of large scale state-subsidized housing, public education and health services. as well as extensive compulsory social security schemes, the working of an industrial economy would be simply inconceivable. Given the conditions and requirements of urbanization, large scale concentration of labor power in industrial production plants, rapid technical, economic, and regional change, the reduced ability of the family to cope with the difficulties of life in industrial society, the securalization of the moral order, the quantitative reduction and growing dependence of the propertied middle classes - all of which are well known characteristics of capitalist social structures - the sudden disappearance of the welfare state would leave the system in a state of exploding conflict and anarchy. The embarrassing secret of the welfare state is that, while its impact upon capitalist accumulation may well become destructive (as the conservative analysis so emphatically demonstrates), its abolition would be plainly disruptive (a fact that is systematically ignored by the conservative critics). The contradiction is that while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state. This is exactly the condition to which we refer when using the concept “contradiction”. The flaw in the conservative analysis is in the one-sided emphasis it puts on the first side of this contradiction, and its silence about the

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second one. This basic contradiction of the capitalist welfare state could, of course, be thought to be a mere “dilemma” which then would be “solved” or “managed” by a circumspect balancing of the two components. This, however, would presuppose two things, both of which are at least highly uncertain: first, that there is something like an “optimum point” at which the order-maintaining functions of the welfare state are preserved while its disruptive effects are avoided; and, second, if so, that political procedures and administrative practises will be sufficiently “rational” to accomplish this precarious balance. Before I consider the prospects for this solution, let me first summarize some elements of the contending socialist critique of the welfare state. The critique from the socialist Left Although it would be nonsensical to deny the fact that the struggle for labor protection legislation, expanded social services, social security, and the recognition of unions led by the working class movement for over a century now has brought substantial improvements of the living conditions of most wage earners, the socialist critique of the welfare state is, nevertheless, a fundamental one. It can be summarized in three points which we will consider in turn: the welfare state is said to be (1) ineffective and inefficient, (2) repressive, and (3) conditioning a false (“ideological”) understanding of social and political reality within the working class. In sum, it is a device to stabilize, rather than a step in the transformation of capitalist society. In spite of the undeniable gains in the living conditions of wage earners, the institutional structure of the welfare state has done little or nothing to alter the income distribution between the two principal classes of labor and capital. The huge machinery of redistribution does not work in the vertical, but in the horizontal direction, namely, within the class of wage earners. A further aspect of its ineffectiveness is that the welfare state does not eliminate the causes of individual contingencies and needs (such as work-related diseases, the disorganization of cities by the capitalist real estate market, the obsolescence of skills, unemployment etc.), but compensates for (parts of ) the consequences of such events (by the provision of health services and health insurance, housing subsidies, training and re-training facilities, unemployment benefits, and the like). Generally speaking, the kind of social intervention most typical of the welfare state is always “too late”, and hence its ex post facto measures are more costly and less effective than a more “causal” type of intervention would allow them to be. This is a generally recognized dilemma of social policy making, the standard answer to which is the recommendation to adopt more “preventive” strategies. Equally generally, however, it is also recognized that effective prevention would almost everywhere mean interfering with the prerogatives of investors and management, i.e., the sphere of the market and private property which the welfare state has only very limited legal and de facto power to regulate. A further argument pointing at the ineffectiveness of the welfare state emphasizes the constant threat to which social policies and social services are exposed due to the fiscal crisis of the state, which, in turn, is a reflection of both cyclical and structural discontinuities of the process of accumulation. All West

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European countries have experienced a sharp economic recession in the midseventies, and we know of many examples of cutting social policy expenditures in response to the fiscal consequences of this recession. But even if and when the absolute and relative rise of social policy expenditures as a percentage of GNP continues uninterrupted, it is by no means certain, as Ian Gough and others before him have argued, that increases in the expenditures are paralleled by increases in real “welfare”. The dual fallacy, known in the technical literature as the “spending-service-cliché”, is this: first, a marginal increase in expenditures must not necessarily correspond to a marginal increment in the “outputs” of the welfare state apparatus; it may well be used up in feeding the bureaucratic machinery itself. But, second, even if the output (say of health services) is increased, a still larger increase in the level of risks and needs (or a qualitative change of these) may occur on the part of the clients or recipients of such services, so as to make the net effect negative. The bureaucratic and professional form through which the welfare state dispenses its services is increasingly seen to be a source of its own inefficiency. Bureaucracies absorb more resources and provide less services than other democratic and decentralized structures of social policy could. The reason why the bureaucratic form of administering social services is maintained in spite of its inefficiency and ineffectiveness, which becomes more and more obvious to more and more observers, must, therefore, have to do with the social control function exercised by centralized welfare bureaucracies. This analysis leads to the critique of the repressiveness of the welfare state, its social control aspect. Such repressiveness is, in the view of the critics, indicated by the fact that, in order to qualify for the benefits and services of the welfare state, the client must not only prove his or her “need”, but must also be a “deserving” client - a client, that is, who complies with the dominant economic, political, and cultural standards and norms of the society. The heavier the needs, the stricter these requirements tend to be defined. Only if, for instance, the unemployed are willing to keep themselves available for any alternative employment (often considerably inferior to the job they have lost) that eventually may be made available to them by employment agencies are they entitled to unemployment benefits; and the claim for welfare payments to the poor is everywhere made conditional upon their conformity to standards of behaviour which the better-to-do strata of the population are perfectly free to violate. In these and many other cases, the welfare state can be looked upon as an exchange transaction in which material benefits for the needy are traded for their submissive recognition of the “moral order” of the society which generates such need. One important precondition for obtaining the services of the welfare state is the ability of the individual to comply with the routines and requirements of welfare bureaucracies and service organizations, an ability which, needless to say, often is inversely correlated to need itself. A third major aspect of the socialist critique of the welfare state is to demonstrate its political-ideological control function. The welfare state is seen not only as the source of benefits and services, but, at the same time, as the source of false conceptions about historical reality which have damaging effects for working class consciousness, organization, and struggle. First of all, the welfare state creates the false image of two separated spheres of working class lift. On the

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on side, the sphere of work, the economy, production, and “primary” income distribution; on the other, the sphere of citizenship, the state, reproduction, and “secondary” distribution. This division of the socio-political world obscures the causal and functional links and ties that exist between the two, and thus, prevents the formation of a political understanding which views society as a coherent totality-to-be-changed. That is to say, the structural arrangements of the welfare state tend to make people ignore or forget that the needs and contingencies which the welfare state responds to are themselves constituted, directly or indirectly, in the sphere of work and production, that the welfare state itself is materially and institutionally constrained by the dynamics of the sphere of production, and that a reliable conception of social security does, therefore, presuppose not only the expansion of “citizen rights”, but of “workers rights” in the process of production. Contrary to such insights, which are part of the analytical starting points of any conceivable socialist strategy of societal transformation, the inherent symbolic indoctrination of the welfare state suggests the ideas of classcooperation, the disjunction of economic and political struggles and the evidently more and more ill-based confidence in an ever-continuing cycle of economic growth and social security. The Welfare State and political change What emerges from our sketchy comparative discussion of the “right” and the ”left” analyses of the welfare state are three points on which the liberalconservative and the socialist critics exhibit somewhat surprising parallels. First, contrary to the ideological consensus that flourished in some of the most advanced welfare states throughout the fifties and sixties, nowhere is the welfare state believed any longer to be the promising and permanently valid answer to the problems of the socio-political order of advanced capitalist economies. Critics in both camps have become more vociferous and fundamental in their negative appraisal of welfare state arrangements. Second, neither of the two approaches to the welfare state could and would be prepared, in the best interest of its respective clientele, to abandon the welfare state, as it performs essential and indispensable functions both for the accumulation process as well as for the social and economic well-being of the working class. Third, while there is, on the conservative side, neither a consistent theory nor a realistic strategy about the social order of a non-welfare-state (as I have argued before), it is not perfectly evident that the situation is much better in the Left where one could possibly speak of a consistent theory of socialism, but certainly not of an agreed-upon and realistic strategy for its construction. In the absence of the latter, the welfare state remains a theoretically contested, though in reality firmly entrenched, fact of the social order of advanced capitalist societies. In short, it appears that the welfare state, while being contested both from the right and the left, will not be easily replaced by a conservative or progressive alternative. To be sure, there are a number of normative models of the social and economic order which are, however, advocated by intellectuals and other minorities rather

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than being supported by any broad political current. One is the neo-laissez faire model according to which the welfare state can and should be abolished so that the resurrection of the free and harmonious market society can take place. This solution is typically supported by political forces from the old middle class, such as farmers and shopkeepers, who also often favour tax-resistance movements. The political problem with this solution is that the further and more evenly capitalist modernization has taken place within one country, the smaller the social base of this backward-looking alternative will be. Its polar opposite is a model favoured by elements of the new middle class, combining “post-material” values with certain ideas inherited from the anarchist and syndicalist tradition of political thought. This model would imply that the functions of the welfare state could be taken over by libertarian, egalitarian, and largely self-reliant communities working within a highly decentralized and debureaucratized setting. Typically, both of these alternative models have no more than a very marginal role to play as long as they fail to form alliances with one of the principal classes, respectively, and the political forces representing them. But such alliances, either between the old middle class and the centres of capital or the new middle class and the established working class organizations, are immensely difficult to form and sustain. Nevertheless, it would probably not be too speculative an assumption to expect such struggles for new alliances to occupy the stage of social policy and welfare state reform in the years to come. In my view, three potential alternative outcomes of these political efforts can be envisaged. First, under conditions of heightened economic crisis and international tension, a relative success of the neo-laissez-faire coalition, based on an alliance of big capital and the old middle class, is not entirely to be excluded as a possibility. Second, in countries with a strong social democratic (and possibly also in those with a strong Euro-Communist) element, it is more likely that new forms of interest intermediation and relatively peaceful accommodation will emerge which are designed to determine the “right dose” of welfare state expansion i.e., one that is compatible both with the requirements of accumulation as well as with the key demands of working class organizations. This model would involve the extensive reliance on “neo-corporatist” or “tripartite” modes of decision-making, carried out by representatives of highly centralized employers’ organizations and unions under the supervision of specialized agencies of the state. The second conceivable configuration, however, will operate, especially under economic crisis conditions, at the expense not only of the old middle class, but also of those sectors of the working class which are less well organized and represented within such highly exclusive frameworks of inter-group negotiation and decision-making. Not entirely inconceivable is, third, a type of alliance that combines working class organizations and elements from the new middle class on the basis of a nonbureaucratic, decentralized, and egalitarian model of a self-reliant “welfare society”. Proponents of this solution are to be found within the new social movements who find some resonance in the theoretical ideas of authors like Illich, Gorz, Touraine, Cooley, and others. Rather than speculating about the likely outcome of this configuration of forces and ideas, which would require a much more detailed analysis than is possible within the confines of this essay, I want to turn in my concluding remarks to the

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nature of the political process which will eventually decide about one or the other of these outcomes. This process can best be conceived of as consisting of three tiers, or three cumulative arenas of conflict. The first and most obvious is the arena of political decision making within the state apparatus. Its actors are political elites competing with each other for electoral victories and scare resources. They decide on social policy programs, legislations, and budgets. This is the most superficial and most visible level of politics, the one publicized by the media and involved whenever the citizen is called upon to act in his or her political role, e.g., as voter. But this is by no means the only level at which political power is generated, distributed, and utilized. For the space of possible decisions of political elites is determined by societal forces that, on a far less visible level, shape and change the politicians’ view and perception of reality, i.e., of the alternatives open to decision-making and the consequences to be expected from each of the alternatives. This is the level at which the agenda of politics and the relative priority of issues and solutions is determined, and the durability of alliances and compromises is conditioned. On this level, it is more difficult to identify specific actors; the forces operating here are most often the aggregate outcome of a multitude of anonymous actors and actions which nevertheless shape the politicians’ view of reality and space of action. Examples of such conditioning forces are events in the international environment (such as wars or revolutions), macroeconomic indicators (terms of trade, growth rates, changes in the level of unemployment and inflation, etc.), and changes in the cultural parameters of social life (ranging from the rates of secondary school attendance to divorce rates). The experience of these indicators shapes the elites’ image of reality, their view of what they can and must do, what they have to expect as consequences of their actions, and what they must refrain from doing. The important point here is this: although the power to structure the politicians’ reality, agenda and attention cannot be as easily traced back to personal actors as is the case on the first level of political conflict, there is, nevertheless, a matrix of social power according to which social classes, collective actors, and other social categories have a greater chance of shaping and reshaping political reality, opening or closing the political agenda, than others. Access to and control over the means of production, the means of organization, and the means of communication are highly unevenly distributed within the social structure, and each of them can be utilized, to a different degree of effectiveness, to shape and to challenge what politicians perceive as their environment of decision making. The relative weight of these different resources which, partly, may balance each other, but which also can be concentrated in the hands of one and the same class or group, depends also on cyclical and conjunctural variations which may allow a group to exploit its specific social power to a larger or smaller extent at different points in time. Underlying this second level of politics (the social power matrix), however, is a third level at which changes within the matrix itself occur, i.e., changes in the relative “weight” collective actors enjoy in shaping the agenda of politics. If, as we have argued before, the second level consists in the process of shaping the space of political action by the exercise of veto power, blackmail, threat, mobilization, and social discourse about political issues, or merely the silent force

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of “anticipated reaction”, this does not mean that the amount and effectiveness of political resources that each social class and social category controls must remain fixed. That is to say, social power is never great enough to reproduce itself eternally. Power positions are, almost by definition, contested and hence subject to change and redistribution. The struggle for the redistribution of social power is what takes place on the third, and most fundamental, level of politics. For instance, the market power, or political legitimacy, or the organizational strength that one group or class has enjoyed so far may be restricted (with the effect of making the political agenda less vulnerable vis-á-vis this group). or another group may open up new channels of influence, may form new alliances, or win a hegemonic position through the appeal to new values, ideals, and visions. Both relative losses of power and relative gains in power can be promoted, facilitated, or triggered off (if only through the unequivocal demonstration of failures) on the level of formal politics. The veto power attached to certain group can be limited and constrained, and the institutional underpinnings of social power can be abolished. It therefore appears that the three levels are interrelated, not in a strictly hierarchical but in a cyclical manner: although the action space of level one (“formal politics”) is largely determined by the matrix of social power (“level two”), it may itself facilitate and promote a revision of the distribution of social power (“level three”). And the stage of democratic politics would thus have to be looked upon as both determined by, and a potential determinant of social power. I trust that I can leave it to the reader to apply this analytical model of the political process to the contemporary controversy about the welfare state that I have reviewed and discussed, and, thereby, to explore the extent of its usefulness. The question with which I wish to conclude is as much of academic as it is of political significance: will the agenda of the welfare state, its space of action and future development, be shaped and limited by the matrix of social power of advanced capitalist social structures? Or will it, conversely, itself open up possibilities of reshaping this matrix, either through its own accomplishments or failures?

NOTES 1

A corollary argument often used in the conservative analysis is this: not only does the welfare state undermine the quality of working behaviour by inducing workers to be more “demanding” and, at the same time, less willing to spend strong efforts on their work, etc., but also it cuts the quantity of available productive labour. This is said to be so because the welfare state ideology puts strong emphasis on public sector services, bureaucratic careers, and especially education and training, all of which drain the labour market of “productive” labour in a variety of ways.

CHANGING CRISES-TYPES IN WESTERN SOCIETIES Johannes Berger Although the advanced Western societies recovered from the last recession measured at least against the state and development of the national product astonishingly rapidly, the public concern for the future of the capitalist order has not decreased, but rather increased. No doubt, economic crises have accompanied the capitalist process from its very beginning, and, compared with the catastrophe of the thirties, the world economic crisis of the seventies turned out to be a rather mild one. However, symptoms increase which indicate that the economic, social, and political orders of Western societies will be confronted with challenges of a dimension which raise the question of the viability of the present social order. By “present social order” I mean Welfare State capitalism which came into being in reaction to the world economic crisis. At its core lie economic intervention and social integration policies. Above all high unemployment indicates that this system is in a deep crisis, resolvable only by a restructuring of its main institutions, which may be compared with the readjustment the Welfare State itself represents. The most common features of the crisis of present capitalism are in the economic area: stagflation, i.e., a combination of stagnation and inflation; in politics: a drastically increased public debt as the price for the recovery after 1975, instances of ungovernability and bureaucratic rigidity; in the cultural realm: the erosion of protestant ethics, that is, the decay of value orientations (like the pursuit of gain, discipline, industry, and diligence) on which the success of the capitalist order relied; in the field of external trade: burdens stemming from the increase of oil prices, and the extreme international inequity in the distribution of life chances caused by dependent development; finally, in relation to nature: the shortcoming of exhaustible resources and the destruction ~ of the natural environment. In what follows, I do not want to review all of the crises phenomena that confront advanced societies, nor do I want to participate in depicting the collapse of the capitalist era. What is important is that essential features of the current crisis cannot be understood if one disregards the far-reaching influence that the very existence of the welfare-state has for the functioning of the economy. I will argue that the current crisis must be conceived of as the consequence of a successful crisis management in the recent past of capitalist countries. There are some indications that full employment policy, so successful in the first twentyfive years of the post-war period, either meets with hindrances it generates or the continuation of the growth of capitalist systems will lead them to limits rooted in the disturbance of an ecological, not an economic, equilibrium. Discussing the type of crisis that emerges from the interference of the political system with the economic system, I distinguish two further types, one from 230

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which it is derivable (the “classical” economic crisis), and one to which it possibly leads (provided that economic growth is continued with the aid of welfarist strategies). The most common form of the latter type is the ecological crisis. Thus one can distinguish crises within one social sub-system, crises developing between at least two social sub-systems, and crises which emerge at the boundary between a social sub-system and its natural or cultural environment. I As the study of capitalist development has shown, capitalist growth since the beginning of the capitalist era has not been steady and stable, but unstable and cyclical. Periods of prosperity were replaced by periods of depression with economic crises as the summit of the economic cycle. This crisis type, well known from economic history, refers, sociologically speaking, to a crisis of a functionally differentiated, well delimited economic sub-system, which threatens the system as a whole due to the leading role attributed to this system for capitalist society. Such crises do not occur from extraneous, random disturbances; they are generated endogenously by the logic of the economic process itself. However, both Marxist approaches (Weisskopf, 1979; Sherman, 1979) and post-Keynesian instability theorems, adjacent to Harrod, use such a manner of explanation (Geipel, Schneider, Vogt, 1979). The real cause for such crises - again formulated in an abstract sociological manner - are incompatible system imperatives. The leading idea in revealing incompatibilities and control problems prone to generate crises is, in each case, that the economic system has to solve more than one problem at once. A crisis occurs if the solution of one problem takes place at the cost of another one, or at least two problem solutions are incompatible with each other. For instance, the solution of the production problem (to produce commodities profitably) leads to a violation of realization conditions. The very same strategy which improves capital investment - a lowering of the real wage - impedes the sale of commodities. This is the basic idea of a Marxist theory of underconsumption. The same explanatory pattern, a lack of coordination between two coordination problems, can be detected in different versions of Marxist crises theories as well as in post-Keynesian instability theorems or in the well-known dilemma of economic policy: the ability to attain price stability only by neglecting the goal of full employment. If economic crises, as they have been characteristic of capitalist society, only represented a deficiency of the “economic machine”, one should hardly see why such a defect represented a challenge to the existing social order. But economic crises are social crises as well. Not only do they question the functioning of the economic machine, but, at the same time, they threaten the social integration of society. The fundamental conception of a Marxist crisis theory, conceived to be more than a business cycle theory, states that the contradictions of the economic system will be vented in class conflicts: it is precisely the deterioration of the situation of the working class in and by a crisis which will force this class to take political action. Welfare state policies can then be conceived as attempts to prevent a situation which might lead to a civil war between capital and labor.

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II Welfare State policies are set in a twofold manner: on the one hand, either a way out of the crisis is to be found or the economic crisis is to be avoided altogether by Keynesian macro-economic demand management. Keynes’s explanation of unemployment starts with commodity markets: disequilibria in commodity markets entail insufficient demand in labor markets. If unemployment is a consequence of an insufficient demand for commodities, then the remedy lies in complementing inadequate private demand by public expenditures. Among the two main means of overall economic control, fiscal policy and monetary policy, Keynesians prefer fiscal policy since it allows for a direct creation of demand (Landmann, 1976). On the other hand, an arsenal of socio-political measures serves to neutralize the consequences of unemployment. Social policy is altogether labor market orientated. Its main function consists in securing the reproduction of labor power even in the case of unemployment and to raise the salability of labor power, basically by public educational measures. Thus the maintenance of labor power is, at least partially, detached from the wage-earning status and attached to citizenship. For example, although only persons who have been employed before receive unemployment pay in the Federal Republic, the government supports the unemployment insurance system in case payments to the unemployed exceed receipts from payroll deductions of the employed. A graded system of unemployment aid and social aid is, in principle, responsible for everybody, not only for dismissed wage earners. Has this combined system of Keynesian overall control and welfarist social policy turned out to be successful? In the empirical case of the Federal Republic, there can be no doubt. For more than two decades, high rates of growth of the national product dominated the picture of economic development. “lot before the beginning of the seventies did an unstable development pattern start in which continuously high unemployment occurred along with low growth rates and, for Germany, high inflation rates (between 4 and 6 percent). At the same time, this has been a period of extreme internal stability. The economic growth of the postwar period would have been inconceivable without the coalition which the trade unions formed with employers and the government. However, it seems less important to know why this development pattern - the incorporation of highly institutionalized and centralized trade unions into the growth coalition - has worked, but why it cannot possibly work any longer and why the traditional growth coalition of “unitary” unions (as opposed to political unions), employers, and a social democratic government has cracked. At first it seems difficult to see on what the crisis-prone tendencies of a full employment policy depend. If the matter of conflict stemming from unemployment is removed, where else should relevant dangers, attributable to the economic system itself, result? Economic literature refers to different reasons for stagnation-tendencies. I do not want to examine them here; rather I want to demonstrate that full employment policy represents such a serious intervention in the “economic machine” that the attempt to eliminate its faults threatens its functioning.

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The mechanism of capitalist accumulation is constituted such that unemployment is not just contingent, but a System requirement. As the foundation of a crisis theory, this idea was stated by Marx for the first time. Goodwin (1972), in a well known paper, has given it a mathematically exact formulation. In order not to threaten capitalist reproduction on a continuously expanding scale, wage squeezes are needed. This is precisely the function of the industrial reserve army: “The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds pretentions in check” (Mark, 1970, p. 639). In the course of accumulation, wages rise due to the increased demand for labor. Everything else being equal, the wage-profit ratio will increase while the rate of profit will decrease, and so will the rate of accumulation. “The rate of accumulation lessens; but with its lessening, the primary cause of that lessening vanishes, i.e., the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour power. The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacle that it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital . . .” (Marx, p. 619). Wage share and degree of employment vary inversely during the business cycle, but over the cycle their average values remain constant. Thus, the rise of wages “. . . is confined within limits, that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a progressive scale” (p. 620). Public full employment policy prevents the rise in wages from receiving a check At least it absorbs the effect of this check (“sticky wages”). In this way, it prevents the crisis from exercising its “purgative function”, i.e., to produce a wage level “corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital”. The crisis mechanism is weakened since now, with the lessening of accumulation, the “cause of that lessening”, the “disproportion between capital and exploitable labour power”, does not vanish to a sufficient degree. First of all, government labour market policy influences the size of the labour supply, partially through safety measures for certain groups of wage earners (women, older workers, etc.), partially by regulating entry into and departure from the labour force, and partially by regulating the relation of periods of education to employment periods over the lifetime of labour power. Secondly, capital no longer negotiates with an unorganized labour force; employment contracts are concluded collectively. The organization of the labour force in trade unions takes place under the protection of the state and by resort to rights the constitutional state has granted (in the Federal Republic, for instance, free collective bargaining is a constitutional norm). Finally, and this may be the decisive point, the bargaining power of trade unions will be strengthened by the fact that the threat coming from unemployment has considerably decreased due to socio-political counter-strategies. Thus, the claim is not that unemployment no longer exists in the Welfare State, but that the threat coming from unemployment has weakened. In short, the relative strength of capital and labour has shifted. The attempts to substantiate why in the struggles about the wage rate the “master always remains master” can be traced back to Adam Smith (cf. recently Offe, Wiesenthal. 1980).

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Such attempts regularly account for the superiority of capital by stating that it could threaten the existence of its counterpart sooner than could labour capital, since capital could “wait” longer. However, due to protection against unemployment by the state, capital loses the power to freely apply the sanction of unemployment. The dominance of capital over labour rested on the ability to confront the labour force with the alternative: work or starve. This core relation is thus undermined. I do not wish to claim here that under the conditions of the Welfare State one could no longer ascertain a connection between wage share and degree of employment (cf. the debate on the Phillips-curve), nor do I want to claim, according to measures of “the good life”, the Welfare State would provide its citizens with adequate income and an appropriate standard of living. But I do claim that full employment policy has changed the traditional crisis-mechanism, and with that the conditions of capital accumulation, on the one hand, and the shape dass struggles will take on the other hand. By hindering the reserve army in the exercise of its function in the recovery of the accumulation process, full employment policy weakens the distributional Position of capital. As a result, stagnation tendencies and the inflation process occur simultaneously. The trade Union strategy of securing a given real wage, rendered possible by public demand management and wellfarist guarantees, results in “increasing the difficulties of overcoming the situation of stagflation. For if trade unions and wage earners do not permit a decrease in the real wage, and, as a result of diminishing capacity utilization, no productivity increase can be achieved, then there is no way to check inflation and to rise profitability” (Müller, Rödel, et. al., l978, p.106). Apart from these consequences on the system level, full employment policy leads to rising aspirations of the labour force. This is the basic reason why employers oppose a continuous full employment policy. “Indeed”, Kalecki (1971, p. 140) remarked, “under a regime of permanent full employment `the sack` would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined and the self-assurance and class consciousness of the working class would grow”, (cf., Vorbruba, 1978). These changed conditions for capital accumulation and class conflict, along with the indicated features of crisis associated with public full employment policy, do justify speaking of a new type of crisis (compared to the classical case of an economic crisis with purely economic causes): a) the crisis of Welfare State capitalism arises from the interlocking of the economic and the political systems; b) it can be conceived as a result of a successful crisis management; and c) whereas in the classical case of an economic crisis social disintegration threatened the continuation of the capitalist system - because of a growing revolutionary disposition fed by impoverishment and unemployment - now it is social integration which threatens this continuation. Social integration was possible only as the price of satisfying distributive claims which were substituted for revolutionary conflict-readiness. But, precisely, the satisfaction of these distributive claims, supported by welfarist strategies, represents an obstacle to capitalist growth. The crisis of the welfare-state is the best known example of a “crisis by interference”. The necessary precondition of that crisis-type is the function differentiation and institutional separation of the sub-systems of the society such

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that every sub-system has its specific task, norms, governing principles. etc. It occurs if one sub-system cannot fulfill unhindered its own functional primacy (if, for instance, the economy has to take into consideration other than purely economic aims) and the perspectives, modes of problem-solution, etc., of one subsystem are advanced within the other. III In the last section I distinguished crises phenomena peculiar to a full employment capitalism from crises phenomena of a capitalism without a full employment policy. To be sure, by full employment capitalism I do not refer to a capitalism really attaining the full employment goal, but a capitalism characterized by a particular combination of capitalist mode of production and a public policy committed to full employment goals. In such a system, unemployment is not actually eliminated, but the threat stemming from it has beer weakened. The welfare system does not guarantee wealth for everybody, but it prevents mass misery. Immiseration is regularly restricted to marginal groups and does not affect the core of the labor force. As outlined, this goal shall be attained in a two-fold manner: there is state intervention into the economy in order to raise income to the full employment level, and there are socio-political measures providing cover against market risks which result in a tendency to detach the reproduction of labor power from the wage earning status. Both strategies imply a politicization of the economy. Its justification lies in its success: the avoidance of sharp downturns with high unemployment. But at the same time this politicization of the economy has weakened accumulation by undermining the control of capital over labor. It certainly would be wrong to trace back this constellation solely to welfarist practices, but I maintain that the Welfare State contributes its share to the development of such a constellation. Above all, continuing high unemployment since the crisis of 1974-75 indicates that the end of full employment capitalism has come. What will happen if Keynesian strategies are no longer effective? There seem to be three solutions to the welfarist dilemma of sharing responsibility for high unemployment the elimination of which was its ratio essendi: a conservative, a social-democratic, and a radical-democratic. (A) The conservative solution aims are the destruction of Welfare State capitalism. The Welfare State has undermined work discipline, has limited private initiative, and has ruined state finances. In this way business confidence has been undermined with the result that the investments necessary to put an end to depression are not forthcoming. Implicit in this scenario is a pecular crisis theory: the economy does not produce cyclical downturns by itself, the market mechanism is able to match demand and supply in all markets. In particular, differences between investments and savings are balanced by variations of the interest rate. Depressions only come into being because of the monopoly power of trade unions and because of state interventions into the economic circular flow. Discretionary intervention, undertaken for the purpose of counter-cyclical overall control, has destabilizing effects instead and should therefore be eliminated (cf. Landmann). First of all, they result in a crowding out of private investments

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since they are financed by public borrowing; secondly, they usually occur too late, and, finally, the employers cannot be deceived about the transitory nature of deficit spending policy. The common denominator of conservative proposals to overcome a crisis is depoliticization of the economy and reprivatization of state activities. But this intended attrition of the Welfare State can take place only at the price of a reemergence of the classical type of conflicts born from economic crises It is hard to imagine that social security systems could be reduced rigorously without provoking massive reactions from traditional working-class organizations. For this reason, the conservative solution relies on an inappropriate strategy. It seems improbable that it could be pushed through. (B) The core of the social-democratic solution consists of a corporatist model of politics: the political incorporation of the trade unions into the process of restructuring the economy. An ideal precondition for the success of such a policy is the organization form of “unitary” trade unions, as it is realized in the Federal Republic. The only question is whether a successful integration of organized labor into the state will continue in face of decreased growth and unemployment resulting from the failure of Keynesian full employment policy. Three recent developments will facilitate the task of coping with the urgent problems stemming from high unemployment. (1) As the example of the reorganization of the steel industry in the Saarland has shown, trade unions can consent to the modernization of industry provided that their core-membership of skilled workers is not - or only to a small extent hit by the consequences of such a policy. Referring to this case, Esser and Fach (1979) have spoken of “selective corporatism”. While the jobs of the core groups of the labor force remain secure, the marginal and problem groups who cannot find a job, despite the efforts to achieve a high level of employment have to rely on the welfare services and the custody measures provided by the welfare state. (2) One can forego a massive application of Keynesian instruments if other mechanisms are available to tackle the problem of high unemployment. Two relief-strategies of this kind can be distinguished: the segmentation of the labor market and the development of an informal sector of the economy. The necessity to react to unemployment with economic policies is reduced if a change of the structure of unemployment in the direction of an increased vertical labor market segmentation occurs (Baisch, 1980). Mainly so-called “problem groups” are affected by unemployment: women, older workers, adolescents, “guest” workers, etc. With the exception of ethnic minorities, socially accepted alternative roles are available for them (for women, for instance: mother and housewire) which weaken their willingness for conflict (cf. Offe and Hinrichs, 1979). (3) Also alleviating labor market problems is the most recent development in Western societies: the expansion of the so-called “informal sector” of the economy. The informal economy consists of self-initiated alternative projects like housework, neighbourhood-aid, moonlighting, and some criminal forms of securing one’s existence (e.g., petty theft cf. Gershuny, 1979). Shifting growing parts of the population into this sector does its share in preventing high unemployment from resulting in a social explosion (cf. Rosanvallon, 1980). In part, groups living in the informal sector do not regard unemployment as

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threatening their existence, but rather as a chance to build up a new identity free from the restrictions of industrial society; for another part, the cleavage of society into two cultures is accepted by those who have become resigned to their fate and are far from articulating demands on the state (as would the trade unions). Both processes - the treatment of the main body of the unemployed as problemgroups and the development of the informal sector - cannot explain unemployment, but the diminishing pressure to undertake anything against it. However, they do not eliminate certain bottle-necks in the corporatistic model. First of all trade unions, who serve different groups of members in a different way, are threatened by the conflict between the interests of the members and system constraints. Secondly, the socio-political provision for the marginalized groups aggravates the fiscal crises of the state. (As can be demonstrated by the example of unemployment insurance, this insurance is not made for serious employment slumps, but rather for mild forms of underemployment.) Finally, situations can emerge in which the governmental control and custody measures will not suffice to keep the latent conflict potential of marginalized groups in check. And the difficulties of conflict control will increase if a second conflict area besides chronic unemployment becomes virulent: the deterioration of life conditions of the population resulting not from decreasing real wages but from a growing destruction of inner and outer nature, to which a continued expansion of the capitalist system will inevitably contribute. At no time was capitalism a system producing commodities exclusively by means of capitalistically produced commodities. On the contrary, it has always fallen back on non-capitalistic resources such as the natural environment, noncapitalist countries (R. Luxemburg), and cultural traditions. Capitalism is not at all - as is claimed in economic theory - an endogeneously self-reproducing and, on its own basis, ever expanding system. On the contrary, it lives on supplies to the maintenance of which it does not contribute. This parasitic development pattern has become obvious in the relations of capitalist production to external nature. This pattern, the reference to a non-capitalist environment which is assaulted by capitalist expansion, was revealed for the first time by Rosa Luxemburg. But it can also be recognized with respect to inner nature, i.e., with regard to the historical-cultural life-world of humans. The extension of the limits of capitalist systems into previously untouched areas of nature and culture constitutes a new crisis type which results from positing as absolute a partial rationality; it consists of negating or levelling the system/environment boundary. It occurs if the economic system does not hold stable the boundary of its natural or cultural environment. This crisis type is reflected in the development of new social movements and the emergence of grass-roots organizations everywhere. In their struggles questions not only of pure survival are at issue, but questions of life-style as well. It is quite the same process of expansion, of changing the external environment, which threatens the familiar historical-cultural life-world. New conflicts arise from such human problems and questions of life style superimposing the traditional class conflicts. (C) The third solution of the welfarist dilemma claims to provide an answer to the two central problems: unemployment and the endangering of inner and outer nature. As opposed to the conservative solution, the radical-democratic solution

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stands for the politicization of the economy, however not in the sense of reinforcing the corporatistic way, but in the sense of a self-governed economy. The principle of participation, already partially acknowledged within the political system, is also applicable to the economy. But what are the foundations for the expectation that a changed organization of the economy will contribute to the solution of both the unemployment and the ecological crisis? The main deficiency of a Keynesian full-employment policy is that it leaves untouched the structure of the private economy while influencing only its quantitative dimensions. The main features of the wage earning system: the work-roles offered, the commodities produced, the techniques applied, and the distributional shares generated, all remain unchanged. Only the scale of production is to be expanded. Under the precondition that everything is to remain unchanged, a limitation of growth will only aggravate all problems. In contrast to structurally unchanged growth, the radical-democratic solution suggests a product policy (improvement vs. growth), a policy of distribution, not only consisting in a shift of the wage share (whatever is available can and must be sufficient for everybody), a technology-policy (based on a careful treatment of the natural resources, labor power, and exhaustible raw materials), a rid a labor policy referring to contents and forms of work. Radical-democratic proposals to solve the crisis are usually put aside as utopian by the advocates of the marketeconomy and the corporatistic solution. Further, an advocate of this policy in a position to push it through in political action is still lacking. But the aggravation of problems in the conflict areas of underemployment and ecology will further the willingness to consider the potential contribution of a self-governed economy to the solution of the welfarist dilemma. The question is only whether this will happen in good time, before marginalization has occurred to a dangerous extent, and before irreversible impairments of the natural environment have taken place which will by far exceed the damages done already.

REFERENCES BAISCH, H., “Segmentierungen am Arbeitsmarkt - eine Restriktion keynesianischer Beschäftigungspolitik?” Alternative Wirtschaftspolitik 2, (Berlin, 1980). ESSER, J. and FACH, W., Internationale Konkurrenz und selektiver Korporatismus. Beitrag für die 10. Tagung des Arbeitskreises “Parteien – Parlamente - Wahlen” der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, (1979). GEIPEL, U., SCHNEIDER, H., und VOGT, W., “Möglichkeiten systemimmanenter Krisenüberwindung?” Alternative Wirtschaftspolitik, Argument - Sonderband 35, (Berlin, 1979). GERSHUNY, J.I., “Informal Economy”, Futures, 1979. GOODWIN, R.M., “A Growth Cycle”. Hunt, E.K. und Schwartz, J. 3. eds., A Critzque of Economic Theory, (1972). KALECKI, M., “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” Kalecki, Serected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, (Cambridge, 1971). LANDMANN, O., “Keynes in der heutigen Wirtschaftstheorie,” Bornbach, G. (Hrsg.), Der Keynesianismus, Bd. 1 (Berlin, 1976). MARX, K., Capital, Vol. 1, (1970).

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MÜLLER, G., RÖDEL, U., u.a., 1978: Ökonomische Krisentendenzen im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, (Frankfurt, 1978). OFFE, C. and HINRICHS, K., Sozialökonomie des Arbeitsmarkts und die Lage benachteiligter Gruppen, Offe, C. (Hrsg.), Opfer des Arbeitsmarkts. Neuwied (1979). OFFE, C. and WIESENTHAL, H., “Two Logics of Collective Action: Tleoretical Notcs on Social Class and Organizational Form,” Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. I, 1980. ROSANVALLON, P., “Le developpement de l’economie souterraine et l’avénir des societés industrielles,» Le debat, Nr. 2, 1980. SHERMAN, H., «A Marxist Theory of the Business Cycle,» The Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. II, 1979. VOBRUBA, O., “Staatseingriff und Ökonomiefunktion. Der Sozialstaat als Problem für sich selbst,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 7, 1978. WEISSKOPF, Th. E., “Marxian Crisis Theory and the Rate of Profit in the Postwar U.S Economy,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 3, 1979.

PLANNING THE CRISIS: REMARKS ON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM OF SOVIET-TYPE SOCIETIES

György Markus To overcome and liquidate the cyclical, crisis-ridden character of a capitalist economic development with its humanly destructive and functionally irrational effects — this was undoubtedly one of the original aims embodied in the Marxian concept of a socialist society, and embraced (though with different degrees of emphasis) by almost all variants of socialism as a practical-social movement and corresponding ideology. The actual situation and practice of the countries of “really existing socialism” have, however, given an almost ironical twist to this goal, so that one no longer reacts with consternation and surprise ~ hen one finds in some writings of East European dissidents (see, e.g., several articles by Kisielewski) a counter position of the transparency of market relations to the “planned chaos” of these economies taken as a matter of elementary self-evidence. And, indeed, one has only to look at the present state of the Polish economy, which can be compared to that of a country devastated by a global war, to see the extent of destructive economic fluctuations possible under a regime where there exists no economic or social mechanisms of direct control even over the most mind-boggling mistakes of planning undertaken by a hierarchically organized apparatus ruling over the whole society. Certainly it would be one of the gravest errors possible to attribute the “Polish crisis” solely or even predominantly to economic causes and difficulties. It is the extreme expression and violent explosion of all those deep-seated social contradictions and conflicts which embrace at least the whole “periphery“ of that enormous empire into which the countries of “really existing socialism“ are politically organized. This crisis has been created by an effort undertaken by virtually all strata of society, following the initiative and example of industrial workers, to achieve a degree of social and personal autonomy against a unified apparatus of power which, through a monopolistic disposition over the basic economic, political, and cultural means, has actually accomplished an expropriation of all the organized channels of social interaction and communication in the whole society. In this sense it is (as, e.g., A. Arato has characterized it) a revolt of “civil society” against a state that ha; concentrated in its hands the control over all means of social integration (beyond the confines of *This paper is based on the second chapter of a book just finished (Dictatorship Over Needs) written together with A. Heller arid F. Feher. The ideas expressed here are the result of our several decades of long collaboration. Thus, I am indebted to my co-authors and friends to a degree that even I cannot clearly appreciate. This does not diminish my sole responsibility for iii the formulations in this paper. I would like also to indicate that the absence of direct bibliographic references to contemporary literature on the subject does not mean a lack of their use. [n what follows 1 was relying especially heavily on the writing of T. Bauer, W. Brus, A. Hegedüs, M. Kalecki, J. Kornai and M. Markus.

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family relations) to a degree almost unparalleled in history. On he other hand, it would be impossible to deny the role of those difficulties which, in the last decade, have specifically plagued the Polish economy, factors that have made Poland the terrain where the whole suppressed social malaise of East European societies exploded with an unexpected force and clarity. To inquire into the deeper and more general causes of these difficulties is all the more significant since their exacerbation in the present significantly restricts (mom~ntari1y, it should be emphasized) the possible “demonstration effect” of the historically very significant (and yet very unstable) Polish experiment for the other countries of the Soviet bloc. The violent disequilibria that in the last few years have characterized the Polish economy, and found their simultaneous expression in the sudden drop in the tempo of economic growth (which finally turned into a decline) and in the enormous difficulties of provisioning, were, at least in their intensity, unprecedented in the post-Stalinist history of any East European society. They certainly were immediately caused by a completely illusory economic policy to which the political elite has dung with a rare stubbornness. This policy, however, emerged from the background of much more general and widespread phenomena as an attempt to solve some of the problems inherent in the very institutional structure of all of these economies. One can characterize the essence of this policy as an attempt to break out from that cycle which, like an iron law, seems in a quite mystical way to regulate the economic development of these societies. What makes this highly “visible observable regularity so strange is the fact that it concerns, primarily, the very character of the plan-targets (and their subsequent modifications), i.e., the direction of an economic policy that seems to be merely a matter of arbitrary decision (within some material limits) of an uncontrolled political elite. Nevertheless, in all these countries, and for long stretches of time, one finds a regular oscillation in the fundamental goal of the policy of investment between two counter posed stages: the first period is characterized by large investments concentrated in the first sector of economy, especially in heavy industry, and is accompanied by a general overtaxing of all resources that results in widespread shortages of both production and consumption goods. This is then followed by a period of “corrections” when there is a general drop in the overall level of investments with a simultaneous redirection of their flow in favour of agriculture and the second sector of industry. Such a “correction” liquidates the worse disequilibria and ameliorates the situation in the consumption market, i.e., in the real life-conditions of the population as well. But within a short time there occurs an inevitable swing back to the first stage, and the whole movement begins anew. No doubt, these “investment cycles” are, even from a merely economic viewpoint, highly expensive and dysfunctional. They are one of the direct causes of those “irrationalities” that seem to be inherently connected with the functioning of East European economic systems and increasingly undermine their capacity for growth. The Polish leadership thus had good, reasonable motives when from 1971 on, it has attempted to break this vicious circle through a policy that has striven to combine some of the typical characteristics oft the two counter posed stages: essentially to realize a very heavy program of investment in

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he infrastructure and the first sector together and simultaneously with a serious rise in the level of real wages. But the concrete economic strategy constituting the foundation of this attempt was completely unrealistic: it rejected the possibility of even minor institutional reforms and placed all its hopes on the direct implantation of Western technology bought on credits that should have been paid back by the products of this imported technical base. This strategy has already led to a minor economic debacle in the case of Rumania. Its unbelievably stubborn implementation in Poland has led to a veritable catastrophe. When the shortterm credits began to run out, the “cycle“ re-asserted itself with an unprecedented violence expressed in the enormous, reciprocally conditioned disequilibria in the external balance of payments, on the one hand, a rid between production and consumption, on the other. Already before the great strike movement began, the Polish economy stood on the brink of bankruptcy. But while it is true that this particular economic strategy in this extreme form was a Polish phenomenon (and was regarded suspiciously by economic experts in other East European countries from the beginning), its most general presuppositions were shared all over Eastern Europe, including the Sowiet Union in the last two decades. From the view-point of these economies the whole period of detente represented an attempt to solve their growing and increasingly perceptible internal difficulties through an increasing transfer 01 developed Western technology (which was, in some cases, especially in Hungary accompanied by some half-hearted institutional reforms). However, not only has the extreme Polish variant of this strategy ended in a fiasco, this policy~ of transfer involves as well a silent capitulation before the more and more renounced parasitic character of the development of these societies. It is, then, an acknowledgement of their inability to generate significant innovations in any of the substantial, value-creating fields of social life. It also has been proven to be practically ineffective: the technological gap between West and Fast has not diminished to any significant degree. As a result, the present-day overt and deep Polish social crisis takes place against the background of a suppressed and still ripening economic crisis which encompasses all the more developed areas of Eastern Europe. The most important constituent and conspicuous indicator of this crisis is the constantly declining rate of the growth of the per capita national income which, especially in the last few years, began to approximate (except the German Democratic Republic) the limit signifying economic stagnation. It is not known generally, though an officially acknowledged (but hardly propagated) fact, that in the last year not only Poland had a negative rate of growth: in Hungary, in this exemplary (at least for many Western observers) land of balanced and reformed development, the gross national product in 1980 was 0.8% less than the preceding year. And ifone takes into account the built-in statistical distortions of the price-systems of these economies which invariably over-value t ~ie level and tempo of growth (plus the elementary fact that no plan was ever fulfil[ed in any of these countries to the full extent), then the 3.4% of overall growth which is the target of the new Soviet five-year plan also appears to be nothing else but an impotent resignation to virtual economic stagnation. Certainly the rate of growth in itself cannot be regarded as the all-decisive —

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criterion by which one can safely evaluate even the mere economic efficacy of a social system; periods of “stagnation” may be necessary to achieve a much needed restructuring of an economy. But when they occur on the basis of a relative underdevelopment (expressed, among other things, in the generally low living standards of the whole population and in the dire poverty of some of its strata) against the background of high popular expectations and an official ideology that places technical progress at the top of its hierarchy of legitimating values; when they take place despite all the conscious efforts to secure rapid growth undertaken by a seemingly all-powerful ruling apparatus which is both unable and unwilling to initiate or tolerate any structural changes in these circumstances they safely can be regarded as expressions of the fact that the given system of social-economic organization has, at least temporarily, run up against some inherent, institutional barriers. It is undoubtedly a rather important task for any critical theory of these societies to clarify their character. These barriers are certainly connected with those “irrationalities” that seem to be organic concomitants of these “planned” economies and constantly undermine and erode their effectiveness. The “investment cycles” can be regarded as partial causes of, and, at the same time, effects of some of the phenomena summed up under this label. In practice they mean a regularly recurring violation of even the elementary demands of equilibrium in favour of a definite sector of the economy (that which produces the means of production). But this formulation does not yet express the full significance of the process referred to. For it must also be realized that under East European conditions the rate of return is significantly higher in the second sector of economy than in the favoured first one. Under these conditions, the basic policy of allocation seems to direct with a law-like regularity the flow of input (of “capital“) into channels that produce less output: it acts consistently against the general principle of economic rationality. Once formulated in this way, one can also find many analogies to this behaviour in fields not directly connected with the existence and working of investment cycles. In the East, everybody knows that a serious and much needed augmentation of agricultural production (and at least indirectly of state revenues) could be easily achieved at minimal investment costs in the semi-private sector of agriculture (individual household-plots of members of agricultural cooperatives) or even with no costs at all through a change of some regulations concerning their use. The apparatus nevertheless consistently prefers horrendous and very risky investments in the state and state-dominated sector of agriculture. It even attempts again with surprising regularity to restrict the use of these household plots, though these attempts are invariably doomed to failure in view of the fact that their output, having a very serious weight on the consumption market, cannot be replaced in any other way (which stands in a sharp contrast to their complete insignificance in terms of the arable land held in this way). It is undoubtedly these constant, consistent, and somehow ineliminable violations of the principle of economic effectivity that constitute the fundamental element in those “irrationalities” to which we referred above But they are accompanied by a host of other phenomena, no less disruptive and, at first glance, baffling: constant and irremovable bottlenecks in definite sectors of economy —

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(especially in agriculture, infrastructure, and Services); chronic short ages both in production and consumption goods, together with a simultaneous irresistible increase in the volume of unutilized stocks; general overmanning within the enterprises coupled with a growing shortage of the labour force on the labour market; institutional resistance against technological change resulting in an actual decline in the effectivity of resource utilization. Anyone who has lived in these societies can easily continue this enumeration. All of these phenomena seem to be radically “irrational“ and in two senses: first, there seems to be pnsent all the necessary political will (and, one would presuppose, also the necessary political and economic power) from the side of the ruling apparatus to redrt ~s them, as ~nnumerabbe Party resolutions in all these countries bear witness; second, while they violate the principle of economic rationality, they certainly dc not follow from the ritualistically professed social goals and values of these societies either, nor do they seem to be in correspondence with the direct interests of any identifiable social group, including the members of the ruling apparatus itself. As a matter of fact this whole system of specific imbalances, which is apparently institutionally built in the very process of reproduction of these societies, only makes the work of each individual “bureaucrat“ more difficult, hisl)ier position less secure in view of constantly occurring economic “avaries“ a Dout which he/she cannot do much but is held responsible, and, also, his/her life iarder. One should not forget that bureaucrats are also consumers. Except for the very top of the power apparatus, where not only the effect of shortages but also that of scarcity is actually eliminated through the systematic privileges enjoyed, its members are also detrimentally affected. This is due to the “anticonsumerist” orientation of these economies and the constant shortages. Nevertheless it is my contention that all these phenomena are net signs of a strange ineffectiveness and irrationality but are highly functional to the whole system of social relations that underlines the structure and function .ng of these economies. They follow not from the fact that these societies for some mystical reason constantly malfunction, but rather they are the expressions of their “well-functioning“, i.e., of their ability to reproduce, also economically, those fundamental relations of social domination on which their whole institutional structure is based. In this sense they are “rational“ ifone understinds by this word merely the consistent realization of a goal-function in the process of social reproduction. In the Grundrisse, in a comparative historical context, Marx has inade use of the concept of “goal of production“ (Zwecke der Produktion) as a characteristic inherent in all economic formations and differentiating them from each other. By this he clearly meant not the individual-psychological motives of productive activity but the different goal-functions of the economy dependent un the basic social relations into which it is embedded. But the concept remained rather vague and unexplicated in detail. One can articulate it through the presupposition that each historically-socially distinct type of economy in a different way defines through the whole system of social relations what constitutes “costs“ and “useful results“ in economic activities, and thereby posits a specific (and not always computable) principle of “maximization“ governing the process of material reproduction in society. —

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All the known (and only partially described above) cases when East European economies directly and systematically violate the principle of economic ration~1ity (i.e., when they regularly choose albocative alternatives with les; than the maximal possible return) seem to be the immediate consequence of t1 e fact that i:i them the maximization of the material means (as “use-values“) unter the global disposition of the apparatus of power as a unified whole constitutes the goabfunction governing the “planned“ economic activities of the state. That is, in these societies only expenditures of resources under the control of the apparatus count as “real costs” (neither “human costs”, nor the strictly economic ones, borne by private individuals or by communities count sui generis as ccsts in economic decisions, though they may play a role as limiting factors as far as the political feasibility of economic decisions is concerned). And the “social utility” of the end-product is graded according to its propensity to remain, during its period of usages, under the control of the same apparatus or to fall out of it. On the whole, in these economic systems only those decisions are “rational“ which maximally increase the material means upon which the domination of the bureaucratic apparatus over the whole society is economically based. Within the given system of social relations such a goal-function of economic activities is a highly “rational” one. Let us consider one example already mentioned: the character of agricultural policy. In a detailed investigation concerning the years 1961-1975 in Hungary, F. Donath has demonstrated that the directly state-owned agricultural enterprises have been consistently fi,vored over the cooperatives, though the effectivity of production in the second form is about 40% higher than in the first one. What concerns the agricultural cooperatives themselves is that the very high ones have consistently received from the state higher subsidies, etc., than the smaller cooperatives, though their respective productivities are again inversely related. To this we have to add the already noted fact of the constant recurrence of eflörts to restrain administratively the use of household plots which have the highest productivity among all these forms. Undoubtedly, from a purely economic viewpoint such a policy makes no sense. On the other hand, it is absolutely consistent: the preferences of the apparatus are dictal ed not by considerations of “rentability”, but by the criterion of how far it remains able to retain the direct control over the means invested. in this respect, e.g., preferring very large cooperatives against the smaller ones, though counterproductive economically, it is nevertheless quite logical: the opportunity for the members to participate in the actual decision-making is in general a very restricted one in the cooperatives, hut in the giant ones it indeed becomes reduced to a mere formality. This logic immediately becomes that of a social “rationality“ if one ceases to look at it from the viewpoint of a separated economy which simply does not exist under the given conditions, but one takes into account its role in the reproduction of the actual relations of power into which it is hue embedded. Attempting to maximize, through its whole policy of development, the means under its global and permanent control, the apparatus makes economically impossible the existence of any power “external“ to it and able 10 restrict its freedom of activity. What is effectively accumulated outside the domr in over which it can directly dispose does not count therefore as an element

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of “national” wealth but constitutes a threat to the latter, because it can confer a degree of economic independence upon those who own it formally or practically. In the last instance this is true of the accumulation of consumption goods in private households too, for even this tends to make the administratively re ~ulated market of labour less elastic with respect to the decisions taken by the apparatus of power. In this sense “anti-consumerism“ is a constitutive characteristic ~f these economies, even if the policy of a brutal and direct suppression of consumption needs had to be abandoned in their post-Stalinist history. There are naturally many important consequences with regard to the character of property relations, the direction of economic development, the basic determinants of social structure, etc. that follow from such a conceptio: 1 of the objective goal-function of economies of the Soviet-type which cannot be discussed within the framework of this essay. One general remark, however, perhaps should be made about the much disputed problem of the dominance of politics over economics in these societies. In view of the above considerations this domination means, first of all, that the fundamental economic relations are constituted through such an institution (the unified apparatus of power which has both in regard to its origin and its principles of actual organization an overall political character. The goal-function of economy, specific to this type of society, is therefore inherently related to, and can be articulated only in terms of, a form of social domination that is not restricted to the sphere of the economy proper, but has (in a politically institutionalized form) a global character: it embraces all forms of social interaction. On the other hand, this domination does not mean that in these societies the politically constituted top of the apparatus (the party leadership) has the arbitrary power to determine at least within the limits of material possibilities the direction of economic developments. The once constituted institutional structure again imposes its own principle of selectivity, its own “logic“ and “laws“, upon this development: though the economy has been, in a definite way, re-embedded in the social wf,ole, its “spontaneity“ has not been overcome in this society either. This economy certainly functions through an uninterrupted process of conscious) political decision-making taking the form of central “plan-commands“. But the actual options open for decisions are delimited not only by the technical-material requirements of an equilibrium, but also by the institutional requirements dictated by the existing system of social domination. And these latter iray even override the former ones. The liquidation of the vicious circle f those “irrationalities“ which constantly accompany this type of development is possible only by simultaneously dismantling the institutional structure c f power itself. The goal-function of Soviet-type economies also is objective in the sense that it cannot be ascribed to the individual bureaucrats (even at the top) as a subjective motive which directs them in their deliberations and decisions. It is a result of the working of a definite institutional structure which through a social “screening process” — imposes a specific hierarchy of preferences and priorities on decisionmaking. Therefore it is not sufficient merely to subsume the most fundamental cascs of East European societies consistently violating the principle of economic effectiveness under another general principle. To explain them one ha; also to —

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show how, and through what mechanisms, this specific historical “goal of production“ asserts and validates itself in all the seeming arbitrariness of decisions made by an apparatus with uncontrolled powers. Only in this way can one also demonstrate the interconnection between the very principle of maximization in this society and those “irrational” phenomena which accompany it and which we have schematically enumerated. The most important among these mechanisms is central bureaucratic planning itself. We cannot argue here in detail that planning as practiced in East European societies be~rs almost no relation either to its Marxian idea, or even to the everyday meaning of this term. It does not mean a forecast of basic future alternatives und an elaboration of guiding strategic schemes of action in view of present day needs and exigencies. Rather it is an integrated system of binding orders that aims to determine the essential characteristics of the economic behaviour of all subordinated units for a longer period of time. It is much more appropriate to speak not a1out planned but command economies. However, it is important to realize that the “planning” itself represents a complex social process of a definite structural-institutional type which results in determinate economic characteristics of the plans elaborated. One could characterize planning under East European conditions as a complicated process of semi-institutionalized competition and bargaining between the various horizontally and vertically articulated “bureaucracies“, je., functional C)flStituefltS of the unified apparatus of power. Most schematically this process encompasses three basic stages: (1) Making of claims (for recognized objectives, first of all for new investments, in the plan) from the side of the corresponding main administrative (functional, territorial, etc.) units a competition between the horizontally co-ordinated organization for the scarce material and budgetary funds available in the future; (2) The overall strategic decision about the basic objectives accepted and the corresponding distribution of resources undertaken by the political leadership with the collaboration of the central planning organ in the rohe of “experts“ the general Llargain struck by the main parties in competition; (3) The transformation of this decision into a balanced system of directives in a process of reiterated bargaining, but now between the hierarchically subordinated levels of corresponding bureaucracies. Each phase in this process has its own characteristics which all contribute to the structural determination of the emerging plan. Concerning the first stage the claims made upon the plan they are invariably overstated in some respects and understated in others. They are overstated a~ to the objectives themselves. The pie of national funds is a limited one. To try 10 increase their own share in it is a necessity dictated not only by the competitive power play between various bureaucracies hut also as a requirement of the task with which each bureaucracy is entrusted. Each segment of the apparatus is directly responsible, in principle, for the optimal, and, in practice, for the smooth functioning of some definite domain or region of social life. Understandably, a segment can fulfil its job more easily, the greater the resources oi-er which it disposes. It will, therefore, overvalue the beneficial effects of proposed projects of investment (or the negative consequences of their —

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non-implementation). No outright “cheating“ is necessarily involved here: these are always cases of probable estimates, and the administration concerned will (and has to) represent at least the most optimal ones. In general, a segment will always ask for more than it considers really necessary, since it knows well that, in any case, it will receive less than requested and that its “competitors‘ all do the same. But if the objectives themselves are overstated, the expecte1 costs of these investments will invariably be understated, and by the same logic. Everybody knows that the important thing is to get some project “into” the plan: to get the apparatus officially committed to it. Then not only considerations of prestige, but also those of efficiency, will, as a rule, ensure its completion, even if the original cost-estimates become severely exceeded: it would be less “economic” simply to abandon a program into which enormous sums have already been sunk. So one can always count on the central organs to “help out” in some way. From the standpoint of the apparatus as a whole, all these are surely only symptoms of an inadequate consciousness on the side of the individual bureaucrats, and they are indeed exhorted all the time to give priority to the “interests of the state“. This is undoubtedly their duty (therefore some may, from time to time, even be punished for exceedingly flagrant cases of transgression“), but it is not the task for which they are directly responsible. As a matter of fact, even if they wanted to act in this “disinterested“ spirit, they would not know how to do it: they have no systematic information about the real situation of all those fields which are not under their direct control. In fact, they can contribute to the emergence of the “general interest“ only in one way: by simultaneously over- and underestimating their claims in the manner described and therey ensuring that, in the competition for funds, all the participants behave in the same way (i.e. none of the bureaucratic units can create by “ruse“ specifically favourable start-positions for itself ). However, since this is an inherently irrational process having no chear-cut limits, how far they dare to go in this “cheating‘ as a necessary constituent of normality depends basically on their perception )f what they can get away with, that is, on the power position of the concerned bureaucracy. Even the initial claims, therefore, will he tihted in favour of organizational strength, i.e., in favour of the military, of heavy industry, of the metropolitan centres, etc., as against “real needs“ in any meaning of this term. It is the task of the central panning organ to prepare suggestions for the political top: how far and in what way can these competing claims be partially incorporated in a balanced set of objectives that takes into ac count the actual situation of the economy and the foreseeable trends in consumption at home and in foreign trade. In this respect the planning bureau itself is in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it has a direct interest in ensuring equilibrium and providing central reserves for cases of emergency: it will be responsible for the translation of the five-year plan into a balanced set of yearly objectives which cannot be done if the above conditions are not met. But, on the other hand, it is entrusted to ensure the optimal dynamics of growth under the existing conditions, and only such a policy can also provide the maximum of resources under its own “disposition” in the next round. Therefore it will again give systematic preferences to productive investments against “unproductive” ones, to investments in the first sector as against those in the second, etc.

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But the ha:,t decision between the competing claims will be made by the political leadership itself: it is the ultimate broker, without appeal. Still, it is hardly an impartial one. Most of its members are either heads of the greatest functional and territorial bureaucracies or responsible within the party for the control over their functioning. The actual ability to influence the hierarchy of institutionalised objectives is very unequally distributed in the apparatus and directly depends upon the (relatively stable) power relation between the organizations concerned. In such a way to take the most glaring example the consecutive plans will always give preference, with respect to the geographic distribution of the funds, to the few great industrial and administrative centres as against the laims made by underdeveloped or “provincial“ regions (whose heads, of course, are less important members of the apparatus), even if the unhealthy geographic concentration of economic, cultural, etc., life is a problem which the leadership itself recognizes and wants to redress. In this system, not only can social needs and interests be expressed merely insofar as they are transhatable into bureaucratic objectives, the legitimacy of which is recognized by the apparatus, but also the terms of the “bargain“ struck will be determined by the fundamental power-structure of the same apparatus. The strategic decision taken by the political elite is ultimate nobody can directly challenge it. What remains is, in a formal respect, a mere “ehaboration and breakdown” of the plan. Actually, however, this means a new process of bargaining, this time between the vertically subordinated units, and not about the objectives themselves but about the costs of their realization. In this process merely budgetary sectors and units (rehated to the “non-productive“ aspects of social life) are in a position without much clout: at best they can complain. Not so, however the various administrations representing the productive, and especially the highly centralized, sectors of the economy. Since in this field even the lowest level units who participate in this process (i.e., trusts and enterprises) are in fact monopolists with respect to some products needed for the national economy as a whole, therefore the argument “under such conditions we cannot deliver according to the plan“ carries a lot of weight. It is even often true, and the subordinate organ, as far as information is concerned, is always in a better position to make this claim than its superiors to disprove it. It also has to make some such claim, since it ought to attempt to ensure the most optimal conditions for the fulfilment of those tasks the plan specifies. And since the most important among these conditions are under the disposal of the superior state organ, now that the objectives are in principle settled, a haggling begins at all levels about the resources needed for their fulfilment. This may take various forms, but just as earhier the goal-claims themselves were systematically overstated, r c~ their costs of achievement will be. The more powerful the administration concerned (and the better the informal ties its chief bureaucrats have with the representatives of the superior organs), the more chances it has to succeed in this bargaining. In this way even the centrally posited balance will always be further tilted towards the largest, most centralized, and politically most powerful organizations, independently of the actual economic demand, not to speak about he needs of the population. Since a structured imbalance is buiht into the institutional process of economic —

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decision-making itself, phenomena of disequilibria will appear even in a re Latively short span of time. When they reach a definite level of intensity, “corrections“ become both economically and politically inevitable. Since, however, these later concern only the character of the concrete economic policy pursued, hut not the social mechanism and the institutional structure through which the furmer is elaborated and arrived at, even the firmest decision for changes becomes eroded through the same mechanisms: the “investment cycle“ begins anew. And through its working in East European societies, the “planned“ distribution and appropriation of the surplus actually accomplishes independently of the “will” of decision-makers its goal-function, the maximization of the means under the direct control of the apparatus itself within the limits of an objective t~chnica1 and a perceived political feasibility. This means that they are “shortage economies“ in the sense that they produce of these economies. As we have seen in the process of elaboration of the command system directing them, both objectives and costs become (though at different stages and in different respects) systematically overstated Actual economic (and social) demand enters into this process — in the form of bureaucratic estimates — only at its beginning; then it is inevitably inflared in an institutionally defined, welldetermined direction. The only effective checks upon both goals and costs are the ones posited by the physical availability of inputs the apparatus can mobilize. The actual restraints upon the process of growth are set, not by the structure of demand (under a given set of prices), but by the extent and “technical“ composition of available resources. In this respect economies of the Soviet type are — as argued by Kornai in great detail —- those of “resource-constraint“ as opposed to classical capitalism as a System of “demand constraints“. This means that they are “shortage economies“ in the sense that their produce —

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ard reproduce artificial shortages of production and consumption goods. Since it is only the resources which effectively delimit the demand for ~actors of productive input, every plan practically turns out to be an “overstrai aed“ one. The central organs at each level try naturally to ensure reserves for tI.e cases of “economic avaries“, and this may even be a major objective in the overall plan. But these reserves will “fly away“ from them partly in the orocess of bargaining with the subordinate units over their inflated cost-claims of plan fulfilment, partly due to the necessity to “help out“ those enterprises which are in trouble, since their investment plans were accepted because of an original underestimation of their costs. So there is never enough —

input left to outbalance those disruptions which occur inevitably because of the unpredictable changes in the external economic environment and in the consumptive behaviour at home. In this situation of unexpected insufficiencies, since no manager can be sure about the actualization of planned deliveries (while it is quite certain that he/she will be unable to procure needed elements of production in a short time in cases of various unforeseen emergencies), each will further infiate his/her demands concerning conditions of plan fulfilment even beyond the level of an operational optimum. —

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only of the material elements of production but also of labour power. Scarcities naturally result in constant disruptions of the productive supply and therefore of the production process itself. In this situation enterprises become directly interested not only in accumulating within their walls material reserves not needed immediately, but they seek to have some reservoir of labour for the inevitably occurring “rush periods” of production. Since this in its turn reduces the supply of labour in the market and therefore increases the uncertainty whether workers of a given qualification can be found at the needed time, a typical case of negative feedback develops: the greater the overmanning of enterprises, the greater the unfulfilled demand for various categories of labour on the market. An economy, however, which constrains growth only through the actual shortage of resources, does not accomplish their effective utilization. It is in fact, an economy of resource-waste, because shortage and waste necessarily presuppose and mutually condition each other. At any given level of technological and economic development, delimiting the possibility of effective substitutions, shortages of some definite factor of production mean that some other available factors that ought have been “combined” with the first remain unemployed. “Bottlenecks” concerning one type of resources result in an enforced underutilization of some other resources present. Furthermore, shortage in the economic sense cannot be identified with physical lack as such. It means that some resources are unavailable at the place and time needed. Since enterprises can “insure” themselves against the endemic occurrence of shortages only through the already described mechanisms of semi-legal “hoarding”, it may very well be, and frequently is, the case that the factor vitally necessary for one enterprise will be kept as a non-utilized reserve at some other productive unit. But since these reserves, by their very nature, have to be kept “hidden” from the higher administrative organs, and since there is no systematic vertical connection between the basic units of production themselves, the given input will remain, as a rule, non-mobilizable: that is, within the framework of the national economy, it will be both wasted (under-utilized) and in shortage, the latter necessarily causing further shortages (through the non-fulfilment of planned deliveries) and therefore further wastes, too. It is just this “vicious dialectics” of shortage and waste which specifically characterizes East European economies as one of the basic components of their ”irrationality”. They produce shortages even of what they have enough of, and nothing proves this better than the fact that unforeseeable shortages remain chronic though in its gross value the fund of unutilized reserves constantly grows in the whole economy and is (as everybody realizes) well beyond the limits of economic rationality. In abstracto there are reserves, only not of what is needed at the needed time and place. There is only one way (beyond “hoarding”) to counteract this tendency: by developing a network of personal relations through which each manager, at whatever level of hierarchy, can obtain “help” from the side of the others in case of emergencies. Thus behind the economy of “scientific planning” there burgeon the transactions of a primitive do-ut-des (give-and-take: the so-called “third economy”, which criss-crosses all the formal institutional boundaries. It just as much eliminates the worse dysfunctionalities in the actual working of the unbelievably cumbersome administrative system as helps to create them, since, by divorcing the “official”

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economic reality from the actual one, it introduces a further factor of uncontrollable accidentality which makes the real effect of the centrally taken decisions even less predictable. But this latter question of a systematic distinction in East European societies between the official and the actual reality of economic life cannot be treated in its real extent within the framework of that abstraction we have accepted up to now. In our discussion, thus far we have considered these economies as if the administrative apparatus of the state constituted the sole economic and economizing subject. The removal of this fictitious presupposition will allow ua to gain a better insight into their segmented character. From the viewpoint here introduced, East European economies represent a strangely dual character. If, in regard to the organization of production, it is a legitimate, or at least meaningful, idealizing abstraction to consider them as economies which in fundamental respects admit the action of one economic subject only, from the viewpoint of consumption they present us with the activity of millions and millions of (in principle) independent economic subjects: the individual households which attempt to maximize their incomes (income wages) and minimize (in relation to their wants) their expenditures to achieve a balance between the two, i.e., which provide a strictly economic activity. The scope of this activity is severely restricted by the fact that the state apparatus, as dominant employer and supplier of goods, essentially by its own fiat sets the conditions under which households can both derive and spend income. But as long as the whole country is not transformed into one enormous camp of labor with a strict system of rationing, as long as individuals have some choice between the administratively offered jobs (at set wages) and available consumption goods (at set prices), the economies in question necessarily represent a dual picture of administratively centralized production and atomized consumption, both having their own “subjects” following different principles of economic activity, being submitted to discrepant “logics”. The economy can function as a whole, of course, only because these two spheres are interconnected: primarily, though not exclusively, by the administratively regulated markets (or pseudo-markets) of consumption goods and labour power, respectively. These latter subordinate the economic activities of the households to the reified logic of production through a direct restriction of the conditions and extent of the supply of commodities, on the one hand, and the demand for definite kinds of labour on the other. The fact that both these markets have an essentially non-pricing character is, in principle, synonymous with the claim that they are “closed” in relation to, and separated from each other. Changes in demand for articles of consumption do not lead through a feedback mechanism of prices to a re-adjustment in the structure of production, and, therefore, to corresponding changes in the market of labour power, and vice-versa. It is this relative fragmentation which ensures that the role of market relations is restricted to distribution proper, that they exercise no directly equilibtating function between production and consumption, and so allow the former to follow the logic of social domination described earlier. There are two interconnected consequences of this state of affairs. On the one hand, under such conditions the unification of production and consumption remains incomplete. The apparatus of power and management by its commands,

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can only restrict the activities of the households (both as consumers and suppliers of labour power) but cannot determine the limited choices exercised by them in both respects. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental cause of those dysequilibria which are inherent in the functioning ofa command economy. But if these phenomena necessarily follow from the subordination of production and the whole society to a unified and separated apparatus of power, their occurrence at the same time makes the existence and functioning of this apparatus an economic necessity. For under such conditions, when the market plays no equilibrating role, it is only the “corrective” actions of the central administration which can re-establish, again and again, the relatice correspondence between the previously disjointed spheres of the economy. Yearly plans and the intermittently undertaken “modifications” of plan-directives (that is the bulk of activity of the central apparatuses of economic management) to a large extent fulfil just these functions. In this sense, by the seeming defaults of its own functioning, the apparatus constantly reproduces the conditions which make its existence necessary, in general, “bureaucracy” is no more an abnormal carbuncle, a mere parasite on the social body of Eastern societies, as the class of capitalists is under Western conditions: both are “organic” elements in their respective processes of reproduction. An economy which cannot ensure the relative balance between production and consumption, except through the administrative intervention of central organs after dysequilibria have reached overall and glaring proportions, necessarily functions in a very cumbersome and wasteful way. Its contradictions become dearer the more differentiated, decentralized, and pluralistic is the demand it has to meet therefore, they are the most pronounced in the sphere of production of consumption goods. Here the system can function in its undiluted form only so long as it imposes a most drastic dictatorship over the needs of the absolute majority of the population: an enforced (through chronic shortages) homogenization of demand at the level of bare subsistence necessities and dire poverty. The post-Stalinist stabilization of these societies, however, could take place only on the ground that the regimes concerned have incorporates the tendency toward a very slow but constant raising of living standards into the system objectives of the economy. The attendant emergence of a more differentiiated and volatile demand concerning consumption goods cannot be met, even in principle, by the pure mechanisms of a command economy: it not only constitutes one of the important stimuli toward “economic reforms”, but, at the same time, enforces a further segmentation of economic life - or at least significantly enhances those phenomena of fragmentation which never were entirely absent in these societies. At the present moment we can see in them a very uneasy, but functionally necessary, interaction and interpenetration of three “economies” which are governed by quite diverse mechanisms. The official system of command economy has naturally an absolutely preponderant and dominating position due both to its predominant economic weight and to the fact that the apparatus managing it concentrates in its hands also the political power through which it always can at least restrict the possibilities of, and set the overall conditions for the working of the “orher” economies. But this ofTicial economy, with irs rigid

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and immobile organization essentiahly depending on central signahs and commands, is, in principle, unable to provide the necessary varit ty of goods and services for consumption. With the differentiation of consump :ion it suffers a “suppiementation“ through a second economy working accordiirg to a more or less strict market and profit principle. This is the economy of private enterprises and activities which, in some of these countries, may achieve even a preponderance in some branches (especially in services, in the production and trading of semi-luxury goods — inchuding house-building — - and seasonal commodities). It is constituted not onhy by small private enterprises proper, but by the activity of co-operative peasants on their househohd plots. I‘he widespread cases ofmoonhighting among workers, and many other “grey arets“ ofeconomic activities, also behong, to a very harge extent, to its sphere. This second economy fulfills the indispensibhe function offihling in those gaps between production and consumption which are posited by the ~tructure of the official economy. In this sense it is definitely supplementary to ihe first, and its devehopment during the post-Stalinist period was and is an imrortant factor of stabilization, since it largely contributes to a better satisfaction )f consumption needs. And it plays such a rohe in more than an economic respect. by relaxing the control over legal and semi-hegal private earning activities, th apparatus has opened up channels through which a very significant part of the population can better its own lot by its own “initiative“. Since all forms of public-collective activity remained, at the same time, just as much suppressed as before, this development enormously stimulated processes of social atomization which are the precondition of the uncontested sociah domination of the ap paratus itseif. While in all these respects the existence of a second econor ~iy seems to be highly functional in East European societies, in other regards it e~ercises a deeply disturbing effect on the dominant system of economic reh ations: it both supplements the working of the official, first economy and ~ntroduces new interferences into its functioning. To begin with, its very pres nce means that there exists now a double system of wages: the officiah one and he one workers can earn (mostly after hours) through free bargaining for private activities or for those performed within the framework of private enterprises. Th s latter wage is, as a ruhe, several times higher than the former one. The understardable result is a lowering of the intensity of labor in the sphere of the official economy. Those workers who have a regular opportunity to make earnings in tFe second sector become positively interested in the bad work of their main, oflicial workplace, since disorganization allows the sparing of energy for after-hours labor, or even for making this “on the side“ during official labor time. Naturaily, the two-tier system of prices relates not only to labor hut also to a very wide range of commodities and services. The second economy fulfills its inte lrative function because it makes goods which are in short supply in the stare-conirohled market at officiah prices (and which are therefore available to the consum ~r onhy through “connections“ or by chance) dependably avaihabhe (and of more reliable quality) though at a much higher price. Consequently, this feature of the second economy reduces the “labor of purchasing“ which other‘vise wouhd be unmanageabhe. Since, however, many of these artiches and services are semihuxuries only in the perverse sense that most of the populatio cannot obtain

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them through the channels of the state economy, people have to buy them through the second economy which they can afford to do only if they also make earnin~‘s in it. So the second economy constitutes an expanding circle, more and more depressing the productivity of the first. According to a recently pub ished official estimate, more than 70% of all the wage earners in Hungary draw some income (in the absolute majority of cases supplementary to official wages) from the second economy. And the segmentation between the two can becorne so pronounced that in some countries there actuahly exists a double sysum of currercy: some goods in the GDR are available almost exchusively for West Germin marks only, while in Poland solely für American dollars. This enormous expansion ofa second economy is made possible, paradox cahly, by the fact that it is not really integrated with the first. The official ecorlomy requires this suppiementation but it is unable to provide the normal condit ions für its functioning. The real task of a second economy is to fill n the gaps between demands and supply in the sphere of consumption created hy the first cne. The logic of the command economy, however makes supplyiirg the second (with raw materials, instruments, etc.) the last in order of its own pri rities. When there occur some relevant shortages, it is, of course, the provision ng of private enterprises which will suffer first. Under such conditions the s ~cond economy couhd not function at all were its activity really determined through the legalofficial channels ofcontact with the first. But it is not: the workers who do private jobs after hours work mostly with toohs and materials stolen fro ri the factorv~ private entrepreneurs flourish because they have their “con tacts“ beginning with the respective Ministry and ending with the sahes-person ach in state-owned shops. It is this host ofsemi-legal and outright illegal activities which permits the majority of the adult population to participate actively in the second economy. The result is, however, a wide-reaching criminalization of ecoiomic life, riow considered the “normal“ state of affairs by ahmost everyone. Cn the whole, if the second economy contributes to the integration of productioii with consumption, it does so only at the price of disintegrating production its elf, at least in its subjective aspect, from the side of work-motivations. This “criminahization“ ofeconomy could never have proceeded so far were the transgressions of official rules and the by-passing of official channels not a ready a pra tice deeply embedded in the working of the first economy itsehf. And we come up here against the phenomena ofa “third economy“. Ifthe second ihls in the g~ps heft open by the official command economy primarily in the sphere of consumption, the third fills in the gaps concerning the very organizat on of production within the first economy. Ifthe second is regulated essentiahly b‘r pure market mechanisms, it is the mechanisms of an exchange of “geneialized equivihences“ and reciprocah services (better known from economic anthropohogy than :From descriptions of modern societies) that dominate transactions in this third sphere. This third economy is that of the personal-informal relations of assistance in case ofshortages and other emergencies existing mostly between the various members of the bureaucratic apparatus as we described earhier. The actua] rohe ofthese relations in the “normal“ working ofthe economy hardhy can be overestimated. Each manager, at whatever level, has to rely in his wor t on a wholc System of informal ties carefully cultivated during his whole career. On the

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other hand, the connections and transactions which constitute this third economy are 211, strictly speaking, illegal (or at least violate existing regulations c f some kind~, though they often have nothing to do with the motive of direct personal gain and are dictated by considerations of greater efficiency in the worl~ of the entrusted economic unit. Nevertheless, the fact that these activities are inrormalillegal, and so hidden, makes it impossible to differentiate the above cas~s from those of outright corruption. It is, therefore, little wonder that the second ecor omy “hooks up“ (in cases of larger private enterprises) to the firs: at the highier levels generally through the mechanisms of the third. In their post-Stahinist period of development, East European societi es have shown a marked tendency towards enhanced segmentation in the abo~e sense and, at the same time, towards the informal, uncontrohlable integratiot L of the sep~rated segments of the economy. In consequence, they have created in evergrowing cleavage between the official and the actual reality of econoriic life. Second and third economies actuahly perform a secondary redistribution of incomes and — to a lesser extent — of factors of production that goes on “in secret“. Under these circumstances, not only planning in a substantial s~nse hut also meaningful commanding becomes more and more difficult. The lorigrange consequences ofeconomic measures turn out to be completely unexpectecl for the planners themselves since they take place in an environment that does not exist for them and is radically different from their (i.e., from the ufficiahly ackaowledged) reality. A typical example of this kind occurred in Hunga y in the late sixties when everybody in charge was so convinced about the irievitable em~rgence of widespread unemployment in the wake of economic refo :ms that even some precautionary welfare measures were taken to ameliorate its social impact. As it turned out, the reforms resulted in a near catastrophic shortage of skil led labor in the largest industrial state enterprises which couhd be redressed only by introducing stop-gap measures administratively restricting the movement of abor power contrary to the whole aim and spirit of the reforms. As we have Seen, East European economies perform better the more centrahized anti hess differentiated the demand they have to meet. It is for this reison that they have their highest achievements in the military fleld (where, as a rule, the re~resentatives of the sole “consumer“, i.e., the Army, exercise a direet control over the very production process in the relevant enterprises): the di ;junction be~ween production and consumption is comphetely ehiminated. And, ~t general, this is the cause of the fact that they are abhe to solve the task of the “~ake off “, but their difficulties become more and more pronounced as they enter t ie period of “intensive“ development: they function relatively “successfuhly“ (though to state it in this way demands a rather terrifying dose of “economic ynicism“ in view of the enormous human costs of this “success“) as long as here is a re.,tricted number ofwell-defined tasks that must be solved at all costs arid can be solved, primarily, through the mobilization ofreserves oflabor power tlirough its redirection from agriculture to industry. But they get less and less able to generate growth with the increasing complexity of the economy and with the pogressive ei~ haustion of the agricuhtural reservoir of labor (at the given state of technical development), i.e., in a situation when the sustained rise in the social prductivity ol labor becomes the main condition of devehopment. The near stagnant stage

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they have reached now suggests that their institutional structure ~ as turned into a veritable economic barrier. However, this “crisis of economic growth“ prepares, under East European conditions, the ground for a social crisis as weh. These economies are no more able to provide the means for both further re-armament and für ar uninterrupted, even if very slow, rise in the hiving standards of the population. Knowing their institutional priorities leaves hittle doubt as to the question whi:h of these two sociah objectives will be dropped — even independently of tue international pohitical situation. This means, however, that the very conditions upon which the relative stabihization of these regimes in the post-Stahinist period has been based now become increasinghy eroded. The material (and perhiaps, also, the institutional) resources of this system of power are undoubtedlv vast. But with the eighties it certainly has entered a new period ofcrisis and inst ibility which, in its intensity, may even be greater than the one which fohlowed Stalin‘s death. The historical significance of Polish events consists, first of all, in the fact that they laid bare the ultimate social causes of this crisis. The Pohi~h workers have radically refused to act as a brute social force that simply moves the apparatus to proceed from the first stage of the cycle to the second one. In tliis case, a whole people has really learned from history, not simphy the “mistak~s“ of planning, but the fundamental structurah cause which makes all these pher omena possible, even necessary — the monopoly of the apparatus over all mea is and forms of social organization and contact. With the actual destruction of tliis monopoly by the “reconstitution ofcivil society“ (hut a civil society ofa new ur~pe based not ort the mute identity of interest between competitive individuals but on the voluntary solidarity within and among the various particularistic interest groups), the Pohish experiment has alsc posed a question not yet completehy answered: what type of institutionah economic arrangements can correspond to this sociah configuration and lend to it a necessary degree of stabihity? 1: is of historical significance, and, perhaps, not only für Eastern Europe, that PoJand should have the freedom to continue its important experiment.

ITALY TODAY: A CRISIS OF A NEW TYPE OF DEMOCRACY Mimmo Carrieri and Lucio Lombardo Radice Translated from Italian by Alison Anthoine

1. September 1973-May 1978: The strategies of Enrico Berlinguer and Aldo Moro, and the brief season of national solidarity. The expression “historic compromise” (compromesso storico), destined to resound loudly, was used for the first time by Enrico Berlinguer in the last of his three articles published in Rinascita as “Reflections on the Facts of Chile’’, September 28, October 5, and October 12, 1973. In fact, the article in question closed as follows: The gravity of the country’s problems, the ever-impending menaces of reactionary adventures, and the necessity of finally opening to the nation a secure path of economic development, social renewal, and democratic progress render it even more urgent and ripe that we reach what might be termed the great new ‘historic compromise’ between the forces that collect and represent the great majority of the Italian people.

The forces of which Berlinguer spoke are the popular mass organizations of Socialist, Communist, or Catholic inspiration. The problem of “a long future of united struggles and of alliances not only with the Catholic populus but also with their organizations” was continuously posed by Palmiro Togliatti from the moment he returned to Italy in 1944. Togliatti had repeatedly affirmed that “the action for an understanding with the Catholic world must be conceived as an aspect of the Italian path toward socialism”. The unity of the Socialist, Communist, and Catholic popular forces has always been one of the fundamental slogans of the Italian Communist Party (ICP): why, then, did the proposal of a “great new ‘historic compromise’” create such an uproar and rapidly put into effect a stalemate kind of situation? The tragic failure of the Chilean attempt at a democratic transformation without or against the Christian Democrats gave great force to the affirmation of Berlinguer according to which it would be entirely illusory to think that, even if the parties and the forces of the Left were able to obtain 51% of the vote and of the parliamentary seats (something that would in itself signal a great step forward in the relationships of strength between the parties in Italy), this fact would guarantee the survival and the work of a government which would be the expression of such 51%. This is why we speak not only of an ‘alternative of the left’ but of a ‘democratic alternative’.

In this strategic context, the political future of a collaboration and an understanding of the popular forces of

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became a proposal for a government of democratic solidarity to be achieved in a short time, or immediately. An immediate political proposal with an immediate political program, based on “a careful choice of the priorities and times for the social transformations”, which had to imply “the endeavor not only to avoid a collapse of the economy but rather to guarantee, even in the critical phases of passage to new social assets, the efficiency of the economic process”. In short, “a program of profound social transformations — which necessarily determines reaction of every kind from the conservative groups”, had to be effected in such a way “as not to drive vast strata of the intermediate ranks into positions of hostility”, and had to receive “in all of its phases the consent of the great majority of the population”. We have dwelt upon the formation of the strategy of the ‘historic compromise’; we will now review briefly the successes obtained by the ICP under the sign of the new proposal between May 1974 and June 1976. In May of 1974, the proposal of abrogation, by means of popular referendum, of the divorce law (which for the first time had been introduced in Italy), supported with a vehement general mobilization by the apparati of the Catholic Church and of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), was rejected by roughly 60% of the electorate. This meant not only that millions of citizens of Catholic faith had voted against the rule that the Vatican wanted to impose, but also that a consistent percentage of the Christian Democratic voters had voted against a clerical position on a civil problem due to the campaign of the powerful secretary and leader of the DC, Amintore Fanfani. In June of 1975, the regional elections brought about a real quality jump by the large increase in votes for the Left, in particular for the ICP. Consolidating power in the three traditional “red regions” (Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria), Communists and Socialists won the government of three other regions: Piedmont, Liguria, and Latium. On the wave of sensational electoral growth of the ICP “red” administrations succeeded those of center or center-left hinged on the DC in a number of large Italian cities from Turin to Naples; even the capital, Rome, would have, a year later, its first mayor in history elected from the ICP list, the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan. Finally, on 20 June 1976, there was the great electoral leap of the ICP which increased its share of the vote by roughly 7%, moving from 27% to 34%. One Italian out of three voted ICP; one could no longer govern against the Communists, nor without some kind of backing from them. The traditional strategy of the political leadership of the Christian Democratic Party, which was that of absolute and prejudicial anti-Communism, entered into complete crisis. At the end of July 1975, after a dramatic meeting of its leaders, Amintore Fanfani was forced to leave the office of Secretary General to Benigno Zaccagnini, an anti-Fascist doctor from Ravenna who enjoyed great moral prestige, and who fought during the Resistance in the “Garibaldi Brigade” commanded by the Communist partisan “Bülow“ (i.e., Arrigo Boldrini) who was in 1975, and still is today, President of the National Association of Partisans of Italy.

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The Secretary General of the DC was thus Benigno Zaccagnini and Aldo Moro became its President. The anti-Communist bloc of Fanfani was no longer set against the prospect of Enrico Berlinguer’s ‘historic compromise’ but rather Aldo Moro’s strategy of opening, of attention, of cautious looking forward to an at least temporary collaboration. We will try to indicate the fundamental features of this strategy. At the beginning of the 1960’s, Aldo Moro was the creator and builder of the so-called “opening to the left” of the DC that is part of the big political operation consisting of the passage from “centrism” to “center-left”, from the government alliance with the moderate lay parties which excluded the Italian Socialist Party (ISP) to that which, instead, privileged the Socialists and excluded the liberal right. Moro would speak of it in 1977 as a “great opening in an unexplored direction”. After the crisis of 1974/75, Moro realized the impossibility of holding on to the traditional anti-Communist prejudice. He said in Bari on 12 September 1975, while he was President of the so-called Moro-La Malfa government (DC plus Republicans): There is a fog surrounding the political future. Grave uncertainty about the realizability of a center-left government, even if radically renewed. Grave uncertainty about the formulas which included the Communist Party halfway between the Government and the opposition. It is for the political forces to declare their opinion on some kind of association of the Communist Party with the majority, keeping in mind those reasons of diversity which we have invoked on other occasions. No one can deny . . . above all today, the force and the weight of the Communist Party on the life of the Nation. No one can think, above all today, of avoiding a serious confrontation, neither superficial nor formal, with the greatest opposition force, on the content of the program and on the political sights . . .

When, two years later, on 18 November 1977, Moro spoke at Benevento on the subject: “The way toward an agreement on the program” (accordo programmatico), the government in office was that of Giulio Andreotti which stood on the abstention of the communists: Andreotti himself baptized it with the name “non sfiducia”, i.e., “not no-confidence”. What is the situation now? The situation is one of non-opposition on the institutional level. [We remember that the Communist leader Pietro Ingrao was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies with the votes also of DC representatives.] In this institutional framework of non-opposition which was brought about . . . by the historic circumstances, two facts were at stake: the agreement on the program and the permanent differentiation, also in the regime of non-opposition, between the DC and the Communist Party, which confirm themselves, even in this context, as ideally alternative parties . . . . I might say that it is a typical case of ‘parallel convergence‘ toward the government . . . but between us we have ‚indifference‘ . . . Now, in face of these facts: indifference of the political forces; crisis of the public order; tension in the nation, social-economic crisis, what answers should be given? What is the answer we have tried to give? It is the answer of the agreement on the program, which does not represent a political alliance, but represents, rather, a common assumption of responsibility in face of the enormous problems we have before us.

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Moro thus pushed the DC, all of the DC, overcoming the very strong internal resistance, to reach the second step on the “unexplored road” of a government accord with the ICP: the step which carried from the “non sfiducia” to the “accordo programmatico”. The strategies of Enrico Berlinguer and Aldo Moro, although profoundly different (we will return to this later), between June 1976 and March 1978, they were two “convergent parallels” toward a complete “democratic legitimation” of the ICP — which would have consented, in one form or another, to its association in the responsibilities of government — as a political force “indifferent” for the DC, not discriminated against a priori for reasons of principle. The next step to reach was clearly that which carries from an accordo programmatico with the ICP to a new parliamentary majority including the ICP, but leaving it out of the government. The resistance to this new step was particularly bitter in the Christian Democratic Party, of which Moro was President. Moro succeeded, at least apparently, in overcoming it, making himself the defender of the DC as a whole, even of its politicians most under discussion (it was the time of the Lockheed scandal). On 16 March 1978, while Aldo Moro was on his way to Montecitorio, home of the Chamber of Deputies, to vote in favor of the new Andreotti government supported by a parliamentary majority that included the ICP, for which he had fought with such tenacity, strategically and tactically, a “column” of Red Brigades ambushed the automobile of the President of the DC on Via Fani, killed five bodyguards, and kidnapped Aldo Moro. That same evening, the Chamber and Senate voted their confidence in the new government. The Red Brigades executed Aldo Moro on May 9, 1978. His corpse was left, with clear symbolic intent, in Via Caetani, between Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Piazza del Gesù: between the headquarters of the Communists and the Christian Democrats. 2. May 1978-December 1980: from ‘historic compromise’ to ‘democratic alternative’ — the “sharp turn” of the ICP. We have, up to this point, discussed what was tactically convergent in the political action of Enrico Berlinguer and Aldo Moro during the period of “national solidarity”. We would now like to underscore the profound strategic difference between the perspective of ‘historic compromise’ and that of ‘confrontation’ (Moro). As has clearly appeared from the quotations cited above, for Enrico Berlinguer the ‘historic compromise’ was necessarily the strategy to be adopted for a gradual and peaceful evolution of the Italian democracy toward socialism. The general historical-political framework in which the proposal of the ‘historic compromise’ was framed was that of the ‘’third path”: Experience has carried us to the conclusion . . . that today democracy is not only the terrain upon which the class adversary is forced to withdraw, but it is also the historically universal value upon which to base an original socialist society.

These were the words spoken by Enrico Berlinguer at the solemn convention in Moscow, in November 1977, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of the

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October Revolution. Democracy and socialism: a third path, different from the social-democratic path of democracy without socialism, and from the Bolshevik path of socialism without democracy. Aldo Moro, in the above mentioned speech at Benevento in December 1977, expressed his doubts on the realizability of a “third path”: There has been proposed a formula for a socialist society, indicated as the point of arrival of a political experience, which may pass through different stages, but directed toward a socialist society which declares itself democratic; and certainly the declarations made on the large themes of religious conscience, of liberty, and of social and political pluralism represent an effort to give a content to such a society. But I might say that the lines of this socialist democracy still remain indistinct since they are not expressed in any recognized model which might be referred to .... While there is no model identifying socialism and democracy, there are other clearly unacceptable models which exist nevertheless.... These are aspirations which must translate themselves into conduct, which must become reality, which must insert themselves into the context of the democracy which we conceive.

What is the conclusion of Moro? With great caution, without doubting the “sincerity” of the “aspirations” and of the “states of mind” of the Communist leadership, Aldo Moro not only did not believe in a “socialist society which declares itself ” (which could be) “democratic”. The ultimate objective of his strategy was another, completely contrary to that of the communists. Moro, too, wanted a change in the Italian democracy, but not in the socialist sense (irreversible in the final instance), which was the objective of Berlinguer. Moro wanted to eliminate the “anomaly” of the Italian democracy, with respect to the other European democracies, which was the lack of alternation between different blocs in the government (laborites and conservatives, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, and so on). To have “the democracy which we conceive”, a parliamentary democracy with alternation in the government — an always reversible alternation, not implying, therefore, qualitative structural transformations — Aldo Moro saw clearly that it was necessary, in the first place, to acknowledge the “democratic legitimacy” of the large popular opposition party of the ICP (this is what his theory of ‘indifference” means) and to carry, later, its “evolution” to an outlet of socialdemocratic nature. In such a way, after an intermediate period of cautious “grand coalition”, a possible future alternation in the government would not signify in Italy much more than the alternation between Labourites and Conservatives in the United Kingdom, or between the Social-Liberal coalition and the bloc of Christian Democrats and Social Christians in the Federal Republic of Germany. Moro sketched a large and courageous political operation which, even though stimulated by the concern about an intelligent conservation of the capitalistic regime in Italy, implied, nevertheless, the liquidation of the obtuse and corrupt “regime” introduced by the DC in Italy after 1947, after the break of De Gasperi with the national anti-Fascist unity. Moro’s idea was of an operation which would have at least led to a modernization, to a State reform, to some kind of institutional participation by the unions and the workers’ parties, at least to a real control of the workers in the government, even if a bourgeois-government. This was an operation which the Red Brigades had to cut off from their

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perspective of “so much the worse, so much the better”, in order to hope to reach the contrary result they pursued, that of the “fascistization” of government and State. It was an operation which the men of the “DC regime”, the power-groups spread out like cancerous cells in the Party and the institutions, could not tolerate for long. The Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro; the conservatives and reactionaries, in the party of which he was President liquidated his political strategy. Ours is a chronicle of political plans, not a chronicle of facts. For this reason we do not stop at indicating the outlets of the real restoration, which occurred in the Christian Democratic Party after the death of Moro and ended at the Congress of December 1979, that removed Zaccagnini from the Secretariat of the Party to which Flaminio Piccoli was raised, and put into the minority the political heirs of Moro with the union of all the nostalgic “correnti” (organized groups) of the “regime” around the so-called “preamble” proposed by Carlo Donat Cattin, representative and leader of the “wildest” anticommunism. Instead, we would like to focus on a point which does not appear to be sufficiently explored by the Italian political scholars, which is precisely that the strategy of the ‘historic compromise’ had entered its crisis, had already started — so to speak — its tail spin, during the period of “national solidarity”, as a result of the strategy and tactics of Moro and Andreotti, and that the subsequent deep involution of the DC did nothing other than accelerate its crisis, forcing the ICP into its “sharp turn” (sterzata) of November 1980, to which we shall return. The decisive proof of our assertion seems, to us, to be the very bad, and in some areas disastrous, results of the ICP in the administrative elections on May 1978, shortly after Aldo Moro’s murder. What happened in the two years of „non sfiducia“ and “accordo programmatico”, in the first months of the ICP participation in the parliamentary majority that supported the (ugly) Andreotti government, elected to face the emergency of Moro’s kidnapping, without any appreciation of its composition? Despite the efforts of the Secretary and the majority of the Central Committee to emphasize that the ICP would remain a “party of struggle” (“partita di lotta”) even though becoming a “party of government” (“partita di governo”), during those years and months an overvaluation of (often, an exclusive attention to) institutional political summit accords spread through the regional and local levels. The concern about “legitimization” ended up being a restraint on the struggles, on popular mobilization, on prompt and open criticism of bad government. The ICP’s passage from the policy of “national solidarity”, meaning government with the DC, to the policy of “democratic alternative”, meaning government without the DC in which the ICP would play a directing rather than a subordinate role, was slow and difficult, and it implied internal discussions. We will mention only a few dates: December 1978: The ICP decides to leave the majority of national solidarity. New elections are necessary, two years before the end of the term of the legislature that began in 1976. June-July 1979: The ICP experiences a notable reduction in percentages, from a total of 34% to 30%, in both the national elections and the elections for the

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European Parliament. December 1980: The ICP Direction releases a statement announcing what Enrico Berlinguer would call a “sharp turn” (“sterzata”) a few weeks prior to the meeting of Central Committee which ratified the statement of the Direction. It is the passage from the strategy of “national solidarity” to that of “democratic alternative”. It is worth noting that a few weeks before the “sharp turn”, at an earlier meeting of the Central Committee, the affirmation of Pietro Ingrao that the historical period of “national solidarity” was to be considered ended was sharply criticized by, among others, Luciano Barca, editor of Rinascita. Two facts pushed the ICP: the enormous oil scandal involving the leadership of the State controllers (“Guardia di Finanza”), and the total failure of government and the state apparatus in facing the earthquake of November 23 in the southern regions. The damages of the so-called “DC-regime”, or “DC system of power”, became terribly evident; the “sharp turn” was commanded by the facts themselves. 3.

The scenarios for Institutional Reform

To simplify classification, we will describe the three principal phases of the Italian institutional debate. Phase One. People started to speak of a Second Republic and, in general, of changes relevant to the institutional settlement at the beginning of the 1970’s, when the growth of social conflict and the weight of the Left, accompanied by an increase in participation and in unsatisfied demands, put into crisis the coalition governments based upon the exclusion of the Communists. A number of conservative sectors (for example, a group of “presidentialist” Deputies of various tendencies collected around the Christian Democrat Ciccardini), worried about insuring the continuity of the regime, advanced proposals for institutional modifications which were seen as a way to block changes already in effect. They tried to avoid the problem of consensus, which is a prerequisite for stability, in order to find an artificial simplication of the real elements of the situation. The institutional mechanisms would have had to serve to hold up the weakness of the governments through a constitutional amendment which would provide for the switch from a parliamentary to a presidential form of government. The expression “Second Republic” thus refers to a modification of the pact upon which the Italian Republic was based: the agreement between the fundamental political forces which was expressed in the Constitution of 1948. A presidential system, as intended by original promoters, would have simultaneously permitted a long exclusion of the left from power (a long-term center-right majority was imagined) and a reinforcement of the government leadership at the expense of the society: what was anticipated was a “reduction” in the authority of the social complex. In reality, these ideas never appeared very significant. Indeed, they were minority views even within the moderate and conservative forces, and no party, not even the Christian Democrats, ever proposed them in an official manner. Moreover, these ideas presupposed the maintenance of a secure majority of the center-right which the elections in the mid-1970’s put into question, and they

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didn’t address the problem of the procedures for constitutional review which require a two-thirds majority of both Houses of parliament. In the meantime, on the “material constitution” level, effects very different from these were unfolding: the institutional system was becoming more flexible and collected new political subjects. Thus, people spoke of institutional pluralism, referring not only to the decentralization in effect (introduction of regional rule, but also neighborhood councils) which was creating a network of elective assemblies, but also to the distribution of informal powers which expressed the citizens’ need to participate (from spontaneous committees to factory councils which sought a plan for union control of production). Phase Two. The scenario changed and new factors arose around the middle of the decade, in particular after the elections of June 20, 1976. For the first time, the parties of the Left, who had, until then, always supported adherence to Constitution, began to think that the system provided by the framers of the Constitution did not adequately allow for a policy of reform. It was the Socialists, and, in particular, a number of intellectuals in the Socialist field (supported by the Party), who advanced proposals for the reform of the power structure and the electoral system, based upon the choice of a presidential republic built on the French model, having its basis in a two-round majority electoral system. The expressed goal of these proposals was that of favoring the conditions of the alternation between parties and/or contrasting coalitions in such a way as to block the propensity (which, according to them, came out of the majorities of national solidarity) toward the “associative democracy”, and to accellerate evolution toward a government of the Left. The less stated, but tightly intertwined, intent was to restore a greater political and electoral space to the Socialist Party. This goal could be pursued by causing the failure of the “historic compromise”, which, in its application, did not seem to offer much space to the ISP, and by causing a rebalancing within the Left between the two principal parties in a way favorable to the Socialists. This assumption was based upon the presupposition that the mechanisms for alternation would help the Socialists (as was happening in France), as far as the shifting of power between sides of different orientation was considered possible and organic, because their ideology and programs, although opposite, would not question the fundamental values of the system. From here the ISP insists, controversially, on the lasting “anomaly” of the ICP with respect to a governmental legitimization in the political systems of the West. In this exception alone, the idea of a Second Republic takes on a positive light because it refers to institutional conditions for the overcoming of a blocked system. During this period, the sallies into this terrain by the Christian Democrats were few; other than from the usual Ciccardini, they came from representatives of the “dorotei” like Piccoli and Bisaglia. These efforts seemed halfhearted and useful to related controversies. They had the apparent goal of buttressing the declining center of the DC in the party system by means of electoral reform, plus that of giving credit to the will to govern during the closing phase of the national solidarity, by showing that the DC was able to do without the ICP. But scholars raised doubts about the practicability of the Socialist proposals with respect to their capacity to produce the desired results. On one side it was

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said that the presidential republic had a leadership vice which contrasts with the tendencies to differentiate between political systems: the same proponents of the theory took care to assure a network of social autonomies and “counter-powers”. On another side, it had to be noted that “we cannot avoid the observation that the two-round majority system, should it be applied in Italy, would impose a traumatic simplification of the Italian political spectrum, cancelling out the representatives of nearly 30% of the voters, and would offer to the Christian Democrats a crushing absolute majority”.1 These reforms would, therefore, lead to a great reduction of the pluralism now present in Italian society. Moreover, many people consider proportional representation to be the essence of the democratic system. Alternation would not be achieved, rather the DC would be reinforced by drawing the moderate and conservative votes, and the Communists, as much as they would be penalized by the electoral system, would not be reshuffled within the Left; instead, they would run the risk of remaining the only organized force of the Left. The entire discussion of state reform thus takes on the aspect of a trial balloon, useful for giving a characterization to the ISP and for building a new image for it after the deterioration of the center-left period, legitimizing the new leadership rather than being identified with potentially operative instruments of intervention. The institutional processes, in effect, in this period, appear to be marked by different tendencies. In the face of the Christian Democratic management of institutions, which in the Moro strategy foresees a decomposition of the conflicts in order better to control them (particularly in the public mediation structures), there is the Communist strategy based on the centrality of the elective assemblies and, in particular, on the “centrality of Parliament”. This expression refers principally to two objectives: first, to restore the real power to the hands of the elected representatives, as an expression of the sovereignty of the people, by inverting the expropriation practiced by more restricted or informal decision centers; second, to make the elective assemblies the center of the social life of the country in which the principal political demands flow together and are coordinated. The limits of this formulation are the core of the adjustments that the Communists are making in their institutional strategy. Parliament, despite producing various important laws, has shown a deficit in responses to problems due to its own functional defects (procedural holdups due to, for example, strict bicameralism) and to an overloading of tasks (little decentralization and insufficient coordination with the government whose lack of reform causes delays and indecision in legislative action). Phase Three. After the political elections in June 1979, the speeches on institutional reform continue to hiccup along, almost always fragmentary and episodic, but in a framework of problems which appear misplaced. The key word around which the political game is played is “governability”, which is used within the new center-left collaboration mostly as an equivalent for stability and efficiency in general rather than in reference to government efficiency in particular. The increasing importance assumed by the debate on institutions is justified by objective evidence which involves all of the political forces: if the crisis of governability, as a crisis of consensus and legitimacy, affects all of the democratic

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countries of Western capitalism, in Italy it assumes characteristics of particular gravity due to the abuse of the institution, accompanied by a strong decline in the efficiency of the state apparatus, in particular that of the executive branch as seen in the delays after the earthquake of November 1980. Thus, two different elements intertwine: on one side, the increased dependence of the society on the State, and, on the other, the society’s increasing mistrust of the State’s ability to manage. The seriousness of the crisis was evidenced with worried statements of Communist representatives: “if we really want to indicate what is in danger, that it isn’t only the future of governments and majorities, and not even, strictly speaking, in this country. It is something much more . . . . Being menaced is a group of convictions on the value of democracy, on the possibility of living and governing by relying on the will of the people, on the free expression of this will, and on the certainty of the law“.2 For these reasons even the Communists think about specific remedies of an institutional nature which would insure greater governmental efficiency, but would still be suited to precise goals, for example, the reform of the parliamentary regulations and a more clearly defined plan for government, accompanied by an increase in political responsibility of the Prime Minister and the reorganization of the Ministers. Constitutional amendments might also be necessary, but amendments (as in the case of a monocameral reform of Parliament) which would adjust, but not damage, the original rationale of the framers of the Constitution. Indeed, according to the ICP, the constitutional pact remains the principal point of united reference present in Italian society, and to alter the rules of the game to which it refers “could mean damaging its legitimacy”. The Communists differentiate their analysis and their remedies from those of the other political forces because they deem insufficient both the statements which lead to the reinforcement, exclusively, of the powers of the central organs (who can choose which social demands to address, because of a strengthening of the executive branch against the legislative branch), as well as the solutions which seek to put into the political system, with an entirely positive valuation, all the new political needs without worrying about the instruments of satisfaction and selection of the requests. The strategies of the other parties are also changing. While the DC denounces uncertainties and the inadequacy of projects in the face of the aggravation of the institutional crisis, the Socialists are still the most active on this front. They had to take notice of the failure of the attempt to rebalance the relationships of force on the Left with the election of 1979, and are induced to question their own traditional position in order to find a political space that would increase the value of their role. This seems assured, for the short-term, by a renewed collaboration with government to the exclusion of the Communists. This allows the obtaining of various types of benefits in a proportion greater than the electoral power of the party, adding weight to the Socialist contribution to the formation of the coalition. This position leads the Socialists to a gradual abandoning of alternation as a political prospect and institutional mechanism. The reference to the German model is gaining influence in the Socialist theories and proposals as a factor in the forecasting of measures which would create stability in the coalitions, such as the so-called constructive no-confidence vote which would discourage extended

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crises. As a parameter of electoral reform, the “barrier clause”, which raises to 5% the number of votes necessary to obtain parliamentary representation, seems to adapt itself to the hypothesis of a collection of intermediary lay forces around a Socialist pole. If this were to occur, the participation of the ISP would become necessary for any coalition government (as happens for the German Liberals), those hinged on the DC as well as those which might, in the future, be based on the ICP. This is the idea of the grand reform (an expression which has really remained very generic) proposed by the ISP’s Secretary, Craxi: “a grand reform is necessary, possible, urgent. The new process of reform must embrace the institutional field, the economic one, the area of social relations. We must arrest the decline of the institutions, the dispersive spontaneity in economics, the dangerous confusion in the area of social relations. Thus, institutional reforms are also necessary, those which would lead to revision of the Constitution, legislative interventions, revision of regulations, choices of organizational policy, and consequent administrative measures. The structure of the Constitution must not be considered untouchable except in the principles and values which define its deeply democratic character”.3 Even in relation to these trends, observers have underlined the difficulty of their being put into effect: the simplification of the political system around a tripolar system is based on the adhesion of the same political forces, whose autonomous identity comes into question (currently in the Italian parliament the Republican, Social Democratic, and Liberal Parties have less than 5% each of the vote), without it being clear what advantages they can draw from it. Rather than produce innovation and institutional changes, these proposals serve as a political signal of the prospect of a socialist center, which implies the ISP’s abandonment of the problem of the substantial remixing of the power relationships and their acceptance of the role as a third force in the system, accompanied by the desire to take advantage of their position. The first months of 1981 were also characterized by another politicalinstitutional hypothesis, the so-called Visentini Proposal, advanced in rather imprecise journalistic form by the President of the Republican Party, Bruno Visentini: “My project for efficient government aims at an objective of constitutional consolidation, that of reintegrating the executive and legislative power of the Republic in the roles and functions which limited party leadership have reduced through arbitrary usurpations . . . . The institutional deviations are by now obvious to everybody. The power which derives from the public functions is now exercised in too many different cases, not for general interest but rather as an instrument for only one side . . . .” 4 Visentini appears to be the spokesman for the increasingly large part of the public which can no longer tolerate the crisis of representation and the degeneration of the party system: he interprets the distance felt by much of the “modern” and entrepreneurial middle class from the elements of state management as practiced by the relative majority party. Visentini does not propose a modification of the Constitution, or specific institutional reform, but rather a reshuffling of the weight of the party leaderships in the institutional dialectic and a reinforcement of the professionalism of those who hold public office. Rather, he proposes a homogeneous government based on a clear program, but does not specify the

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elements upon which it might be possible to build a more united and efficient government, nor the forces which might support it. 4.

Some observations on the problem of institutional reform

The judgment usually made on the state of the discussion is not very favorable: sporadic interventions, made more to appeal to fantasy and to attract attention rather than serve as a systematic strategy for reform. It is, above all, a judgment of method. When these proposals are introduced, it is necessary to define clearly the goals to be pursued, the possible benefits (and the eventual costs), and the most suitable instruments available; in sum, what is needed is a much more clear expression of policy. In addition, the characteristics of the institutional engineering should be precisely set out. Often this is presented like a general panacea or is considered with a prejudiced refusal. Institutional engineering can modify and rationalize a number of structures. It seems less likely, however, that it will change political behavior, as the Socialist proposals have the ambition of doing. Rather, it is a source for the estimation of technical feasibility as well as forseeable effects. Another methodical point, rarely considered thus far, should be inserted with respect to the Italian situation. The constitutional structure is a delicate mechanism endowed with its own particular organic unity. They should look not only to fixed points, but to the function of the entire mechanism, taking care that there not be any inconsistency between the individual parts and the system as a whole. On the merits of the possible proposals, first a word of caution. Relevant modifications of the institutional system, which is based on the balance and convergence of the principal political forces who built it, must obtain the consensus of all of the fundamental forces in order not to alter the balance. “The change of the rules of the game in a political system can be the effect of the rather generalized agreement between the players who look forward to a goal of greater functionality . . . without there necessarily being specific and forseeable advantages. In this case, in the Italian context, we would naturally have an agreed transition to the Second Republic if proposed and realized reform substantially move away from the current constitutional model.”5 This means that proposals to the advantage of only one of the fundamental political actors that penalize the others are not practicable, and that those which have as their goal a political objective (such as alternation) rather than a benefit considered acceptable by everybody cannot advance. This means that a substantial understanding can be found around an increase in the functioning of the structures from which the yield of the system might improve. One reform which is not very costly and which would guarantee rapid proceedings and decisions would be to change to the monocameral system. Another positive reform would be to reduce the number of members of parliament, as has been requested by many, including the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Communist Nilde Jotti. Yet another reform would give more responsibility to the Prime Minister and reduce the number of ministers and undersecretaries, only the most important of which would be permanently

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retained. For Italy this would be a very important reform because it would modify the very method of government. 5. Conclusions: The crux of the “Italian situation” is the pending possibility of a socialist transformation of society by democratic means. The eight months of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 and the three years in Chile from September 1970 to September 1973 concretely posed, not just in theory, but in the “experimental laboratory” of history, the problem of the possibility of building a socialism within liberty. The two experiences posed the problem in a complete way, addressing it from both sides. Indeed, the attempt led by Dubcek had as its goal the democratic transformation of a society with a socialist structure while still retaining the socialism, while that led by Allende aimed toward the socialistic transformation of a society with democratic institutions while still retaining the democracy. Dubcek wanted to add liberty to socialism and Allende socialism to liberty. The tragic interruption of those two attempts had as a decisive element outside interference: the military invasion by troops from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia and the military coup incited by power groups tied to American imperialism in Chile. That those attempts correspond to profound internal necessities for democratic development of authoritarian socialism, on one side, and to socialistic development of bourgeois democracy, on the other, appears to be confirmed by the new course of socialism in Poland starting with the “Baltic summer” of 1980 as compared with the Soviet system of “real socialism”, on the side, and by the path followed by the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, from the time that it became a government of national unity, after the liquidation of the long dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty in July 1979. Once again, in each case, in the face of the socialist orientation of liberty in Nicaragua and of the democratic development of socialism in Poland, the current political leadership of the two superpowers wants to eliminate the anomalies: to repolish in Warsaw the monolithic state socialism, and in Managua a “strong” bourgeois democracy, if not indeed a Duarte dictatorship. Today, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union must deal in a world that is no longer bipolar, no longer divided into neatly divided camps within which the will of the superpower is power. Nicaragua, for example, is supported by the Socialist International and thus by continental Western Europe, which is winning its own autonomy and promotion in the context of the Atlantic Alliance. Poland in renewal can also count on the full solidarity of the European left, the eurosocialists and eurocommunists, and on that not only of the Catholic Church, but of the Catholic and Christian world in all of its pacificist components of charity and justice for the oppressed. Further, even in Latin America the liberation movement of the oppressed has its own practical and theoretical point of force in the „base communities“ and in the „theology of liberation“: in the Nicaraguan government of unity there are three ministers who are Catholic priests. Returning to Italy, it is well known that the actual power of the Italian Communist Party, the largest and most influential in the Western world, and its

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capacity for alliance around its view of the democratic path to socialism, has “always” worried the United States administrations, whether they be Democratic or Republican. It is probable that in the new Reagan administration, just as occurred in Carter’s, there might be perplexities or even contrasts on the possibility of the “alternation” of the office of Prime Minister between Christian Democrats and Socialists. It is certain that there is, and will be, a harsh and solid aversion and opposition to the notion of such an “alternative”. The difference between “alternation” and “alternative” is anything but a game of words, a subtlety of political semantics. Rather, it has to do with the basic differene between two notions for renewal and defense of democracy in Italy, of how to face the current crisis. Even though in new forms, what we have said above in comparing Enrico Berlinguer’s strategy of “historic compromise” and Aldo Moro’s of “confrontation” remains valid. “Alternation” means a normalization of the democratic “game” in Italy: reversible periodical replacement of the political leadership which carries significant changes but no “fundamental reform”. “Alternative” means, rather, the beginning of profound and irreversible transformations of the entire structure with the maintenance and development of pluralism, but understood as a plurality of forces and ideas that confront each other as they evolve, not a „back and forth“ of government to opposition and vice versa with parties after all unchangeable, always the same. The democratic alternative is a necessity of life for Italian democracy. No other way out of the crisis exists. Nor does there exist the possibility of “freezing” the situation. Immovability is impossible; the desire not to change, as we have already seen, leads to an ever more devastating degradation of the institutions. Moreover, there is the danger of a wearing out of the political conscience of the Italian citizens, in the form of delusion, fatigue, and general lack of faith. We are referring to a danger that has its first manifestations in an incipient, measurable decline in the percentage of voters, which still remains among the highest, if it is not in fact the highest, in Europe, and in an incalculable fall of passion and basic participation in the public cause. Nevertheless, the contradiction — between the resistance to change and the moralizing of the DC and the governments it leads, and the expression of conscience and the idealistic orientation of the citizens — continues to be very strong.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

G. Pasquino, “Suggerimenti scettici egli inzegmiri elittoreli”, Il Mulino, n.5, 1979, p. 771. P. Jegzao, Introduction to Seminar, “Governo e Parlamento nella crisi della società italiana“, 12-13 January 1981. Thesis for the 42nd Congress of the ISP (April 1981), p. 20. Interview of Visentini, “Le mie riforme”, La Repubblica, January 3, 1981. G. Pasquino, “Riflessioni sulle riforme politiche istituzionali”, Il Mulino, No. 1, 1981.

FOUCAULT ON MODERN POWER: EMPIRICAL INSIGHTS AND NORMATIVE CONFUSIONS Nancy Fraser For the past several years, Michel Foucault has been theorizing about and practicing a new form of politically engaged reflection on the emergence and nature of modernity. This reflection, which Foucault calls “genealogy”, has produced some extremely valuable results. It has opened up some new areas of inquiry and problematized some new dimensions of modernity; as a result, it has made it possible to broach political problems in fruitful, new ways. But Foucault’s work is also beset by difficulties. It raises a number of important philosophical and political questions which it is not, as it stands now, equipped to answer. This paper aims to survey the principal strengths and shortcomings of Foucault’s work and to provide a balanced assessment of it. Most generally, it is my thesis that Foucault’s valuable accomplishment consists of a rich empirical account of the early stages in the emergence of some distinctively modern modalities of power. This account yields some important insights into the nature of modern power. These insights, in turn, have political significance in that they suffice to rule out some rather widespread political orientations as inadequate to the complexities of power in modern society. For example, Foucault’s account establishes that modern power is “productive” rather than negating. This suffices to rule out liberationist politics which presuppose that power is essentially repressive. Similarly, Foucault’s account demonstrates that modern power is “capillary”, that it operates at the lowest extremities of the social body in everyday social practices. This suffices to rule out state-centered and economist political praxes since these praxes presuppose that power is located essentially in the state or economy. Finally, Foucault’s genealogy of modern power establishes that such power touches people’s lives more fundamentally through their social practices than through their beliefs. This, in turn, suffices to rule out political orientations aimed primarily at the demystification of ideologically distorted belief systems. This is not to suggest that the sole importance of Foucault’s account of the nature and emergence of modern forms of power is the negative one of ruling out inadequate political orientations. More positively, it is that Foucault enables us to understand power very broadly, and yet very finely, as anchored in the multiplicity of what he calls “micropractices”, the social practices which comprise everyday life in modern society. This positive conception of power has the general but unmistakable implication of a call for a “politics of everyday life”. These, in general, are what I take to be Foucault’s principal accomplishments and contributions to the understanding of modernity. They were made possible, it seems, by Foucault’s use of his unique genealogical method of social and 272

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historical description. This method involves, among other things, the suspension of the standard modern liberal normative framework which distinguishes between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of power. Foucault brackets those notions, and the questions they give rise to, and concentrates, instead, upon the actual ways in which power operates. As I have said, Foucault’s suspension of the problematic of legitimacy has unquestionably been fruitful. It is what enables him to look at the phenomenon of power in interesting new ways and, thereby, to bring to light important new dimensions of modernity. But, at the same time, it has given, or is likely to give, rise to some grave difficulties. For example, it has been or may be supposed that Foucault has given us a value-neutral account of modern power. Or alternatively, since this does not square with the obvious politically engaged character of his writing, that he has some alternative normative framework to the suspended one. Or since none is readily apparent, that he has found a way to do politically engaged critique without the use of any normative framework. Or, more generally, that Foucault has disposed altogether of the need for any normative framework to guide politics. Clearly a number of these suppositions are mutually incompatible. Yet Foucault’s work seems simultaneously to invite all of them. He tends to assume that his account of modern power is both politically engaged and normatively neutral. At the same time, he is unclear as to whether he suspends all normative notions or only the liberal norms of legitimacy and illegitimacy. To make matters worse, Foucault sometimes appears not to have suspended the liberal norms after all, but rather to be presupposing them. These, then, are what I take to be the most serious difficulties pertaining to Foucault’s work. They appear to stand in a rather curious relationship to the strengths I have mentioned; it seems that the very methodological strategies which make possible the empirically and politically valuable description of power are intimately tied up with the normative ambiguities. I propose to explore these issues in the following manner: first I shall give an account of Foucault’s genealogical method, including the suspension of the liberal normative framework of legitimacy. Then I shall given an account of Foucault’s historical insights concerning the nature and origin of modern power which the genealogical method has made possible. Next, I shall briefly discuss the valuable political implications of the view of modern power which emerges. And, finally, in the fourth and last section of the paper, I shall discuss the difficulties pertaining to the normative dimensions of Foucault’s work. I The Genealogical Method and the Bracketing of the Problematic of Legitimacy Following Nietzsche, Foucault calls the form of his reflection on the nature and development of modern power “genealogy”.1 What he means by this can best be

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approximated at first negatively, in contrast to a number of other approaches to the study of cultural and historical phenomena. Genealogy represents a break, for example, with semiology or structuralism which analyzes culture in terms of systems of signs.2 Instead it seeks to conceive culture as practices. Furthermore, genealogy is not to be confused with hermeneutics, which Foucault understands (no doubt anachronistically) as the search for deep hidden meanings beneath language, for the signified behind the signifier. Genealogy takes it as axiomatic that everything is interpretation all the way down,3 or to put it less enigmatically, that cultural practices are instituted historically and are therefore in a sense arbitrary or contingent, that is to say, ungrounded except in terms of other prior contingent, historically instituted practices. Next, it is Foucault’s claim that genealogy is opposed to critique of ideology. Again, his understanding of that enterprise is somewhat crude; he means that genealogy does not concern itself with evaluating the contents of science or systems of knowledge, or, for that matter, with systems of beliefs at all. Rather it is concerned with the processes, procedures, and apparatuses whereby truth, knowledge, belief are produced, with what Foucault calls the “politics of the discursive regime” 4 Lastly, Foucault claims that genealogy is to be distinguished from history of ideas. It does not seek to chronicle the continuous development of discursive content or practices. On the contrary, it is oriented to discontinuities. Like Thomas Kuhn, Foucault assumes that there is a plurality of incommensurable discursive regimes, each supported by its own correlated matrix of practices, and that these regimes succeed one another historically. Each regime includes its own distinctive objects of inquiry, its own criteria of well-formedness for statements admitted to candidacy for truth and falsity, its own procedures for generating, storing, and arranging data, its own institutional sanctions and matrices.5 It is the whole nexus of such objects, criteria, practices, procedures, institutions, apparatuses, and operations which Foucault means to designate by his term ‘power/knowledge regime’. This term thus covers in a single concept everything that falls under the two distinct Kuhnian concepts of paradigm and disciplinary matrix. But, unlike Kuhn, Foucault gives this complex an explicitly political character. Both the use of the term ‘power’ and, more subtly, that of the term ‘regime’ convey this political coloration. Foucault claims that the functioning of discursive regimes essentially involves forms of social constraint. Such constraints and the manner of their application vary, of course, along with the regime. But they typically include such phenomena as the following: the valorization of some statement forms and the concomitant devaluation of others; the institutional licensing of some persons as being entitled to offer knowledge-claims and the concomitant exclusion of others; procedures for the extraction of information from and about persons involving various forms of coercion; and the proliferation of discourses oriented to objects of inquiry which are, at the same time, targets for the application of social policy.6 Their obvious heterogeneity notwithstanding, all of these are instances of the ways in which social constraint, or in Foucault’s terms “power”, circulates in and through the production of discourses in society. What Foucault is interested in when he claims to be studying the genealogy of power/knowledge regimes should now be clear. Roughly speaking, this will be

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the holistic and historically relative study of the formation and functioning of incommensurable networks of social practices involving the mutual interrelationship of constraint and discourse. Foucaultian genealogy is obviously a unique and original approach to culture. It groups together phenomena which are usually kept separate and separates phenomena which are usually grouped together. It does this by adhering or claiming to adhere to a number of methodological strategies which can be likened to bracketings.7 Bracketing, of course, is not Foucault’s term, and, given its association with the phenomenological tradition to which he is so hostile, he would doubtless reject it. Nevertheless, the term is suggestive of the sort of studied suspension of standard categories and problematics which he practices. It should already be apparent, for example, that Foucault’s approach to the study of power/knowledge regimes suspends the categories truth/falsity or truth/ideology. It suspends, that is, the problematic of epistemic justification. Foucault simply does not take up the question of whether the various regimes he studies provide knowledge that is in any sense true or warranted or adequate or undistorted. Instead of assessing epistemic contents, he describes knowledge production procedures, practices, apparatuses and institutions.8 This bracketing of the problematic of epistemic justification is susceptible of a variety of construals. It can be seen as strictly heuristic and provisional and, therefore, as leaving open the questions whether such justification is possible and, if so, in what it consists. Alternatively, it can be seen less minimally as a substantive, principled commitment to some version of epistemological cultural relativism. The textual evidence is contradictory, although the preponderance surely lies with the second, substantive construal. Be that as it may, Foucault’s views on epistemic justification are not the primary concern here. More to the point is another sort of bracketing, one which pertains to the problematic of normative justification. Foucault claims to suspend such justification in his study of power/knowledge regimes. He says he does not take up the question of whether or not the various constraint-laden practices, institutions, procedures, and apparatuses he studies are legitimate or not. He will refrain from problematizing the normative validity of power/knowledge regimes.9 A number of very important questions arise concerning the nature and extent of Foucault’s bracketing of the normative. What exactly is its intended scope? Does Foucault intend to suspend one particular normative framework only, viz., the framework of modern liberal political theory whose central categories are those of right, limit, sovereignty, contract, and oppression? This framework distinguishes between the legitimate exercise of sovereign power which stays within the limits defined by rights, on the one hand, and the illegitimate exercise of such power which transgresses those limits, violates rights, and is thus an oppressive power, on the other hand.10 When Foucault excludes the use of the concepts legitimacy and illegitimacy from genealogy, does he mean to exclude only these liberal norms? Or alternatively, is Foucault’s bracketing of the normative rather broader? Does he intend to suspend not only the liberal framework but every normative

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framework whatsoever? Does he mean he will bracket the problematic of normative justification simpliciter? In either case, how do Foucault’s proclaimed intentions square with his actual practice of genealogy? Whatever he claims to be doing, does his work in fact suspend all political norms or only the liberal ones? Furthermore, whatever the scope of the bracketing, what is its character? Is Foucault’s bracketing of the normative merely a methodological strategy, a temporary heuristic aimed at making it possible to see the phenomena in fresh new ways? If so, then it would leave open the possibility of some subsequent normative assessment of power/knowledge regimes. Or alternatively, does Foucault’s bracketing of the normative represent a substantive, principled commitment to cultural, ethical relativism; to the impossibility of normative justification across power/knowledge regimes? These questions have enormous importance for the interpretation and assessment of Foucault’s work. But the answers, by and large, do not lie ready to hand in his writings. To begin to untangle them it will be necessary to look more closely at the actual concrete use he makes of his genealogical method.

II The Genealogy of Modern Power Foucault’s empirical study of modernity focuses on the question of the nature and emergence of distinctively modern forms of power. It is his thesis that modernity consists, at least in part, in the development and operation of a radically new regime of power/knowledge. This regime comprises procedures, practices, objects of inquiry, institutional sites, and, above all, forms of social and political constraint which differ markedly from those of previous regimes. Modern power is unlike earlier powers, according to Foucault, in that it is local, continuous, productive, capillary, and exhaustive. This is so, in part, as a consequence of the circumstances in which it arose. Foucault claims that the modern power/knowledge regime was not imposed from the top down, but developed only gradually in local, piecemeal fashion largely in what he calls “disciplinary institutions” beginning in the late 18th century. A variety of “micro-techniques” were perfected by obscure doctors, wardens, and schoolmasters in obscure hospitals, prisons, and schools, far removed from the great power centers of the ancien regime. Only later were these techniques and practices taken up and integrated into what Foucault calls “global or macrostrategies of domination”.11 The disciplinary institutions were among the first to face the problems of organization, management, surveillance, and control of large numbers of persons. They were the first, that is, to face the problems which would eventually become the constitutive problems of modern politics. Hence the tactics and techniques they pioneered are, in Foucault’s view, definitive of modern power.

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Foucault describes a variety of new disciplinary micro-tactics and practices. The one for which he is best known is le regard, or the gaze. The gaze was a technique of power/knowledge used by administrators to manage their institutional populations by means of visibility. They organized these populations so that they could be seen, known, surveilled, and thus controlled. The new visibility was of two kinds, according to Foucault: synoptic and individualizing. Synoptic visibility was premised on architectural and organizational innovations which made possible an intelligible overview of the population and of the relations among its elements. It is exemplified in the design of prisons after Bentham’s Panopticon (rings of backlit cells encircling a central observation tower), in the separation of hospital patients according to their diseases, and in the arrangement of students in a classroom space articulated according to rank and ability. Individualizing visibility, on the other hand, aimed at exhaustive, detailed observation of individuals, their habits and histories. Foucault claims that this visibility succeeded in constituting the individual for the first time as a case, simultaneously a new object of inquiry and a new target of power.12 Both kinds of gaze, synoptic and individualizing, were micropractices linking together new processes of production of new knowledges with new kinds of power. They combined scientific observation of population and individuals, and hence a new “science of man”, with surveillance. This link depended upon the asymmetrical character of the gaze; it was unidirectional: the scientist or warden sees the inmate but not vice versa. This is most striking in the case of the Panopticon. There the unidirectionality of visibility denied the inmates knowledge of when and whether they were actually being watched and thereby made them internalize the gaze and in effect surveil themselves.13 Less overtly, the forms of scientific observation in other institutions objectified their targets and pried omnivorously into every aspect of their experience. Foucault would not, however, have us conclude that the objectifying behavioral sciences have a monopoly on the use of the gaze as a micro-technique of modern power/knowledge. He demonstrates the similar functioning of what he calls the “hermeneutics of the psyche”. Practices like psychoanalysis, which constitute the individual as speaking subject rather than as behavioral object, also involve an asymmetrical, unidirectional visibility, or perhaps one should say audibility. The producer of the discourse is defined as incapable of deciphering it and is dependent upon a silent hermeneutic authority.14 Here, too, there is a distinctive use of coercion to obtain knowledge and of knowledge to coerce. The importance for Foucault of micro-practices such as the gaze far transcends their place in the history of early disciplinary institutions. As has been noted, they were among the earliest responses to the problems of population management which later came to define modern politics. They were eventually integrated in global political strategies and orientations. But even in their early disciplinary form they evince a number of the hallmarks of a distinct vely modern power. Disciplinary tactics anticipate later developments in the genealogy of modern power in that they cause power to operate continuously. Panoptical surveillance

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is, in this respect, very different from pre-modern power mechanisms. The latter operated discontinuously and intermittently and required the presence of an agent to apply force. Modern power, as first developed in disciplinary micropractices, on the other hand, requires no such presence; it replaces violence and force of arms with the more gentle constraint of uninterrupted visibility. Modern power, then, is distinctive in that it keeps a low profile. It has no need of the spectacular displays characteristic of the exercise of power in the ancien regime. It is lower in cost (economically, since it requires less labor power; and also socially, since it is less easily targeted for resistance). Yet it is more efficacious. Given its connection with the social sciences, modern power is capable, according to Foucault, of an exhaustive analysis of its objects, indeed of the entire social body. It is neither ignorant nor blind, nor does it strike hit or miss, as did earlier regimes. As a result of its superior hold on detail, it is more penetrating than earlier forms of power. It gets hold of its objects at the deepest level — in their gestures, habits, bodies, and desires. Pre-modern power, on the other hand, could only strike superficially from afar. Similarly, modern power, as first developed in disciplinary micro-practices, is not essentially situated in some central persons or institutions (such as king, sovereign, ruling class, state, army, etc.). Rather, it is everywhere. As the description of panoptical self-surveillance demonstrated, it is even in the targets themselves, in their bodies, gestures, desires, and habits. In other words, as Foucault often says, modern power is capillary. It does not emanate from some central source, but circulates throughout the entire social body down even to the tiniest and apparently most trivial extremities.15 Taken in combination, these characteristics define the operation of modern power as what Foucault calls self-amplifying. In this respect also it is unlike the power of the ancien regime. The latter operated with, so to speak, a fixed amount of force at its disposal. It expended that force via what Foucault calls “deduction” (prélèvement); it simply counterposed itself to the opposing forces and sought to eliminate or minimize them. Modern power, on the other hand, continully augments and increases its own force in the course of its exercise. It does this not by negating opposing forces but rather by utilizing them, by linking them up as transfer points within its own circuitry.16 Hence the panoptical mechanism takes up the inmate within the disciplinary economy and makes her surveil herself. It aims not at suppressing her but rather at retooling her. It seeks to produce what Foucault calls “docile and useful bodies”.17 Borrowing Marx’s terminology, it may be said that whereas pre-modern power functioned as a system geared to simple reproduction, modern power is oriented to expanded reproduction. Foucault’s description of the disciplinary origins of modern power is extremely rich and concrete. He has thus far produced less in the way of a detailed account of the processes whereby the local, piecemeal micro-techniques were integrated into global macro-strategies. The fullest account so far is that found in his History of Sexuality., Vol. I (La Volonté de savoir). There Foucault discusses the modern macro-strategy of “bio-power”. Bio-power concerns the management of the production and reproduction of life in modern society. It is oriented to such new objects of power/knowledge as population, health, urban life, and sexuality. It objectifies these as resources to be administered, cultivated, and controlled. It

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uses new quantitative social science techniques to count, analyze, predict, and prescribe. It also makes use of widely circulating non-quantitative discourses about sexuality whose origins Foucault traces to the self-interpretation and selfaffirmation of the 19th century middle classes.18 In his Tanner Lectures of 1979 at Stanford, Foucault linked his work on biopower with the problematic of political rationality.19 Indeed his treatment of the development and use of social science as an instrument of population resource management and social control is clearly related to more familiar treatments of modernization as a process of rationalization. But there is one striking and very important difference. Whereas the concepts of rationality and rationalization have largely come to have a two-sided normative character, in Foucault’s usage they do not. In the thought of Jürgen Habermas, for example, rationalization involves a contrast between instrumentalization, which is a one-sided, partial, and insufficient rationalization, and a fuller practical or political rationality. It therefore carries with it a normative standard for critiquing modernity. Foucault‘s discussion of political rationality in the Tanner Lectures, on the other hand, contains no such contrast and no positive normative pole. Rationality for him is either a neutral phenomenon or (more often) an instrument of domination tout court.20 III The Political Implications of Genealogy Foucault’s picture of a distinctively modern power which functions at the capillary level via a plurality of everyday micro-practices has a number of significant political implications. Some of these are strategic and some are normative. Consider that Foucault’s analysis entails that modern power touches individuals via the various forms of constraint constitutive of their social practices, rather than primarily via the distortion of their beliefs. Foucault dramatizes this point by claiming that power is in our bodies, not in our heads. Put less paradoxically, he means that practices are more fundamental than belief systems when it comes to understanding the hold that power has on us. It follows from this view that the analysis and critique of such practices take priority over the analysis and critique of ideology. Foucault’s insight thus tends to rule out at least one rather crude version of ideology critique as strategically inadequate to the social reality of modern power. It rules out, that is, the view that given the appropriate objective material conditions, the only or main thing that stands in the way of social change is people’s ideologically distorted perception of their needs and interests. When stated baldly thus, it is questionable whether anyone actually holds this view. Still, Foucault’s vivid reminder of the priority of practices is a useful corrective to the potential onesidedness of even more sophisticated versions of the politics of ideology critique.21

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A second strategic implication of Foucault‘s insight into the capillary character of modern power concerns the inadequacy of state-centered and economist political orientations. Such orientations assume that power emanates from one or the other or both of these central points in society. But Foucault‘s description of the polymorphous, continuous circulation of power through micro-practices belies this assumption. It shows rather that power is everywhere and in everyone; it shows that power is equally present in the most apparently trivial details and relations of everyday life as it is in corporate suites, industrial assembly lines, parliamentary chambers, and military installations. Foucault’s view, therefore, rules out state-centered and/or economist political orientations. It rules out, that is, the view that the seizure and transformation of state and/or economic power is sufficient to dismantle or transform the modern power regime.22 These two strategic political implications of Foucault’s empirical work can be combined and stated more positively. In revealing the capillary character of modern power and thereby ruling out crude ideologism, statism, and economism, Foucault can be understood as in effect ruling in what is often called a “politics of everyday life”. For if power is instantiated in mundane social practices and relations, then efforts to dismantle or transform the regime must address those practices and relations. This is probably the single most important feature of Foucault’s thought. He provides the empirical and conceptual basis for treating such phenomena as sexuality, the family, schools, psychiatry, medicine, social science, and the like as political phenomena. This sanctions the treatment of problems in these areas as political problems. It thereby widens the arena within which persons may collectively confront, understand, and seek to change the character of their lives. There is no question that a new move to widen the boundaries of the political arena has been underway in the West since the sixties. Foucault has clearly been influenced by it and has, in turn, helped to buttress it empirically and conceptually. In the foregoing considerations of political strategy, it has been taken for granted that the modern power regime is undesirable and in need of dismantling and transformation. But that assumption pertains essentially to the normative political implications of Foucault’s genealogical description. It is these which require thematization now. It has been noted several times that in Foucault’s account modern power is not applied to individuals by the state or sovereign in a top-down fashion. Rather it circulates everywhere down to the tiniest capillaries of the social body. It follows from this, claims Foucault, that the classical liberal normative contrast between legitimate and illegitimate power is not adequate to the nature of modern power. The liberal framework understands power as emanating from the sovereign and imposing itself upon the subjects. It tries to define a power-free zone of rights whose penetration is illegitimate. Illegitimate power is understood as oppression or the transgression of a limit. But if power is everywhere and does not emanate from one source or in one direction, then this liberal framework will not apply. Furthermore, given its inapplicability, Foucault claims that the proliferation of discourse governed by

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this framework may itself function as part of the capillary deployment of modern power. This discourse may function to mask the actual character of modern power and thus to conceal domination.23 It is clear that with this last charge Foucault has crossed the line between conceptual and substantive normative analysis. In using the term ‘domination’ at the same time that he is ruling out the liberal normative framework, it appears that he is presupposing some alternative framework. The question as to what that might be will be discussed in the next section of this paper. Suffice it to say now that Foucault’s empirical thesis that modern power is capillary, if correct, does not by itself dictate the adoption of any particular normative framework. At most, it undercuts one traditional basis of the liberal one. A similar situation arises with respect to the normative political implications of Foucault’s insight into the productive and self-amplifying character of modern power, his insight into its orientation to what I called “expanded reproduction”. This insight belies what Foucault calls “the repressive hypothesis”. That hypothesis assumes that power functions essentially negatively by such operations as interdiction, censorship, and denial. Power, on this view, simply says no. It says no to what are defined as illicit desires, needs, acts, and speech. But if Foucault is right, modern power is equally involved in producing all of these things. His empirical account rules out the repressive hypothesis and the liberationist political orientation it supports. That orientation, which is now rather widespread in the West, aims at liberating what power represses. It makes “illicit” speech, desires, and acts into expressions of political revolt. Not only does Foucault reject it as inadequate to the true nature of modern power, but once again he suggests that it is a feature of the deployment of modern power to proliferate liberationist discourse, once again to mask the actual functioning of domination.24 In ruling out the repressive hypothesis Foucault is ruling out the radical normative framework which substitutes the contrast “repression versus liberation” for the liberal contrast “legitimacy versus illegitimacy”. He has linked both of these frameworks to the functioning of what he identifies as domination. It appears, therefore, that Foucault must be presupposing some alternative normative framework of his own. What might this be? IV Unanswered Questions concerning the Normative Dimensions of Foucault’s Genealogy It is my thesis that despite his important contributions to the study of modernity, Foucault’s work ends up, in effect, inviting questions which it is structurally unequipped to answer. A brief recap of my line of argument to this point will clarify what I mean by this allegation. I have claimed that Foucault adopts at least the minimal heuristic principle that

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power regimes be broached and described as neutral phenomena, that they not, for example, be interrogated immediately from the liberal standpoint as to their legitimacy or illegitimacy. I have also claimed that the use of this methodological strategy permits him to give a perspicuous representation of the emergence of the modern regime which in turn brought to light some neglected features of the operation of power in modern life. Furthermore, I have argued that Foucault’s account of modern power constitutes good grounds for rejecting some fairly widespread strategic and normative political orientations and for adopting instead the standpoint of a “politics of everyday life”. At the same time I have left open the question of the nature and extent of Foucault’s bracketing of the problematic of normative justification of power/knowledge regimes. I have noted some indications that his description of modern power was in fact not normatively neutral, but I have not systematically pursued these. I now wish to reopen these questions by looking more closely at the politically engaged character of Foucault’s work. Let me begin by noting that Foucault’s writings abound with such phrases as: ‘the age of bio-power’, ‘the disciplinary society’, ‘the carceral archipelago’, phrases rife, that is, with ominous overtones. Let me also note that Foucault does not shrink from frequent use of such terms as ‘domination’, ‘subjugation’, and ‘subjection’ in describing the modern power/knowledge regime. Let me now also restate the main outlines of his description in language closer to his own: In the early modern period, closed disciplinary institutions like prisons perfected a variety of mechanisms for the fabrication and subjugation of individuals as epistemic objects and as targets of power. These techniques aimed at the retooling of deviants as docile and useful bodies to be reinserted in the social machine. Later these techniques were exported beyond the confines of their institutional birthplaces and were made the basis for global strategies of domination aimed at the total administration of life. Various discourses which have seemed to oppose this regime have, in fact, supported it in part by masking its true character. Put this way, it is clear that Foucault’s account of power in modern society is anything but neutral and unengaged. How, then, did he get from the suspension of the question of the legitimacy of modern power to this engaged critique of biopower? This, in sum, is the problem. There are a number of possible explanations. First, one might read Foucault’s critique as politically engaged, yet somehow still normatively neutral. One might, that is, interpret his bracketing of the normative as covering all political norms, not just the liberal ones. In a variety of interviews, Foucault himself adopts this interpretation. He claims he has approached power strategically and militarily, not normatively. He says he has substituted the perspective of war, with its contrast between struggle and submission, for that of right, with its contrast between legitimacy and illegitimacy.25 On this interpretation Foucault’s use of the terms ‘domination’, ‘subjugation’, and ‘subjection’ would be normatively neutral. These terms would simply be descriptive of the strategic alignments and modes of operation of the various opposing forces in the modern world.

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Such an interpretation is open to a number of questions, however. It is usually the case that strategic military analyses identify the various opposing sides in the struggle. They are capable of specifying who is dominating or subjugating whom and who is resisting or submitting to whom. This Foucault does not do. Indeed he rejects it as a possibility. He claims that it is misleading to think of power as a property which could be possessed by some persons or classes and not by others. It is better conceived as a complex, shifting field of relations in which everyone is an element.26 Strictly speaking, this claim does not square with the fact that Foucault seems at times to link bio-power with class domination and to implicitly accept (at least elements of ) the Marxian economic interpretation thereof. Nor does it square with his tendency to identify such capillary agents as social scientists, technologists of behavior, and hermeneutists of the psyche with the “forces of domination”. But whether or not he does or can identify the forces of domination and those they dominate, the claim that his normative-sounding terminology is not normative, but, rather, military, runs into a second difficulty. This is that the military usage of ‘domination’, ‘struggle’, and ‘submission’ cannot, in and of itself, explain or justify anyone’s preference for, or commitment to, one side as opposed to the other. Foucault calls in no uncertain terms for resistance to domination. But why? Why is struggle preferable to submission? Why ought domination to be resisted? Only with the introduction of normative notions of some kind could Foucault begin to answer such questions. Only with the introduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what’s wrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought to oppose it. It seems, then, that the assumption that Foucault’s critique is engaged but nonnormative creates serious difficulties for him. It would perhaps be better to assume that he has not bracketed every normative framework but only the liberal one based on legitimacy. In that case, it becomes essential to discover what alternative normative framework he is presupposing. Could the language of domination, subjugation, struggle, and resistance be interpreted as the skeleton of some alternative framework? This is certainly a theoretical possibility. But I am unable to develop it concretely. I find no clues in Foucault’s writings as to what his alternative norms might be. I see no hints as to how concretely to interpret ‘domination’, ‘subjugation’, ‘subjection’, etc., in some completely new “post-liberal” fashion. This is not to deny that these terms acquire rich new empirical content from Foucault’s descriptions of disciplinary power; ‘domination’, for example, comes to include dressage which involves the use of non-violent yet physical force for the production of “normal”, conforming, skilled individuals. But such important new meaning-accretions and extensions are not in and of themselves tantamount to the elaboration of an entirely new normative framework. They do not, in other words, suffice to tell us precisely what is wrong with discipline in terms wholly independent of the liberal norms. On the contrary, their normative force seems to depend upon tacit appeal to the notions of rights, limits and so forth. I suggested earlier that Foucault sometimes seems to presuppose that macrostrategies of global domination such as bio-power are connected with class

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domination, and that the Marxian account of the latter is basically acceptable. Could it be, then, that he is presupposing the Marxian normative framework? It is characteristic of that framework, at least on one widely accepted reading, that it does not fully suspend all liberal norms. Rather it presupposes at least some of them in its critique of capitalist social and productive relations. For example, Marx demonstrates that while the contractual exchange of labor power for wages purports to be symmetrical and free, in fact it is asymmetrical and coercive. He is not, therefore, fully suspending the bourgeois norms of reciprocity and freedom. Perhaps Foucault could be read in similar fashion. Perhaps he is not fully suspending, but is rather presupposing, the very liberal norms he criticizes. His description of such disciplinary micro-techniques as the gaze, for example, would then have the force of a demonstration that while modern social science purports to be neutral and power-free, in fact, it too involves asymmetry and coercion. This reading of Foucault’s work is one I am sure he would reject. Yet it gains some plausibility if one considers the disciplinary or carceral society described in Discipline and Punish. If one asks what exactly is wrong with that society, Kantian notions leap immediately to mind. One cannot help but appeal to such concepts as the violation of dignity and autonomy involved in the treating of persons solely as means to be causally manipulated. But again, these Kantian notions are clearly related to the liberal norms of legitimacy and illegitimacy defined in terms of limits and rights. Given that there is no other normative framework apparent in Foucault’s writings, it is not unreasonable to assume that the liberal framework has not been fully suspended. But if this is so, Foucault is caught in an outright contradiction, for he, even more than Marx, tends to treat that framework as simply an instrument of domination. The point is not simply that Foucault contradicts himself. Rather it is that he does so in part because he misunderstands, at least when it comes to his own situation, the way that norms function in social description. He assumes that he can purge all traces of liberalism from his account of modern power simply by forsweating explicit reference to the top-of-the-iceberg notions of legitimacy and illegitimacy. He assumes, in other words, that these norms can be neatly isolated and excised from the larger cultural and linguistic matrix in which they are situated. He fails to appreciate the degree to which the normative is embedded in and infused throughout the whole of language at every level, and the degree to which, despite himself, his own critique has to make use of modes of description, interpretation, and judgment formed within the modern Western normative tradition.27 It seems, then, that none of the readings offered here leaves Foucault free of difficulties. Whether we take him as suspending every normative framework, or only the liberal one, or even as keeping that one, he is plagued with unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. Because he fails to conceive and pursue any single consistent normative strategy, he ends up with a curious amalgam of amoral militaristic description, Marxian jargon, and Kantian morality. Its many valuable empirical aspects notwithstanding, I can only conclude that Foucault’s work is normatively confused. I believe that the roots of the confusion can be traced to some conceptual ambiguities in Foucault’s notion of power. That concept is itself an admixture of

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neutrality and engagement. Take, for example, his claim that power is productive, not repressive. Throughout this paper I have supposed that this was an empirical claim about the self-amplifying nature of a distinctively modern power. But, in what is clearly an equivocation, Foucault simultaneously treats productivity as a conceptual feature of all power as such. He claims that not just the modern regime, but every power regime, creates, molds, and sustains a distinctive set of cultural practices including those oriented to the production of truth. Every regime creates, molds, and sustains a distinctive form of life as a positive phenomenon. No regime simply negates. Foucault also makes the converse claim that no positive form of life can subsist without power. Power-free cultures, social practices, and knowledges are in principle impossible. It follows, in his view, that one cannot object to a form of life simply on the ground that it is power-laden. Power is productive, ineliminable, and, therefore, normatively neutral.28 How is this view to be assessed? It seems to me to boil down to a conjunction of three rather innocuous statements: 1) social practices are necessarily normgoverned, 2) practice-governing norms are simultaneously constraining and enabling, and 3) such norms enable only insofar as they constrain. Together these three statements imply that one cannot have social practices without contraints and hence the mere fact that it constrains cannot be held against any particular practice. This view is a familiar one in twentieth century philosophy. It is implied, for example, in Habermas’ account of the way in which the successful performance of any speech act presupposes norms of truth, comprehensibility, truthfulness, and appropriateness. Such norms make communication possible, but only by devaluing and ruling out some possible and actual utterances. They are what enable us to speak, at the same time and insofar as they constrain us. If this is what Foucault’s thesis of the general productivity and ineliminability of power means, then power is a normatively neutral phenomenon indeed. But does this interpretation accord with Foucault’s usage? In some respects, yes. He does include under the power/knowledge umbrella such phenomena as criteria of well-formedness for knowledge claims, criteria which simultaneously valorize some statement forms and devalue others; and also, social or institutional licensing of knowledge claimants, licensing which simultaneously entitles some speakers to make certain kinds of specialized knowledge claims and excludes others from so doing. If these are the sorts of things meant by power, then the thesis that power is productive, ineliminable, and therefore normatively neutral is unobjectionable. But Foucault’s power/knowledge regimes also include phenomena of other sorts. They include forms of overt and covert coercion in the extraction of knowledge from and about persons and also the targeting of objects, including persons, for the application of policy in more subtly coercive ways. These phenomena are far less innocuous and far more menacing. That they are in principle ineliminable is not immediately apparent. So if they are what is meant by power, then the claim that power is productive, ineliminable, and therefore normatively neutral is highly questionable. I noted earlier that Foucault’s power/knowledge regime notion covered a highly heterogeneous collection of phenomena. Now it appears that the

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difficulties concerning the normative dimension of his work stem it least in part from that heterogeneity. The problem is that Foucault calls too many different sorts of things power and simply leaves it at that. Granted, all cultural practices involve constraints. But these constraints are of a variety of different kinds and thus demand a variety of different normative responses. Granted, there can be no social practices without power, but it doesn’t follow that all forms of power are normatively equivalent, nor that any social practices are as good as any other. Indeed, it is essential to Foucault’s own project that he be able to distinguish better from worse sets of practices and forms of constraint. But this requires greater normative resources than he possesses. The point can also be put like this: Foucault writes as if oblivious to the existence of the whole body of Weberian social theory with its careful distinctions between such notions as authority, force, violence, domination, and legitimation. Phenomena which are capable of being distinguished via such concepts are simply lumped together under his catch-all concept of power.29 As a result, the potential for a broad range of normative nuances is surrendered, and the result is a certain normative one-dimensionality. I mentioned earlier that Foucault’s genealogy of modern power was related to the study of modernization as rationalization, but that there was one very important difference. This difference was Foucault’s lack of any bi-polar normative contrast comparable to, say, Jürgen Habermas‘ contrast between a partial and one-sided instrumental rationality, on the one hand, and a fuller practical or political rationality, on the other hand. The consequences of this lack are now more fully apparent. Because he has no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of power which involve domination from those which do not, Foucault appears to endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such. Furthermore, he appears to do so without any conception of what is to replace it. In fact, Foucault vacillates betwen two equally inadequate stances. On the one hand, he adopts a concept of power which permits him no condemnation of any objectionable features of modernity. But at the same time, and on the other hand, his rhetoric betrays the conviction that modernity is utterly without redeeming features. Clearly what Foucault needs and needs desperately are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms cf power. As it stands now, the unquestionably original and valuable dimensions of his work stand in danger of being misunderstood for lack of an adequate normative perspective.

NOTES Foucault has adopted the term ‘genealogy’ only relatively recently in connection with his later writings. See especially “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977). Earlier he called his approach

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‘archaeology’. See especially The Archaeology of Knowledge., trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972). For an explanation of the shift, see “Truth and Power”, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York, 1980). “Truth and Power”, Ibid., p. 114. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie Numero 6: Nietzsche (Paris, 1967), pp. 183-200. “Truth and Power”, op.cit., p. 118. Ibid., pp. 112-3, 131, 133. “The Discourse on Language”, trans. by Rupert Swyer, The Archaeology of Knowledge, op.cit., pp. 216ff. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, op.cit., pp 51ff. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979) pp. 17 ff., 101-2, 170 ff., 192. That Foucault’s project could be understood in terms of the concept of bracketing was first suggested to me by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. They discuss what I call below the bracketing of the problematic of epistemic justification, but not that of the problematic of normative justification, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, forthcoming). “Truth and Power”, op.cit., p. 113. Discipline and Punish, op.cit., pp. 184-5 “The History of Sexuality”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., p. 184. “Two Lectures”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., pp. 93, 95. “Two Lectures”, Ibid., pp. 91 ff. “The Eye of Power”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., pp. 158-9. “Prison Talk”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., p. 38. “The Eye of Power”, Ibid., pp. 146 ff. Discipline and Punish, op.cit., pp. 191-4, 201-9, 252. Discipline and Punish, Ibid., pp. 202-3 The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), pp. 61 ff. “Power and Strategies”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., p. 142. “Truth and Power”, op.cit., pp. 119, 125. “The Eye of Power”, op.cit., pp. 151 ff. “Two Lectures”, op.cit., pp. 104-5. Discipline and Punish, op.cit., pp. 201-9. “The Eye of Power”, Ibid., p. 160. The History of Sexuality, Volume I, op.cit., p. 139. Discipline and Punish, Ibid., p. 170. Discipline and Punish, Ibid., pp. 136-8. The History of Sexuality, Volume I, op.cit., pp. 24-6, 122-7, 139-45. ‘”Each and Every One: A Criticism of Political Rationality”, transcribed from tapes by Shari Popen (unpublished manuscript). Ibid. “Truth and Power”, op.cit., pp. 118, 132-3. Ibid., p. 122. “Body/Power”, Power/Knowledge, op.cit., p. 60. “Two Lectures”, op.cit., p. 89. “Two Lectures”, Ibid., pp. 95-6. “Power and Strategies”, op.cit., pp. 139-41. The History of Sexuality, Volume I, op.cit., pp. 5-13. “Truth and Power”, op.cit., p. 119. “Body/Power”, op.cit., p. 59. “Two Lectures”, op.cit., pp. 90-2. Ibid., p. 98. “Power and Strategies”, op.cit., p. 142. This formulation combines points suggested to me by Richard Rorty and Albrecht Wellmer. Discipline and Punish, op.cit., p. 27. “Power and Strategies”, op.cit., pp. 141- 2. “Two Lectures”, op.cit., p. 93. “Truth and Power”, op.cit., pp. 131-3. I am indebted to Andrew Arato for this point.

CRITICAL REVIEWS

THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS Marx Wartofsky This is a review of Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism.* That is to say it is neither a review of Kolakowski’s intellectual or political career, nor is it a polemic about contemporary Marxism disguised as a review. Thus, neither Kolakowski nor Marxism are as such the subjects of this discussion, but only what Kolakowski says about Marxism in this work. Still, since this is intended not as a mere description but as a critical review, it is inevitable that the critical questions will concern Kolakowski’s own views and interpretations as well as those of the Marxists he writes about. Thus, this is, after all, a review of Kolakowski and of Marxism, but in this restricted sense. Anything more would be beyond the scope of this review. Kolakowski begins his three-volume history of Marxism by telling us what his approach to the subject will be: I propose in this work to study Marxism from a point of view similar to that which Thomas Mann adopted in Doktor Faustus vis-a-vis Nazism and its relation to German culture. Thomas Mann was entitled to say that Nazism had nothing to do with German culture or was a gross denial or a travesty of it. In fact, however, he did not say this: instead, he inquired how such phenomena as the Hitler movement and Nazi ideology could have come about in Germany, and what were the elements in German culture which made this possible. . . . Mann was not content to pass over the question of the birth of Nazism in the usual manner, or to contend that it had no legitimate claim to any part of the German inheritance. Instead, he frankly criticized the culture of which he himself was a part and a creative element (1:4).

Kolakowski’s intended analogy is clear: German culture is to Nazism as Marxism is to Stalinism. The argument which supports it, however, is not clear because the terms of the analogy are not commensurable. “German culture” is a term which covers a major and complex social and historical phenomenon, with openly conflicting and incoherent elements, e.g., peasant and urban cultures, medieval and capitalist forms of production, profound political fragmentation and regionalization with historically late unification, proletarian and bourgeois interests, rationalist and irrationalist traditions in philosophy and religion, etc. However complex a body of thought Marxism is, as Marx and Engels formulated it, and whatever incoherences and differences there may be within it, it can hardly be reconstructed as analogous to such a complex, internally conflicted and differentiated system as a national culture. *Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism — Its Origin, Growth and Dissolution, 3 Vols, (Oxford, 1978). Vol 1, The Founders, pp. 434; Vol. 2, The Golden Age, pp. 542; Vol. 3, The Breakdown, pp. 548. Tr. from the Polish by P. S. Falla.

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To be sure, Kolakowski also compares Marxism to Christianity, as an analogous body of thought with an attendant social movement and a history of alternative interpretations; and here the terms of the analogy seem more commensurable. But even this is less than fair, for if one retains the analogy between the original Christian doctrines and the original formulations of Marxism by the founders, again one is comparing a polyvalent set of historical texts — the Gospels — with the work of a single thinker, Marx (or at most, with the related texts of Engels as well). The analogy fails for another reason. If some elements of German culture, or of the Christian Gospels, could be seen, respectively, as sources, say, of Nazism, or of the corrupt and barbaric practices of historical Christianity at its worst, then it is not because German culture as such, or the Gospels as such, formed a coherent body of theories and beliefs from which these evils arose. Rather, it is presumably because there were also such elements present. But Kolakowski has a stronger thesis about Marxism: it is not simply that there were some elements in Marx’s work that lent themselves to Stalinist interpretation (though he sometimes presents a weaker thesis of this sort). Instead, Kolakowski views Marx’s thought as largely coherent, despite what he sees as unresolved problems, ambiguous formulations, or conceptual errors (particularly in the theory of value, in Capital). And he argues that the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism may, in fact, be derived, as a possible and valid interpretation, from the fundamental premises of Marx’s own thought, rather than as an aberration or distortion based on ambiguities (as we shall see). The analogy to Thomas Mann would be trivially true if all that was intended by it was the observation that Stalinism in fact is a development within the world movement of Marxism. That is a simple historical fact, and clearly that is not what Kolakowski wants to show. Rather, his thesis is normative: that Stalinism is one legitimate interpretation of the Marxism of Marx’s own works, of the sources themselves; and Kolakowski’s history of Marxism is intended to show the connections. In order to do this, Kolakowski has to argue that there are in Marx’s own formulations those very sources of totalitarianism, of the subordination of moral choice to so-called historical necessity, or of the working class to the party, or of individuality to the collective, or of responsibility for one’s actions to utter automatism, or of socialist legality to terror — themes which Kolakowski has so vividly treated in his earlier writings. Furthermore, Kolakowski has to show that these sources of Stalinism in Marx (and Engels) are not fortuitous, aberrational, peripheral, but instead are systematic and central, if indeed Stalinism is to be shown as a “legitimate” possible interpretation “equally entitled to invoice the name of Marx” as Kolakowski says, along with other possible interpretations. If Kolakowski is right, then, of course, humanist Marxism, democratic Marxian socialism, so-called revisionism, or any other anti-Stalinist Marxism have no greater claim to Marx’s thought than has Stalinism. “Equal”, after all, means “equal” and does not admit of degrees. Now Kolakowski does not argue that Stalinism is the unique, or inevitable outcome of Marx’s thought, only that it is “one legitimate interpretation”. He writes,

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There is no point in asking who is a ‘true’ Marxist in the modern world, as such questions can only arise within an ideological perspective which assumes that the canonical writings are the only source of truth, and that whoever interprets them rightly must therefore be possessed of the truth. There is no reason, in fact, why we would not acknowledge that different movements and ideologies, however antagonistic to each other, are equally entitled to invoke the name of Marx — except for some extreme cases with which this work is not concerned (1:3).

As it turns out, Kolakowski is not concerned with the equal entitlement of conflicting views or interpretations within Marxism, except peripherally. His central concern is with Stalinism as a legitimate interpretation of Marxism — moreover, of Leninism as well, which he holds to be consistent with Stalinism and, in fact, its direct source. I begin, then, with the question concerning the failure of Kolakowski’s analogy to Thomas Mann, because it is not a quibble over methodology, or over the logic of analogy, but is central to Kolakowski’s project. For the general thesis of the work, as the author states it, is to go beyond a merely historical account in “an attempt to analyze the strange fate of an idea which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin” (1:5). Kolakowski’s work is, therefore, structured as a tragic and dialectical thesis. Lucifer is a fallen angel and not an intruder from the outside. The transmutation of the heroic into the demonic is no accidental matter, and is not to be accounted for by a dualistic principle of good and evil. Rather, what Kolakowski offers us is a dramatic history and a tragic reading of this history. I call it a tragic reading of the history of Marxism because it alleges, in effect, a classical “fatal flaw” internal to the very soul of Marxism: a flaw whose historical working out through the contingencies of political and intellectual life, comes to dominate, and, finally, to negate the very premises of the original humanism. The uncovering of this flaw is the task of Kolakowski’s massive and detailed history of Marxist thought. The truth of Kolakowski’s theses depends, therefore, on just these details of his analysis and critique, and on a hard look at his arguments. Still, in this preliminary sketch, one may reveal Kolakowski’s own conclusion. For Kolakowski, Marxism is essentially eschatological and soteriological. That is, it is fundamentally a theory of the final state or the end of history, as salvation, and a theory of the saviour. It is, therefore, a millenialism which foresees an end of history in which human suffering and finitude will be overcome, exploitation and domination will end, and the realm of freedom and of grace will be ushered in. Therefore, Kolakowski argues, Marxism cannot be understood except in terms of the premises of such an eschatology, and of the theological and philosophical tradition of dialectic, of which it is a part, from its mythic origins through Platonistic and Plotinean Christianity, to Augustine, Eriugena, the German mystics Eckhart and Böhme, throug a modern philosophy to Hegel. The premises of such an eschatological dialectic concern the recognition of the contingency and incompleteness of human existence, and of its separation from the grounds of its own unity and realization. The dialectic is, therefore, a theory of the separation from, and the return to, the condition of primal unity, to non-contingency, to the Absolute. Short of such an eschatological hope or belief, the human recognition of finitude leads to despair.

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But, says Kolakowski, “Messianic hopes are the counterpart of a sense of despair and impotence that overcome mankind at the sight of its own failures” (3:530).1 It seems to me that there are three classic “resolutions” for such “despair” as Kolakowski describes. The first is the religious belief in a supernatural and superhuman source of salvation, an Absolute which lies beyond human thought, action, or will. The second is the denial of any ultimate salvation coupled with resignation to this worldly contingency and to human failure as a permanent condition of human existence. The third is the belief that human beings, by their own thought and action, can transcend their suffering and finitude. In the final sentence of the third volume of his work, Kolakowski dispenses with this ast alternative, which he identifies with human self-deification: The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression has emded in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage (3:530).

Though this review is not intended as a reflection on Kolakowski’s own intellectual and political history, one has, nevertheless, to assess his work as a painful self-examination and critique, for Kolakowski was (and in a perverse sense, remains) a Marxist philosopher whose intellectual and political commitment was precisely to the view that human beings are capable of transcending their present historical circumstances of bondage and exploitation by means of their conscious understanding and political practice. If he rejects such a view at present, at least in the form which it had historically taken in Marxism, he seems to be stuck with one of the other two alternatives: faith in the superhuman Absolute, classically identified with religion; or a cold-eyed recognition and acceptance of despair as the human condition. Short of this, there may be a fourth alternative: a non-millenial theory and practice of human selfimprovement, or of emancipatory struggle, which makes do without hope or belief in a “final” realm of freedom, and is content with a piecemeal meliorism without any guarantees. Between God, despair, and piecemeal meliorism, Kolakowski offers no decisive choices, though he flirts with all three. His critique in this work is focused only on Marxism, not on its alternatives. Thus, his posture is, finally, like that of the “Unhappy Consciousness” (Das Unglückliche Bewusstsein) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.2 What he does offer as a positive alternative to the Marxism which he rejects is at best sketchy, qualified, and occasional, and has to be pieced together from remarks throughout the text. Philosophically, what this comes to is a vague appreciation of Marx’s historical materialism as a heuristic — not a method — for taking into account the social and material aspects of culture and politics in historical inquiry. Politically, Kolakowski suggests that what is needed is some form of democratic and representative regulation of the bureaucratic structures which are necessary for the management of economic, political, and social life in modern societies. But solutions and resolutions are not what Kolakowski’s book is about, so that there is no point in taking him to task for not dealing with them at any length. Main Currents of Marxism is, the author says, a handbook, a history of Marxist ideas and doctrines, the largest portions of which consist of expository accounts of the works of Marx and Engels, of their

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forerunners and contemporaries in the socialist movement (e.g., the Left Hegelians, the Utopian Socialists, Proudhon, Weitling, Cabet, Blanqui, Blanc, Lassalle, and others (Vol. 1, The Founders); the period of the Second International through the emergence of Leninism (Vol. 2, The Golden Age); and finally, the development of Soviet Marxism, of Stalinism, Trotzkyism, and of such other Marxisms as the “revisionist” interpretations of Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School (of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and also Bloch, East European „revisionism“ — including an account of the Polish, Czech and Hungarian movements, and the Praxis group in Yugoslavia. He does not deal with British Marxism (except for some occasional remarks about Caudwell and Farrington), only briefly and in passing with French Marxism — Garaudy, Althusser, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty — and at some greater length with what he calls Mao-Tse-Tung’s “peasant-Marxism”. There is no treatment of Third World Marxism, and only a brief and vitriolic discussion of the “New Left” (Vol. 3, The Breakdown). In the “Preface” to Vol. 3, he notes that “the most recent period, which is the one I know best from my own experience, is treated less fully than any other. The last chapter, which deals with this period, could be expanded into a further volume; but setting aside the difficulties already mentioned — [an inability “to treat the subject with the desireable detachment”, and the difficulty of appearing “in the invidious role of a judge in my own cause” M.W.] — I am not convinced that the subject is intrinsically worthy of treatment at such length”. The prefatory remark may be taken as an accurate statement of Kolakowski’s judgment about the contemporary status and future prospects for Marxism as a viable world-view and as a philosophy of history. II.

History of Marxism as Critique: Kolakowski’s Project

Writing a history of Marxism is something more than a scholarly task. It is a political act. No matter how one approaches the project, the result will be a judgment about Marxism, whether explicit or implicit. For Marxism is, at its core, both a theory of history and a theory about the writing (or the understanding) of history: that is to say, it is a theory about how human beings make history and, at the same time, a theory of how they come to understand or become conscious of their own historical activity. Therefore, if one undertakes to write a history of Marxism itself as an historical phenomenon, one is acting as an historical subject whose own activity in understanding this history is of the same kind as the activity of those about whom one is writing. This is all the more true when such an historical study of Marxism focuses on the philosophical doctrines and debates, i.e., on the explicit expression of the self-understanding of those who take themselves to be Marxists, of whatever persuasion. For the historian — whether a Marxist or not — now includes him/herself within the very domain of the subject matter as a conscious interpreter of the meaning and worth of the ideas. The historian thus comes to understand him/herself, or shapes his/her own consciousness in this reflection on the actions and expressions of others who, like himself or herself, are engaged in the deliberate and conscious attempt to understand human history and action. In effect, this reflection of

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consciousness upon itself, through the mediation of a reflection on the consciousness of others, is inevitably critical, in the broad sense that it must result in a judgment: at the very least, in an interpretive judgment about what these others mean, how they understand themselves and their world; and, almost inevitably, also an evaluative-critical judgment which asserts the standpoint of the historian vis-a-vis these other views. This is not to say that all historical writing is intended as political in its ends, or that evaluative judgment and criticism is always self-conscious and explicit. This would require in turn a reading of the historian’s own work as an interpretiveevaluative task. But this double-reflection of historical consciousness upon itself, in the person of the historian and also upon the historical consciousness of the subjects whom he treats, effectively constitutes either a reaffirmation of a previously held view, or a change in view about the subjects of the history. Insofar as it does either of these, historical reconstruction has a political consequence (and all the more so when such a history stirs others to reflection): remaining with previous views reinforced, or brought into doubt, or indeed, being radically changed. A history of Marxism may therefore change Marxism as a social and intellectual phenomenon. For, if it is effectively critical, it changes the selfunderstanding of Marxists as well as of non-Marxists, whether in agreeing, disagreeing, or being roused to new reflection. There are, of course, dogmatic historians, hagiographers, critics from within and without the Marxist movement itself. Historical writing may limit itself to mere chronicle, or it may be didactic, or “Whiggish”, or sacred, or eschatological, or edifying, or debunking; it may be orthodox, revisionist, conservative, or radical in approach. And there are dogmatic, sceptical, and critical readers of history as well. But one of the insights of Marxism (and not only of Marxism) is that we are self-constituting and selfchanging in the very course of our conscious actions, and that all praxis or action involves consciousness, whatever may be the degree of self-consciousness. Kolakowski, in writing his history of Marxism, has conscientiously attempted to do two things: first, to present the ideas, doctrines, and debates in their historical development and in their influences upon each other; second, he has offered a critique of those ideas which, in his view, have emerged out of this history in the barbarities of Stalinism. He has based his critique on a number of grounds: moral, political, methodological. Critique presupposes a critical ground; and a sustained, systematic, and historical critique - one which sets itself criteria of theoretical coherence and logical consistency, and of empirical warrant or the test of actual political practice — presupposes norms of logic, of factual objectivity, and of moral values as well, since the crucial conclusion of the work is a normative-moral judgment. Any assessment of Kolakowski’s history of Marxism — within the limits he sets himself, of “main currents” of Marxist ideas and doctrines — must therefore assess these very norms, where Kolakowski states them explicitly; or must reconstruct them where they remain implicit. Without this, the review of Kolakowski’s argument may itself become either dogmatic or merely rhetorical. The task is made somewhat easier, for Kolakowski frames his history itself (or its thesis) by posing a question and by proposing an answer to it. Since his work has

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a thesis, whose argument-form is clear, his work may be assessed with respect to whether his argument and his evidence uphold the thesis or fail to do so, in terms of logical, factual, and moral norms. If the work turns out to be slanted in its facts and judgments or in its methodology so as to support the thesis concerning the connection between Marx’s thought and Stalinism, then it must be judged a tendentious work and criticized as such. And Kolakowski himself provides, within the very work itself, several models for the critique of such tendentiousness in others, in considering the response of some Marxist philosophers and intellectuals in accommodating themselves to Stalinism. Thus, if we discover that Kolakowski’s method is suspect, or his logic faulty, or his facts wrong, or his moral values weak or corrupt, then his argument in support of his thesis fails on these grounds, regardless of the truth or falsity of his conclusion. It simply will not have been established by him. The history will not have realized its function as critique, though it may be informative or revealing on other grounds. Kolakowski’s criticism of Marx and of Marxism focuses on, roughly, four major themes: (1) Marx’s theory of history and the attendant question of historical determinism and moral responsibility, or free choice; (2) Marxist epistemology, particularly the question of the relations of praxis and consciousness; (3) Marx’s political economy, and in particular the theory of value; and (4) the question of “eschatology” — of the “end” of history and the communist vision of the future transcendence of the realm of necessity. This is, of course, only one way of summarizing Kolakowski’s major themes for the sake of convenience. It may easily be seen that they are not sharply separable, but bear on each other. For example, the question of dialectics, and of the proper interpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation, is at once a question of the nature of history, of epistemology, of political economy (particularly as it regards the theory of surplus value and the issue concerning the falling rate of profit tendency, or “law”, in capitalism), and certainly eschatology as well. I will, therefore, not discuss these questions ad seriatum in any strict way. In the course of discussing these themes of Kolakowski’s critique, a host of other issues also come up: the question of the role of the party, the responsibility of the intellectuals, the historical nature and function of revisionism. And, as integral to many of Kolakowski’s specific criticisms, there is the question of what properly constitutes a scientific method, whether Marxism is scientific or, as Kolakowski argues, finally mythological, in its own form of reasoning, and whether it is or is not a testable theory. The question of historical determinism and moral responsibility is perhaps the crucial one for Kolakowski. What he says about it in Main Currents of Marxism is not new, and he has dealt at length with these questions in earlier essays. Here, however, the question is posed in a different way than before, namely: to what extent is Marx responsible for the interpretation that (a) history proceeds by necessity in a law-like way, and that knowledge of such law-like necessity is possible for a “science of history”? and (b) what moral imperatives, if any, follow from such a scientific knowledge of historical laws? The question is central precisely because, for Kolakowski, the debasement of Marxism into Stalinist orthodoxy and terror is identified with just this view that the knowledge of

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historical necessity and moral judgment are one and the same; and that the party is the final arbiter of that scientific consciousness which can know the laws of social development and thus has the right and duty to prescribe which actions are in accordance with them, and to proscribe those that are opposed to them. It is in this context, too, that the eschatological question arises. If history has an “end” — in two senses: first, as a goal towards which historical development inevitably tends, (just as in physics a closed physical system inevitably tends toward entropy in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics); and second, as an ‘’end” in which human suffering and alienation are finally overcome in the realm of freedom which is initiated by communism — then such an “end” is at one and the same time the object of the scientific prediction of the course of history, and the object of the moral-political commitment to act in accordance with such predictions. How does Kolakowski interpret Marx’s and Engels’ own views on these questions? He cites Engels’ criticism of Bauer (in The Holy Family): “There is no independent entity called ‘history’ using mankind to attain its ends: history is simply the purposeful activity of human beings.” But, adds Kolakowski, “These observations are the point of departure for the later controversy on Marx’s alleged historical determinism. They leave room for differences of interpretation, as do subsequent statements of [Marx]: in particular, that men make their own history but do not make it irrespective of the conditions they are in” (1:149). Or again Clearly, Marx cannot be saddled with the view that all history is the effect of ‘historical laws’, that it makes no difference what people think of their lives, and that the creations of thought are merely foam on the surface of history an 1 not truly part of it . . . . Marx, then, cannot be regarded as maintaining that history is an anonymous process in which conscious intentions and thoughts are a mere byproduct or casual accretion. Yet there is room for controversy over his theory even if we accept that thoughts, feelings, intentions and the human will are a necessary condition of the historical process. For this view is compatible with strict determination on the basis that although ‘subjective’ factors are necessary causal links, they are themselves entirely due to non-subjective factors; thoughts and feelings, on this assumption, have an auxiliary role in history but not an originating one. In short, even if we do not interpret Marx’s position as one of economic determination there is still room for argument as to the role of free action in the historical process. This controversy has in fact made its appearance in various forms of Marxism in the present century, and cannot by any means be regarded as settled” (1:158-9).

It is presumably “what remains open to interpretation” that opens the way for necessitarian or determinist views as “equally legitimate” interpretations of what Marx said. But on such views, it is not only the efficacy of “subjective” factors in history — e.g., conscious purposes, the possibility of free choice — but also the importance or even the possibility of real individuality which has to be denied if “strict determination” and “historical law” is to prevail as a viable theoretical position. But here, as well, Kolakowski provides the interpretation that Marx recognized individuality as a goal of social emancipation, and not as opposed to it.

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Thus: The restoration of man’s full humanity, removing the tension between individual aspirations and the collective interest, does not imply a denial on Marx’s part of the life and freedom of the individual. It has been a common misinterpretation by both Marxists and anti-Marxists to suppose that he regarded human beings merely as specimens of social classes, and that the ‘restoration of their species essence’ meant the annihilation of individuality or its reduction to a common social nature. On this view, individuality has no place in Marxist doctrine except as an obstacle in the way of society attaining to homogeneous unity. No such doctrine, however, can be derived from The German Ideology . . . . While it is certain therefore that Marx does not follow the Cartesian tradition of conceiving man in terms of self-consciousness ... it is also certain that he seeks to preserve the principle of individuality” (1:161-62).

In yet another place, we read: In Marx’s view, the affirmation of one’s own individuality involves the restoration of man’s ‘social character’ or ‘species-nature’ as distinct from, and opposed to, the state of ‚contingency‘, i.e., enslavement to alienated forces. Under communism, the disappearance of the antagonism between personal aspirations and the species is not a matter of identification, whether forced or voluntary, between the two, and thus of generalized mediocrity and uniformity. What it means is that conditions will be such that individuals can develop their aptitudes fully, not in conflict with one another, but in a socially valuable way . . . . However, to say that Marx did not intend the totalitarian version of his theory is not to say that that version is a mistake and nothing more. We shall have to consider in due course whether Marx‘s vision of social unity did not contain elements contrary to his own intention, and whether he is not to some extent responsible for the totalitarian form of Marxism. Can that unity be imagined in any other way than that of a totalitarian state, however little Marx himself supposed this to be the case? (1:171, my emphasis, M.W.)

And finally: . . . equality, as Engels wrote, means doing away with class differences but not with individual ones . . . . Socialism . . . . is the return to a situation in which only individual human subjects truly exist and are not governed by any impersonal social force; property is individual, and society is no more than the assemblage of the individuals who own it. The notion that Marx regarded socialism as a system for depressing individuals into a Comtean universal being deprived of all subjectivity is one of the absurdest aberrations to which the study of his work has given rise (1:311).

Kolakowski goes on to show that Marx differed from the Utopian Socialists in eschewing their purely normative approach, because it was just this dissociation of abstract norms from the means of attaining them that led the Utopians to be “naturally attracted to the idea of communist despotism. If we know that human nature is fulfilled by the communist system, it is of no importance in establishing this sytem, what proportion of humanity wants to accept it” (1:219). By contrast, says Kolakowski, “it is an essential feature of Marx’s view that he avoided both the normative and the purely determinist approach . . . .” (1:222). I have cited Kolakowski’s own discussion at some length in order to establish two premises for my discussion of his argument: first, it is clear that Kolakowski

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is a sophisticated interpreter of Marx. He knows how to read Marx well enough to see through the usual simple minded, or vulgarized, or distorted interpretations which are commonplace both among Marxists and anti-Marxists. This, of course, is no news. Kolakowski has already shown this in his earlier writings. Still, what is important here is the specific appreciation of Marx’s rejection of any simple notion of historical determinism, and his insistence on the central importance of freedom and individuality as goals of socialist emancipation. Second, however, is Kolakowski’s intimation that Marx also held other views which either stand in direct contradiction to these, or are so formulated that it is reasonable to conclude from them consequences which stand directly opposed to these. This is darkly hinted at in the general use of the double-negative locution which runs through the text, e.g., “whether Marx’s vision . . . did not contain elements contrary to his own intention”, “not entirely blameless”, etc., or the cited passage I emphasized above concerning Marx’s responsibility for totalitarian forms of Marxism: “Can the unity be imagined in any other way than that of a totalitarian state, however little Marx himself supposed this to be the case?” The burden is, of course, upon Kolakowski to show that it cannot be imagined in any other way, if the strong thesis concerning Stalinism’s relation to Marxism is to be proven: namely, that Stalinist dictatorship derives from the central core of Marx’s theory, not as an interpretation of some elements of it which are open to different interpretations. If this weaker thesis is to be proved, then Kolakowski has to show that imagining the socialist future in a totalitarian way is an equally legitimate interpretation of Marx as imagining it in a non-totalitarian way, if that is even possible. For the rhetorical form of the question, as Kolakowski phrases it, certainly suggests that a non-totalitarian socialism consistent with Marxism cannot be imagined. But with what “elements” or with what central theses of Marx’s thought would such a non-totalitarian, i.e., non-Stalinist, socialism be inconsistent? Here we come to the heart of the matter, which, as it turns out, is the epistemological question: the relation of praxis and consciousness. For if, on Kolakowski’s own interpretation, Marx does not resolve the question of historical determinism in favor of some “strict determinism” or some notion of autonomous historical necessity, he must resolve it in some other way which includes the active role of consciousness, or of “subjective” factors. Or, perhaps, Marx fails to resolve this question altogether, leaving it ambiguous whether “determinist” or “voluntarist” interpretations prevail. As we shall see, Kolakowski ultimately holds that Marx had a coherent view of this matter, and that, in fact, it is this coherent view that underlies the Stalinist consequences of Marxism. Kolakowski’s account of Marx’s epistemology is itself a cogent one, so that my criticism of his argument will not be that he misses Marx’s point, or gets him wrong. In fact, he gets him right. In his several discussions of this question in Volume 1, Kolakowski emphasizes the importance for Marx of the “unity of theory and practice”. This has become so sloganized and vulgarized a notion as to require critical restatement. In short, Kolakowski argues that, for Marx, “understanding history and participating in it are one and the same”, that “for the working class, the understanding of the historical world and its practical transformation are a single undifferentiated act: there is not and cannot be a

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separate perception of what is and what ought to be” (1:325). That is to say, consciousness and the forms of consciousness are not detached contemplations of an “object” of consciousness which stands apart from them. Rather, the object is itself “objectified” in the course of practical, transformative labor (in the case of natural “objects”) and thus is already invested with the social purposiveness and meaning of the conscious human praxis which produces it. History, us such an “object” of consciousness, is itself the product of such human purposive activity, and can be understood only in the self-reflection of the conscious action which produces it. Thus it is, first, that history is no alien and external mechanism of “laws” which either imposes itself on conscious agents, or simply “determines” their actions as its own instruments. This would be precisely the inverted world of a fully alienated consciousness, which attributed the force and process of its own activity to some reified and “objective” mechanism (whether “God’s will” or “the engine of history”). Precisely because history is objectified human purposiveness, it has no alien “purposiveness” of its “own”, so to speak. “Its” purposes are none other than the purposes of the human agents who make it. In this sense, Kolakowski rightly says that for Marx, “awareness of the aim takes the form of an act in which the historical participants in the process acquire theoretical insight into the means they have already begun to employ. Since men do in fact strive to liberate themselves from oppression and exploitation, and afterwards become aware of their action as part of the ‘objective’ movement of history, they have no need of a separate imperative telling them that they should strive for liberation in general or that freedom from oppression is a good thing” (1 :324). Second, however, this means that the concepts of “historical necessity” and of “freedom” of individuals can no longer be understood in any way which either externalizes this alleged “necessity” as something apart from human, conscious causality or agency, or which limits this freedom to abstractly free choice, without the means by which to effect the very purposes which are posited by such choice. Thus, the “understanding of history” is not the contemplative observation of a process external to human conscious praxis; and the “making of history” is not reducible to the action of blind automatism without responsibility. Rather, because it is the result of the actions of conscious agents and the objectification of their purposes, history bears human responsibility — hence, moral responsibility — as its signature. When some human beings are under constraint or domination in such a way as to become mere means for the realization of purposes posited by others, this does not mean that there is ‘historical determinism” in any other sense than that some have the power to use others for their own purposes. What Marx argued, cogently — as Kolakowski well knows — is that people are not always self-conscious of the processes by which they themselves make such history, or effect their purposes, or are used as means by others, in effecting the purposes of these others. Thus, as Kolakowski remarks, for Marx it is not poverty as such nor misery or suffering as such, which leads to revolutionary consciousness, or to the understanding of history, but rather dehumanization — i.e., the awareness that one is being denied what belongs to one as a human being, and that such denial is not inevitable, or in the “nature of things”, and can, therefore, be changed. “Marx’s starting point . . . is not poverty but dehumanization . . . . The germ of

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socialism in capitalist society is the working class’s awareness of dehumanization, not poverty” (1:222). The reason I have gone to some length to review this issue of Marx’s understanding of the relation of praxis to consciousness is that it is just on this question that Kolakowski bases his argument that Stalinist totalitarianism is a consequence of Marxism. The argument proceeds roughly as follows: Marx held that the understanding of history could only be achieved in the very process of the making of history, as a reflection by the agents of history upon their own activity. In this self-reflection, the classical dichotomy between fact and value, and between historical necessity and individual freedom, is dissolved, since the “facts” of history are not external “facts” but the value-laden and purposive actions of agents: and the “necessity” here is not some external causal necessity, but only the self-activity of such makers of history. The working class is in the special historical position of becoming aware of its dehumanization through its own praxis of struggling against it, i.e., of emancipating itself from exploitation and positing its freedom as an historical possibility and goal. Along comes Lenin. For him, according to Kolakowski, everything was strictly subordinated to this goal of revolutionary emancipation of the working class. That is, he took Marx seriously. Organizationally, however, he introduced the role of the party as the conscious vanguard of this struggle; that is, he argued that the working-class required one ingredient for its development of a conscious awareness and understanding of history, namely, Marx’s theory of history, and his theoretical explanation of the workings of capitalism as a system of exploitation. Such a theoretical consciousness could not arise spontaneously precisely because the working class was denied the means — the intellectual and cultural means — of theoretical understanding, and this was, in fact, part of their dehumanization and oppression. Thus, despite the relation of praxis and consciousness, it is just the means of knowledge, the epistemological access to historical self-consciousness, that had to be provided from without, by those intellectuals who, like Marx, had seen through the veil of bourgeois ideology to the class-nature of society and the historical tendencies of capitalism: To Lenin all theoretical questions were merely instruments of a single aim, the revolution; and the meaning of all human affairs, ideas, institutions and values resided exclusively in their bearing on the class struggle. It is not hard to find support for this attitude in the writings of Marx and Engels . . . . Nonetheless, their specific analyses were generally more differentiated and less simplified than such ‘reductionist’ formulas might seem to imply. Nevertheless, the general formulas in which they expressed their historical materialism lent themselves well enough to the use Lenin made of them . . . . On this point, he not only cannot be reproached with deviating from Marxism, but it can rather be said that he applied the principles of historical materialism more thoroughly than Marx. If law, for instance, is ‘nothing but’ a weapon in the class struggle, it naturally follows that there is no essential difference between the law and arbitrary dictatorship (2:383).

Given this interpretation of revolution, the party, as the “conscious vanguard of the working class“, is in the special position of understanding history through its leading role in revolutionary practice, in accordance with the epistemological thesis. The justification for the party‘s leading role was, writes Kolakowski,

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“Lenin’s conviction that the party, by virtue of its scientific knowledge of society, is the one legitimate source of political initiative. This later became the principle of the Soviet state, where the same ideology serves to justify the party’s monopoly of initiative in all fields of social life, its position as the sole fount of knowledge concerning society, and therefore the sole proprietor of society” (3:391). For the next step in the argument, we have to wait for Volume 3. There, in dealing with Lukács, Kolakowski writes that Lukács‘ theory of the unity of theory and practice is logically better suited to Lenin‘s idea of the party than is Lenin‘s own philosophy. What Kolakowski is referring to here is, of course, Lukács‘ theory (in History and Class Consciousness) that the working class is the “identical subject-object” of history, that it is in the “epistemologically privileged position” of alone understanding history because it is engaged, in its revolutionary praxis, in that very process of transforming the world, by means of which alone the “totality” can come to be understood. Thus, the gap between an objective “contemplative”, “pure science” of history, on the one hand, and an arbitrary set of moral imperatives of an ideal “ethical” sort, on the other, is overcome: science and morality are one, since the very possibility of a truly “scientific” knowledge of society depends on participation in the revolutionary transformation of society. Thus, history is not given, but made, and historical knowledge is (in Vico’s terms) “makers’ knowledge”. The catch in all this, says Kolakowski, is that the “proletariat” here is not the “empirical working class” but the representative of the true class-consciousness of the proletariat, namely the party of the Leninist type, “a special form of social existence, a necessary mediator between the spontaneous workers’ movement and the totality of history” (3:281). Therefore, Kolakowski continues: “Politically this is a more convenient philosophy than Lenin’s, for, once granted that the party is in possession of the practice-theoretical ‘whole’, there is no need to seek justification . . . . By the end of the Stalin era the epistemologically privileged position of the proletariat was reduced to the view that Comrade Stalin was always right” (3:282). Thus, Kolakowski begins his argument by seeing in Lenin’s “extension” of Marxism a “more thorough application of the principles of historical materialism than Marx’s own”; then identifies this “extension” with Lukács‘ theoretical premise about the party as the true consciousness of the „identical-subject-object of history“, the working class; and, finally, sees Stalinism as the final outcome of this process. Thus, Kolakowski claims to have traced Stalinism to its sources in Marx‘s own historical materialism, step by step, and, more specifically, to the essential epistemological theses about the relation of praxis to consciousness which are central to Marx‘s philosophy. If there is any doubt as to whether these are indeed Marx‘s own theses, as they are expressed by Lukács, Kolakowski wants to dispel it: He writes, concerning Lukács‘ theory of the relation of praxis to consciousness, that „Lukács was beyond a doubt an outstanding interpreter of Marxism, and rendered a great service by reconstructing it in a different way from that followed by a previous generation of Marxists . . . . Lukács certainly formulated a radically new, and I believe, a correct interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, and from that point of view his achievement seems unquestionable.

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However, the fact that Lukács interpreted Marx afresh and more accurately than anyone before him does not mean that he was right to adopt Marx‘s belief in the unity of theory and practice, freedom and necessity. Despite his intention, his work had the effect of revealing the mythological, prophetic, and utopian sense of Marxism which had eluded Marx’s more scientistic followers . . . . Thus, as Lukács showed, the Marxist consciousness [in its invulnerability to rational argument from outside the Marxist movement] obeys the epistemological rules appropriate to a myth“ (3:297-98, my emphasis, M. W.). So it is no longer a question, according to Kolakowski, of ambiguous or incomplete formulations by Marx, open to differing interpretations, one of which happens to be Stalinism. That is only Kolakowski’s weaker thesis. Rather, in this stronger critical thesis, Kolakowski proposes that Stalinism finds its direct sources in a “correct” interpretation of the core of Marx’s philosophy and of his historical materialism. This is what is called a “slippery slope” argument, and it seems to me a profoundly fallacious one, though exceptionally detailed and subtle in Kolakowski’s presentation of it (which I cannot do justice to in my brief summary of it). Though a review does not provide scope for full counterargument or refutation, let me sketch what I find wrong with Kolakowski’s reasoning and his conclusion. First: Marx never identified proletarian consciousness with a closed, undemocratic party’s decisionism or with authoritarianism in any form. Lenin’s model of a highly disciplined “democraticcentralist” party appropriate to illegal and, later, military-style operations in full revolutionary circumstances, is also not to be taken as a general model of party organisation, (Kolakowski notes the argument over this between Lenin and Luxemburg). Whether one holds that it was or was not appropriate even to the particular circumstances, it hardly follows from Marx’s views that this could be the theoretically or practically general form which working-class parties should take. The slavish modeling of other Communist parties on this type, under a variety of national and international conditions, and the extension of this same model, as well as its further transformation in the Stalin period, is no “correct” or “more thorough application of the principles of Marx’s historical materialism”, but rather a contingent development of a highly specific moment, which could very easily have developed differently. The temptation to trace back a given, contingent historical trail to its sources, and then to proclaim that it derives ineluctably from these origins, is to adopt just that posture of retrospective determinism which transforms a factual development into a normative imperative, for the sake of assigning culpability. Certainly this contingent factual development of a certain type of party in given circumstances is a normative fact, or a value-laden one, and, thus, the actions which constituted it are therefore actions which bear moral responsibility, precisely as judgments about what the “facts” required in that situation. Lenin and the others might have chosen to act differently, or to understand history differently than they in fact did. Thus, the “facts” did carry a certain moral imperative with them, expressed in the self-understanding of the actors in that historical moment. But this is not to say that, on Marx’s theory, the sitiation justified that judgment of this moral imperative which prevailed, in some

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externally deterministic or causal way; or that its justification could be read off from the theory of historical materialism as a “deduction from the facts” in consequence of the theory. That would be just the mechanistic or non-dialectical reading of Marx’s theory which Kolakowski goes to pains to show is incorrect. It therefore remains a morally responsible judgment to make, concerning what the imperatives were; and about this, one can hardly say that Marx’s theory proposes an algorithm or a “method” which relieves the historical actors from responsibility by putting the burden of decision on “the objective situation”. Now this is not to claim that Marx, therefore, remains uncriticizable either on broader questions of theory or philosophy, or on specific cases of, say, economic or political analysis. It is to argue, instead, that Kolakowski reads back into Marx a contingent development, which I would argue follows neither from the method or substance of Marx’s own theory, and interprets it as if it were a necessary consequence. In effect, Kolakowski chooses carefully to follow a trail of tragic mistakes and distortions, and finally discovers their sources not in peripheral or ambiguous elements in Marx’s thought, but in what he sees as a central and fundamental flaw, in fact the tragic flaw in Marx’s theory: that Marxism is mythological, identifying wish with historical reality and interpreting empirical history as prophetic eschatology. To be fair to Kolakowski, I must add that this argument for the “strong” thesis is explicitly denied by him, in a number of places. There, the “weak” thesis prevails: . . . the despotic socialism of history is not socialism as Marx intended it; the question however is, how far it represents the logical outcome of his doctrine. To this it may be answered that the doctrine is not wholly innocent, though it would be absurd to say that the despotic forms of socialism were direct outcomes of the ideology itself. Despotic socialism arose from many historical circumstances, the Marxist tradition among them. The Leninist-Stalinist version of Marxism was no more than a version, i.e., one attempt to put into practice the ideas that Marx expressed in a philosophical form without any clear principles of political interpretation (1:419, My emphasis, M.W.).

My criticism of Kolakowski’s strong thesis is, therefore, either based on a misinterpretation of his argument, or else Kolakowski has two theses, one of which contradicts the other. Since both of them — if there are two — depend on interpretations of the text, as well as of history, I want to briefly discuss the weaker thesis in terms of the question of norms of interpretation. That this is not an abstract methodological discussion is evidenced by Kolakowski’s own remark, cited above, concerning his view that Marx did not provide “any clear principles of political interpretation”. It is because of this, presumably, that mutually inconsistent and equally legitimate alternative interpretations could arise, not only in theory, but in practice as well. Thus, Kolakowski says that “the LeninistStalinist version of socialism was a possible interpretation, though certainly not the only possible one, of Marx’s doctrine” (1:418). A history of Marxism may be, on the one hand, a more narrowly hermeneutical or even rhetorical analysis, i.e., a reconstruction of Marx’s intended meaning, or of the text’s possible readings in the context of the author’s project, or his culture, or the historical period; or beyond this, it may be interpreted politically,

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as a living text, used, abused, itself interpreted in the contexts of a social-political movement. It then may become a cloud-shape into which are read different historical and political intentionalities. The norms of interpretation then become crucial, as legitimations of one or another reading, especially with respect to more and less legitimate readings, or what can be judged to be outright distortions or tendentious interpretations. A norm of interpretation which relativizes the text completely, or even in a major way, to accommodate different readings as all having equal claims to legitimacy, is acritical. Now, in Vol. 1, Kolakowski remains critical in his own reading of the text, i.e., he presents his own considered judgment about the core of Marx’s views (summarized in Chapter IX, “Recapitulation”); and he also notes which questions he still regards as open to different interpretations. Yet in subsequent analysis, Kolakowski affords equal legitimation to interpretations which, it seems to me, are either in direct contradiction to his own account of Marx’s thought, or are radical revisions or departures from it. Of course, loyalty to the text is not the desideratum of a political interpretation of Marxism, if Marxism is regarded as a living system of ideas. For then developments, departures, and radical revisions as well as criticisms of the original simply become part of a complex, polyvalent movement whose origins are in Marx, but which progresses beyond the thought and work of one man. Only the text of the Bible, taken by believers as an omniscient God’s timeless truths, can become the object of fundamentalist readings. Marx’s historical timeliness is also and inevitably the limitation of his analysis, which needs to be transcended and developed if Marxism is not to lapse into fundamentalism. Still, this is not what is at issue in Kolakowski’s view: Stalinism is not a “revision” of Marxism, nor a “mistaken interpretation” of Marxism. It is one possible continuation of what is already contained in the text. If that is the case, then the core — the normatively critical interpretation which Kolakowski gives us in Vol. 1 — has to contain the seeds of such a Stalinist interpretation, on the weaker thesis of Kolakowski. And on Kolakowski’s own interpretation, it seems to me that it does not. In fact, it seems to me to be antithetical to the basic elements of the Stalinist “interpretation” unless — and this is a big “unless” — one takes the genesis of any contemporary doctrine to be provided by isolated elements of a corpus of work. But if one argues in this way, as I am alleging that Kolakowski does, one commits what I would call “the reverse genetic fallacy”: this is to affirm that for anything which is derivable from a given statement in an original set of statements, the whole original set of statements is taken as the genesis or source, or held responsible. Now this is an informal or rhetorical fallacy, and not a formal one. Formally speaking, it would be true that, in a logical system, any statement derivable by valid inference from the axioms and theorems of the system can render the whole system inconsistent if it is a false statement; for the norm of consistency requires that only true statements may be derived from true statements, and the principles of valid inference are precisely those which prohibit the inference of false from true statements. But we are not dealing here with an axiomatized logical or formal system in Marx’s work. Rather we are dealing with a program, in which the very meaning of a given statement or formulation has to be interpreted within the whole system of meanings, and not

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piecemeal or in isolation. In such a “system of statements” or a text, the norm is not simply logical consistency — though this is assuredly one norm for criticizing the system — but also coherence, that is, the existence of a core which may be interpreted coherently, despite the fact that there may be ambiguities, anomalies, inconsistencies and even falsehoods. We are dealing with neither a formal system, nor with a completed system. Therefore, though it is critically useful to find, in retrospect, how some contemporary interpretations of a text — e. g., Stalinism — have sources in some elements of the original Marxist program, this does not yet establish that such an interpretation has equal claims to legitimacy with other interpretations. In order to make this claim, Stalinism would have to be as close to the core as these other interpretations. Otherwise, it is an aberrant interrelation, i.e:, a distortion or a mistake. A text may be said to have an ordered series of interpretations, which we may call the distortion-series. Such a distortion-series has at least a partial ordering (such a partial ordering, by contrast to a simple ordering, does not permit comparison of degrees of distortion along different distortion-series or branchings, but only along one branch). Thus, Stalinism may be seen as one distortion of a given branch of distortions of Marxism — e.g., one which also contains objectivist, collective-holist interpretations, or which identifies Partyconsciousness with “scientific historical consciousness”, or morality with historical necessity. Then, one may legitimately claim that along the branch of this distortion-series of Marxism, from some elements in the core to the outer periphery of the doctrine, there may be seen to be a continuity (just as there may similarly be along a different distortion-series, e.g., a purely voluntarist or an abstractly normative interpretation of Marxism). Yet, without the criticalnormative formulation of a core-interpretation, nothing counts as a distortion, nor can there be even a partial ordering of degrees of distortion. In that case, of course, one may claim that all those interpretations have “equal” legitimacy, namely, null-legitimacy, since the concept of “legitimacy” cannot arise if it is not normatively defined by a core-interpretation. But that would be to abandon the responsibility for just such a norm of interpretation of which Kolakowski does avail himself in his own reconstruction of Marx’s thought (whether one agrees with him or not, for here there is room for rational, and even passionate debate). It seems to me that there are more and less “correct” readings of Marx, i.e., that there is a coherent interpretation of the core of Marxism, with all its ambiguities, incompletenesses and errors; and that with respect to this core, other readings may justifiably be characterized as deviant, or distorted, even where they are short of being outright false, or deliberate misrepresentations. It seems to me, also, that Stalinism is one of the most heinous of such distortions, though there are others. And it also seems to me that there are equally legitimate alternative interpretations of Marxism both with respect to different modes or contexts of application, and with respect to open and unresolved questions. But Stalinism is not one of them. Its derivation as “one possible version” of Marxism of „equal legitimacy“ with others, therefore, seems to me to be unsupported by any critical-normative interpretation of Marx which is at all viable, and which establishes a coherent core of Marxism. Of course, such a „core-interpretation“ remains open to reinterpretation, re-evaluation, and critique.

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The alternative view is that there is a fundamental contradiction in Marx’s attempt to bring together history and hope, empirical study of historical development and moral responsibility; and that Marxism ultimately founders and breaks apart under the strain of these tensions. Kolakowski has agonized long and hard over such tensions, recasting them as antinomies, and concluding from them that they cannot be resolved. For, on his view, Marxism, because it is essentially eschatological, and therefore fails to recognize, in its very humanism, the finitude of human existence, ends up as a self-destructive Prometheanism. Kolakowski does not propose a substitute, or a newly revised Marxism. Even his account of the idea of a democratic socialism is cast in the language of negatives, albeit melioristic ones: the purpose of democratic socialism is “to create institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunity, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracy and seductions of totalitarianism. All these efforts and attempts are doomed to failure unless they are firmly rooted in the value of freedom — what Marxists stigmatize as ‘negative’ freedom, i.e., the area of decision which society allows to the individual. This is so not only because freedom is an intrinsic value requiring no justification beyond itself, but also because without it societies are unable to reform themselves” (3:529). He also anticipates and deflects in advance criticisms such as the one I make in this review: “Arguments adduced at the present day to show that ‘that is not what Marx meant’ are intellectually and practically sterile. Marx’s intentions are not the deciding factor in a historical assessment of Marxism, and there are more important arguments for freedom and democratic values than the fact that Marx, if one looks closely, was not so hostile to those values as might at first appear” (3:527). Without permitting myself the kind of invective which Kolakowski fiercely and bitterly deploys, especially in the third volume, I must say that these conclusions are both perverse and arrogant: perverse, in that they come at the end of a massive, painstaking, serious, and angry historical reconstruction of “what Marx really meant” (If this is not at issue for Marxist or non-Marxist intellectuals or activists, why did Kolakowski devote such energy to the project? One may presume that although it may have had a cathartic function for him, he had more serious reasons, including political and intellectual ones); and arrogant, because Kolakowski claims to close the door (or at least pretends to) on criticism and further discussion of his arguments, by characterizing such activity as effectively a waste of time. There is too much of substance in the history of Marxism, and too much at issue in the very questions Kolakowski has posed, for his threevolume work to serve as an epitaph. NOTES 1

Cf. Kolakowski on this question in his essay “History and Hope”: “The excess of hopes and demands over possibilities is necessary in order to force reality to yield all the potentials it contains, and to tap all the resources hidden in it. True, overoptimism runs the risk of disappointment. It is also true that disappointment

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discourages further efforts and precludes organization of the social energy needed to exploit actual possibilities . . . . Illusions are indispensable if non-illusory possibilities are to be realized; and when illusions are confronted with results disillusion is inevitable. The disillusions then slow down the exploration of further non-illusory potentials. Between the appearance of the illusion and the setting in of disillusion, there is a lapse of time during which the slow, painful, burdensome labor of social progress takes place. For disillusions like illusions are not eternal; they yield eventually to the next illusions, certainly more advanced in their demands but also somewhat richer to begin with. No one can foresee the duration of these cycles under different conditions. If its second half — from decline to rise — lasts the time of a generation, then that generation has the feeling of having wasted its life. This feeling is doubtless unjustified from the point of view of the philosophy of history, but it cannot be overcome.” (Toward a Marxist Humanism. New York, 1968, p. 151) 2 Hegel has this to say about the “Unhappy Consciousness”, in The Phenomenology of Mind: “In Scepticism consciousness gets, in truth, to know itself as a consciousness containing a contradiction within itself. From the experience of this proceeds a new attitude which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. The want of intelligence which Scepticism manifests regarding itself is bound to vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which possesses these two modes within it .... In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the bare and simple freedom of itself. In Scepticism, it realizes itself, but, in so doing, really doubles itself, and is itself now a duality. In this way, the duplication, which previously was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is concentrated into one. Thus we have here that dualizing of self-consciousness within itself, which lies essentially in the notion of mind; but the unity of the two elements is not yet present. Hence, the Unhappy Consciousness, the Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being.” (Baillie translation, pp. 250-51)

UN RETOUR À MARX CONTRE LE “MARXISME” DES FONCTIONNAIRES Alain Brossat C’est à plus d’un titre qu’il faut saluer comme des événements la publication au cours de la période récente d’ouvrages comme L’Alternative de Rudolf Bahro,1 Le Socialisme emprisonné de Petr Uhl2 ou encore Morgen de Robert Havemann.3 D’une part, parce que ces textes vont à contre-courant de la tendance dominante parmi la dissidence des pays de l’Est qui est au rejet du marxisme, à sa dénonciation comme ferment du Goulag, de la terreur stalinienne, des horreurs du ‘socialisme réel»: explicitement, leurs auteurs s’efforcent de définir une alternative marxiste au marxisme d’Etat des pays bureaucratiques de l’Est, une alternative socialiste au socialisme «réel», trop réel. D’autre part, parce que ces ouvrages manifestent une hauteur de vue, une qualité de la réflexion marxiste sur ces sociétés, de l’intérieur de ces sociétés, telles qu’elles interdisent aux marxistes occidentaux de poursuivre leurs réflexions sur les pays de l’Est sans tenir compte des considérables apports théoriques qu’ils effectuent. Ainsi se trouve renouvelée la réflexion théorique marxiste sur ces pays, non pas du fait de marxistes universitaires occidentaux, mais de celui de militants de l’opposition communiste dans ces pays qui, tous, payent ou ont payé le prix fort, dans leur existence personnelle, pour leur obstination à mener à bien ces recherches. L’événement mérite d’être souligné. Ceci d’autant plus qu’est frappante la parenté d’inspiration de ces travaux. Pour l’essentiel, notre commentaire s’orientera autour des textes de Bahro et Uhl dont la démarche nous paraît la plus fructueuse. L’inspiration de ces recherches rompt radicalement avec celle des marxistes critiques de “l’ère des réformes”4 dont les réserves et propositions visaient certains aspects du système tout en en acceptant les finalités générales — telles qu’elles étaient redéfinies dans le cadre de la déstalinisation limitée, aux beaux jours du khrouchtchévisme. Aussi bien Uhl que Bahro exercent une critique radicale du socialisme «réel», une critique qui va à la racine du phénomène bureaucratique dans les pays de l’Est, dans la mesure où ils révoquent en doute les fondements théoriques mêmes de ce pseudosocialisme, où ils prônent un total renversement de perspectives dans la définition de ce que doit être le socialisme, dans la mesure où ils plaident pour une refondation théorique du marxisme sur son inspiration première, en bref un retour à Marx contre le marxisme des fonctionnaires. Il ne s’agit pas pour eux de “replâtrer” le socialisme “réel”, d’en colmater les brèches, d’en gratter l’enduit bureaucratique pour lui redonner l’éclat du neuf, mais bien d’entrer dans une phase historique nouvelle où sera radicalement effacée et dépassée cette figure paradoxale qu’est le «proto-socialisme» ou le «présocialisme» qu’incarnent les pays bureaucratiques de l’Est. Au marxisme de l’Etat, au marxisme «officiel», «orthodoxe», dogmatique et figé; au marxismealibi d’une politique incapable d’énoncer ses propres finalités, sans principes, 307

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embourbée dans la contingence et le sinistre “réalisme” des bonzes; au marxisme de pouvoir, au marxisme instrument de domination, d’oppression, facteur d’aliénation, véritable pollution intellectuelle dénoncée avec vigueur par la majorité des dissidents, il s’agit d’opposer l’impulsion originelle du marxisme de Marx: le marxisme de l’Utopie positive et concrète, le marxisme comme théorie générale de l’émancipation humaine, le marxisme qui énonce la réalisation de l’histoire humaine dans le communisme.5 Rudolf Bahro aussi bien que Petr Uhl, s’efforcent donc de remettre notre histoire sur ses pieds, de la saisir comme histoire inversée, imprévue, erratique, en la saisissant dans la perspective du discours fondateur de Marx. Le socle solide de la réflexion de Bahro et de Uhl, c’est le retour à l’antiétatisme de Marx. C’est le retour à l’évidence (à contre-courant de l’évolution du socialisme «réel») que l’horizon du communisme ne se dessine qu’au fil d’une démarche globale qui porte bien au-delà de la destruction de la domination d’une classe par une autre, qui implique le dépérissement conjoint des «formes» où se reproduisent l’exploitation, l’oppression et l’aliénation: division du travail, rélations de domination et subordination, perpétuation de la sphère de l’Etat comme pouvoir séparé, de la politique comme sphère distincte de l’activité sociale, etc. On aurait bien tort d’interpréter ce retour à l’Utopie marxienne comme un retour de romantisme révolutionnaire abstrait, un ultimatisme à bon compte, sans conséquences, l’introduction d’un principe mystique, d’une téléologie hégélienne dans l’esprit des Manuscrits de 44 dans la démarche marxiste, en réaction au pesant «réalisme» du marxisme de gouvernement. Au contraire. Le souffle d’utopie qui passe dans ces livres doit avant tout être perçu comme l’expression d’un puissant réalisme historique, d’une perception lucide des alternatives de l’avenir proche, comme l’aboutissement de réflexions qui projettent sur cet avenir les leçons synthétiques du présent; textes utopiques, donc, au sens où Ernst Bloch écrivait: «Depuis Marx, il n’y a pas de recherche de la vérité possible, et pas de décision réaliste, sans prendre en considération les contenus objectifs et subjectifs de l’espoir dans le monde; à moins de tomber dans la trivialité ou l’impasse»; textes utopiques, au sens où Le Manifeste communiste, Bilan et perspectives, et l’Etat et la Révolution le sont aussi. Comme l’écrit Bahro: «Les marxistes sont sur la défensive dès qu’on parle d’utopie. Cela a été si dur de s’en défaire, à l’époque! Mais voilà que l’utopie devient à nouveau indispensable» (p. 237). Un horizon dépassé Quel est, plus précisément, le programme historique de cette utopie concrète et positive? Bahro et Uhl partent du même constat: c’est la perpétuation des formes anciennes de la division du travail, des rapports de domination et subordination qui en découlent, qui figent les sociétés pré- ou proto-socialistes dans leur forme actuelle, les figent dans une forme historique où il apparaît, dit Bahro, qu’elles n’ont pas «encore franchi l’horizon de la société de classes». Ou encore: «Une organisation de l’ensemble de la société sur la base de l’ancienne division du travail ne peut être qu’une organisation de l’ensemble de l’Etat; elle ne peut être qu’une socialisation sous une forme aliénée» (p. 130). Même démarche chez Petr

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Uhl qui note: “Au bout de trente années de pouvoir, la bureaucratie n’a rien changé de fondamental dans la position sociale des ouvriers” (p. 122). Pour l’un comme pour l’autre, l’objectif historique du socialisme, c’est d’abord de “libérer la force de travail”, briser le cercle vicieux de la subalternité” (Bahro), de l’idiotisme du métier, de la spécialisation sans contre-partie, de la répétition, bref, créer des conditions où “les rapports de l’homme à son travail ne seront plus aliénés” (p. 288). Uhl et Bahro ne sont évidemment pas les premiers, y compris dans l’opposition des pays de l’Est à souligner la perpétuation dans le socialisme “réel” d’une forme de mise en valeur du travail humain qui engendre nécessairement la reproduction de la subalternité telle que la définit Bahro. Le livre de Miklos Haraszti Salaire aux pièces6 constituait, de ce point de vue, une saisissante démonstration. Mais L’Alternative et Le socialisme emprisonné démontrent avec une rigueur et une richesse d’analyse inédites comment se reproduisent dans les sociétés de l’Est à partir de la division du travail les formes liées de la domination et de la subordination dont le couronnement est naturellement la forme-Etat absolutiste qui prévaut dans ces pays. Ce n’est pas par hasard que Bahro cite longuement un texte de Gramsci qui commence ainsi: «Quelles forces d’expansion pourront bien avoir les sentiments d’un travailleur penché huit heures par jour sur sa nachine, à répéter le même geste, de façon aussi monotone que serait l’égrènement d’un chapelet, le jour où il régnera en maître, où il deviendra la mesure des valeurs sociales?» (p. 180). En d’autres termes, il est impossible de saisir les phénomènes d’oppression, d’aliénation sociale et politique dans les sociétés bureaucratiques de l’Est sans les rapporter au substrat autant anthropologique qu’ „économique“, d‘ailleurs, qui, au niveau de la production même, les fonde. Ce n‘est évidemment pas pour rien que Bahro aussi bien que Uhl tiennent à se démarquer d‘une interprétation sommaire des thèses trotskystes qui réduirait la „révolution politique“ dans ces pays à une refonte du pouvoir politique. Bahro le dit joliment: „Le bureaucratisme a depuis longtemps cessé d‘être une couche de peinture de couleur différente bad geonnée sur le fond“ (p. 223). Si donc l‘un et l‘autre s‘accordent à penser que la question du pouvoir, du renversement de la bureaucratie dans ces pays se pose dans des termes originaux pour autant que le point de focalisation de l’oppression n’y est pas le pouvoir d’une classe, mais l’Etat, la domination politique d’une couche bureaucratique, ils s’accordent aussi pour définir le passage du pré- ou protosocialisme au socialisme authentique comme le processus d’une révolution et non d’un aménagement des conditions existantes, d’une révolution autant culturelle que politique, au sens où elle repose sur un changement de cap au plan anthropologique, où elle n’épargne aucune forme, aucune sphère de l’existence soc iale. Le spécialiste Tout ceci explique la convergence frappante qui se manifeste entre Bahro et Uhl au niveau des mesures considérées comme prioritaires dans la sphère de la production: d’abord, un abaissement massif du temps de travail conçu pour libérer une part majeure de l’énergie sociale des producteurs, afin qu’ils puissent agir

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comme des sujets sociaux et historiques conscients; ensuite, l’abolition de l’état de spécialiste au sens où on l’entend dans les sociétés aussi bien capitalistes que pré-socialistes. C’est que, note Bahro, “il y a une énorme différence entre un homme qui est, entre autres choses, très spécialisé dans une opération complexe quelconque et l’état de spécialiste élevé au rang d’une forme sociale d’existence» (p. 271). Uhl, lui, propose la solution suivante: «chaque travailleur consacrerait une partie bien définie de sa semaine de travail à l’exercice de sa profession plus ou moins qualifiée (par exemple vingt heures pendant les trois premiers jours), le quatrième jour, il effectuerait selon les besoins des travaux non qualifiés (dans le commerce, les transports, les services, des activités de contrôle de circuits automatiques, etc.) et les trois jours suivants seraient libres» (p. 288). Fondamentalement, la logique de ces mesures, c’est l’abolition des relations de subordination et domination, le renversement des hiérarchies héritées de la division «classique» du travail que reproduit le socialisme «réel», c’est l’instauration d’une dialectique du travail et du temps libre qui permette de viser consciemment l’abolition de l’existence comme sphères séparées de la production, la «vie privée», les «loisirs», la vie politique etc.; c’est la reconstitution d’un continuum, d’une unité de la pratique sociale. Pour Uhl, c’est sous le signe de l’autogestion, pour Bahro sous celui de la production d’un «excédent de conscience», de l’accession de la majorité des producteurs au «travail général» qu’est placée cette unité nouvelle de la pratique sociale. Nous allons voir que, sur ce point, les différences terminologiques recouvrent des divergences de fond. Quelle est la racine de ces divergences? Bahro, comme Uhl, perçoit avec beaucoup d’acuité que c’est le destin de la Révolution russe qui a scellé celui de l’Utopie marxienne, que c’est autour de la trajectoire de la Révolution russe que se joue la mutation du marxisme d’Utopie générale de l’émancipation humaine en “réalisme” d’Etat. L’Alternative abonde de formules comme celles-ci: «La position de Lénine vis-à-vis du rôle de l’Etat pendant la période de transition devait être nécessairement différente de celle de Marx» (...) «Lénine attribua à l’Etat les fonctions que, chez Marx, la ‘libre association’ devait régler» (p. 90). Uhl, lui, insiste sur le fait que les soviets ont commencé à se bureaucratiser dès l’époque où Lénine et Trotsky présidaient encore aux destinées de la Révolution russe. Pour l’un et l’autre, donc, le développement de la bureaucratie dans les Etats “socialistes” est un phénomène historique, lié à une conjoncture historique particulière et non pas inhérent à la théorie marxiste elle-même, comme il est de mode de le proclamer dans de larges secteurs de la dissidence des pays de l’Est, et aussi de l’intelligentsia occidentale. A l’encontre de la nouvelle metaphysique du Goulag qui, d’est en ouest, proclame inlassablement que les camps et la barbarie du socialisme «réel» découlent en ligne droite de l’Utopie de Marx, Uhl et Bahro maintiennent qu’au contraire la réalité de ce socialisme constitue l’inversion et la négation de la théorie de l’émancipation de Marx. Mais leurs analyses divergent lorsqu’il s’agit d’expliquer cette involution du socialisme. Pour Bahro, il ne fait pas de doute qu’il s’agit là d’un processus fatal. Dans L’Alternative, on relève nombre de formules péremptoires qui tendent à indiquer que l’Union soviétique ne pouvait suivre un autre chemin que celui qu’une sorte de Nécessité historique lui a imposé; ainsi: «L’Etat des peuples qui sont en voie d’industrialisation ne

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peut tout d’abord qu’être bureaucratique” (p. 118); ou encore: “Staline a conquis le pouvoir parce qu’il convenait à cet Etat” (p. 108); “la prise du pouvoir par les bolcheviques en Russie ne pouvait mener à aucune autre structure sociale que celle que nous avons aujourd’hui» (p. 85). Uhl, lui, est beaucoup moins affirmatif; pour lui, tout processus révolutionnaire met en mouvement une tendance autogestionnaire, qui s’est exprimée puissamment au cours de la Révolution russe dans l’eclosion des soviets; sans doute note-t-il que s’est manifestée, dès le début de la Révolution russe, une tendance antagonique à “détourner ces soviets au profit du pouvoir bureaucratique” (p. 249); si certaines de ses formules laissent par ailleurs penser qu’il considère que le “modèle” léniniste du parti d’avant-garde n’est pas étranger à la dégénérescence du système soviétique, s’il insiste aussi sur l’arriération de la Russie, il ne donne jamais dans le fatalisme qui caractérise la démarche de Bahro sur cette question; d’une façon générale, le facteur subjectif, le facteur de la praxis politique, de la conscience politique, occupe, dans sa démarche, une place essentielle. C’est là une position conforme à ses engagements concrets. Actualité de la barbarie C’est à partir de cette question que s’approfondit la divergence entre Uhl et Bahro. Il est vrai qu’ils insistent l’un et l’autre sur le fait que ce sont les conditions existant aujourd’hui dans les pays du socialisme «réel» et, d’une façon plus générale dans les pays industriellement développés qui rendent absolument nécessaire le retour à l’Utopie première de Marx: «L’émancipation générale est devenue aujourd’hui une absolue nécessité», souligne Bahro (p. 238); et Uhl ajoute: «Nous avons atteint un stade de développement des sociétés où la démocratie indirecte est devenue un anachronisme et un frein» (p. 247). Derrière le blocage et l’anarchie des sociétés capitalistes et «proto-socialistes», ce qui se dessine donc clairement pour ces deux opposants marxistes, c’est bien le retour en force de la barbarie comme perspective historique; c’est cette menace qui impose le retour au communisme «utopique» de Marx, au communisme de la «libre association», fondé sur le dépérissement de l’Etat, de la division du travail. Mais Bahro développe cette analyse dans une direction singulière: derrière l’involution du socialisme en notre siècle, il décèle aussi la faillite d’une part de l’Utopie marxienne, la part du messianisme révolutionnaire fondé sur la religion du prolétariat comme sujet historique. Il le dit nettement, à plusieurs reprises: «Le marxisme est une théorie qui se fonde sur l’existence d’une classe ouvrière, mais ce n’est pas sa théorie à elle» (p. 184); «le prolétariat sujet collectif actuel de l’émancipation générale, cela est resté une hypothèse philosophique où s’est concentrée la composante utopique du marxisme» (p. 185). En d’autres termes, il y a, dans le marxisme, une composante métaphysique qui tient au fait que les intellectuels qui produisent le marxisme comme théorie — à commencer par Marx lui-même — projettent sur le prolétariat leur utopie de l’émancipation humaine, en font le porteur théorique de cette émancipation; mais, selon lui, la réalité historique du XXe siècle est venue ruiner cette part de l’Utopie; le prolétariat n’a pas été le «sujet» de l’émancipation comme l’entendait Marx, dans

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son optimisme débordant: “Le concept marxiste de prolétariat est l’expression de l’utopie selon laquelle, après une courte transition, le communisme succédera directement au capitalisme de concurrence” (p. 181). Constatant que c’est le contraire qui s’est produit avec la cristallisation des sociétés bureaucratiques de l’Est, il franchit encore un pas: dans ce type de sociétés, affirme-t-il, le concept de prolétariat est dépourvu de sens: “C’est dans le socialisme existant réellement que l’on constate avec le plus de netteté que le prolétariat industriel en tant que tel ne dispose pas des perspectives d’avenir qu’on lui prédit. Ce que Marx regroupait sous le concept de ‘mission historique du prolétariat’ se dissout totalement dans l’histoire des sociétés industrielles non-capitalistes ou postcapitalistes» (p. 178); et il ajoute: «la caractéristique de notre société n’est plus une division ‘horizontale’ en classes, mais une série ‘verticale’ de couches, avec des transitions à vrai dire encore rigides» (p. 172); l’évolution de ses positions théoriques et politiques depuis qu’il est en Occident montre chez Bahro la tendance inéluctable à étendre ce type de raisonnement à l’ensemble des sociétés industrielles. Un mal nécessaire On voit donc se dessiner ainsi la logique d’ensemble de l’analyse de Bahro. Au fond, il était fatal et nécessaire que le romantisme révolutionnaire des années vingt soit battu en brèche et qu’ainsi soit mise à l’ordre du jour la part de métaphysique du prolétariat “sujet de l’émancipation” que recèle l’Utopie de Marx; au fond, le triomphe du stalinisme fut celui d’un réalisme à la mesure des conditions historiques et, pour ainsi dire, utile, vu le stade de l’évolution historique qui était celui qu’atteignait la Russie au moment de la Révolution. Aujourd’hui, il en va tout autrement, il faut changer de cap, le réalisme stalinien, ce mal nécessaire, et le modèle de développement, de vie sociale qui en découle, ont épuisé toutes leurs potentialités: il faut reprendre en charge la part d’Utopie authentiquement libératrice dont le marxisme est porteur, il faut dépasser “l’horizon de la société de classe” où se trouve confiné le socialisme “réel” comme le capitalisme avancé. Nous avons indiqué déjà, quelles sont les lignes de force de cette transition du “proto-socialisme” au socialisme authentique que propose Bahro. Son argumentation est étayée sur un certain nombre de propositions concrètes qui sont autant d’éléments d’un programme politique de renversement de la bureaucratie. Relevons parmi ces mesures que Bahro propose comme conditions de la «révolution politique»: la réduction de tous les traitements qui dépassent les limites de l’échelle normale des salaires, la suppression de tous les avantages matériels, sociaux, médicaux, culturels et autres dont bénéficie l’appareil, la suppression de la «pompe petite-bourgeoise» dont s’étourdissent les bureaucrates, la suppression du travail au rendement et du salaire à la pièce, la participation de tous à des tâches d’exécution, etc. Il ne fait pas de doute que l’on a là des éléments substantiels de ce programme anti-bureaucratique que tout mouvement social d’importance met à l’ordre du jour dans les pays de l’Est. Pourtant l’impression subsiste à la lecture de la dernière partie de l’Alternative, que demeure un hiatus entre le contenu historique de l’utopie positive et concrète

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que propose Bahro et cet embryon de programme: c’est que, conformément au pronostic qu’il fait de l’extinction du rôle historique du prolétariat, il manque un chaînon dans la démarche de Bahro; l’autoactivité des masses, leur rôle comme porteuses de ce programme anti-bureaucratique dans cette phase de transition. Ce n’est pas pour rien que très souvent, le discours proprement politique de l’auteur de l’Alternative oscille entre l’ultimatisme de l’Utopie générale et le «réalisme» des pas de tortue, de l’étapisme rassis des eurocommunistes auxquels Bahro rend hommage au passage, tout comme son compatriote Havemann; depuis qu’il est en Occident, ce hiatus entre le projet lointain d’un monde débarrassé des nuisances et de l’anarchie de la société industrielle et une politique concrète qui met sous le boisseau tout concept de lutte de classe s’est encore accentué. C’est évidemment comme le montrent de manière saisissante les événements polonais de l’année ‘80, qu’il est impossible de concevoir pleinement une démarche transitoire du socialisme «réel» au socialisme véritable qui ne place pas au centre de sa préoccupation l’autoactivité et l’auto-organisaion des masses, des travailleurs qui jouent un rôle décisif dans le procès de production. Il apparaît ainsi qu’il demeure dans la vision de la révolution politique que propose Bahro comme un résidu de la vieille idée platonicienne du “sage gouvernement des philosophes”, l’idée que les intellectuels, mieux préparés que d’autres couches à maîtriser le processus complexe d’une société développée, plus richement dotés de ce surplus de conscience qui apparaît à Bahro comme la condition du dépassement de l’horizon du socialisme bureaucratique, seraient amenés à jouer le rôle décisif dans ce processus. Ce n’est peut-être pas tout à fait par hasard que Bahro centre toute son évocation du Printemps de Prague sur le rôle qu’y a joué la crise de l’intelligentsia. Ainsi, à une direction corrompue, incapable, veule, bornée, se substituerait une autre, avisée, dotée d’une vision synthétique de l’avenir humain; ce n’est guère qu’en ce sens qu’on peut comprendre l’étonnant plaidoyer que prononce Bahro en faveur ... du parti unique, tout en prônant la création d’une Ligue des communistes, comme si, dans la dictature du Parti telle que l’a érigée, sur le terrain d’un nouvel absolutisme, le stalinisme, n’était viciée que l’orientation du pouvoir politique et non la forme du pouvoir elle-même. Une cassure Ce n’est donc que partiellement que Bahro mène à bien son projet de refonder sur une base solide l’Utopie marxiste: entre le programme et l’Utopie générale, se dessine une cassure qui est à l’origine des innombrables contradictions du livre. Cette cassure est à l’origine d’une confusion lourde de conséquences qui émerge à la fin de l’ouvrage: Bahro y laisse entendre que le retour de l’Utopie doit se fonder sur une critique radicale et extensive — en termes anthropologiques — du caractère prométhéen des sociétés industrielles. Il y laisse entendre qu’il faudrait songer à réduire de façon radicale le développement des forces productives, évoquant aussi bien les aspects antagoniques du rapport entre la production et la nature (le gaspillage des ressources naturelles, les dommages irréversibles infigés à l’environnement naturel par un certain type de croissance industrielle), que la nécessité d’inventer une nouvelle théorie des besoins qui rompe radicalement

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avec le fétichisme de la marchandise. Si ces préoccupations convergent largement avec celles d’autres dissidents, d’un Havemann, par exemple, il apparaît, qu’elles entraînent aujourd’hui Bahro sur le terrain d’une Utopie passablement abstraite et pauvre, l’Utopie désenchantée d’une société revenue du miracle de l’industrialisme; une Utopie généralisante qui efface les racines de classe de l’anarchie de la production capitaliste; une Utopie ambiguë qui à force de prôner le renoncement aux rêves prométhéens, risquerait de converger avec les admonestations des chantres de l’austérité dans les pays capitalistes frappés de la crise; une Utopie qui, à force de proclamer que nos sociétés industrielles souffrent d’excès de croissance en viendrait à oublier la non-satisfaction des besoins élémentaires qui est la règle dans les pays sous-industrialisés du monde capitaliste et, largement aussi, dans les pays bureaucratiques de l’Est. En poursuivant dans cette direction, on aboutit au renversement de l’Utopie positive et concrète que Bahro s’efforce de fonder avec infiniment de force et de hauteur de vue dans la majeure partie de son ouvrage, en Utopie passéiste, en rêverie abstraite sur un monde ossifié, dépourvue de toute visée stratégique de l’émancipation humaine.7 Le fil rouge de l’autogestion Toute autre est la conception que propose Petr Uhl de la transition du socialisme bureaucratique au socialisme authentique. C’est qu’il considère que dans ce processus, la classe ouvrière, les producteurs directs, jouent le rôle décisif. C’est pour lui toute la dialectique de la transition qui se développe autour de la mobilisation des travailleurs, de leur auto-organisation, “des ressources insoupçonnables” qui peuvent être libérées par leur entrée en action. Pour lui, il y a une continuité essentielle entre la mobilisation des travailleurs à l’occasion de processus comme ceux qu’ont connus la Hongrie et la Pologne en 1956, la Tchécoslovaquie en 1968, et le déploiement de formes d’organisation sociale et politique alternatives, le développement dialectique de l’autogestion. Il n’est évidemment pas fortuit que son analyse du Printemps de Prague, contrairement à celle de Bahro, mette l’accent sur le développement des conseils, la dynamique de l’auto-organisation et de l’émergence du double pouvoir. Le fil rouge de son analyse, c’est l’idée que dès les premiers pas d’un mouvement tendant à l’affrontement avec la bureaucratie, il faut mettre en place des éléments de démocratie directe, enraciner la tendance autogestionnaire inhérente à tout processus révolutionnaire dans les institutions de la démocratie directe: comités, conseils de travailleurs. C’est d’abord au niveau des unités de production que doit s’enraciner la démocratie directe. «Au début du processus révolutionnaire», écrit-il, «c’est le domaine du travail, donc de la production qui doit être le pilier du système autogestionnaire» (p. 270). La base solide de cette nouvelle démocratie ce sont les ouvriers des grands complexes industriels. Sur ce point, l’opposition avec Bahro est totale. Celui-ci prône en effet une structuration de la société de la «libre association» sur une base locale, territoriale: la société comme «association de communes». Uhl, au contraire, propose que sur des votes d’intérêt général, les producteurs directs bénéficient pendant toute une phase de transition, de deux voix: une en tant que producteurs, une en tant que citoyens. On a là une

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illustration saisissante du rapport intime qui, selon lui, existe entre l’émergence d’une alternative sociale et historique globale et le rôle de la classe ouvrière en tant que porteuse de ce mouvement. C’est avec un grand luxe de détails que Petr Uhl indique l’ensemble des garanties dont doit s’entourer le mouvement de démocratie directe afin d’empêcher la reproduction de phénomènes bureaucratiques: fondamentalement, c’est l’autoactivité sociale et la mobilisation politique des masses qui constitue la seule garantie contre la cristallisation d’une nouvelle bureaucratie. Le rapport est donc direct entre la transformation de la situation du producteur dans les rapports de production et l’exercice de prérogatives entières du citoyen. Explicitement, Petr Uhl indique que la dialectique de la démocratie directe — par opposition à la démocratie représentative fondée sur la séparation des pouvoirs — tend vers la suppression de l’Etat ou encore, ce qui revient au même, de la politique comme sphère séparée. Il écrit: «Après la victoire des travailleurs, l’Etat survivra aussi longtemps que les institutions étatiques qui s’occupent aujourd’hui de tâches utiles ne seront pas remplacées par les organisations des travailleurs eux-mêmes et par leurs institutions» (p. 315); ou encore: «les partis politiques correspondent à la période de la lutte des classes» (p. 260), ce qui, à la fois, fonde la nécessité du pluralisme politique dans une société de transition, mais aussi indique que la politique, comme forme traditionnelle incarnée par le «jeu» des partis, n’est pas éternelle. Bien entendu, Uhl ne voit pas l’instauration de cette société de démocratie directe basée sur une pyramide d’unités autogestionnaires comme un processus linéaire: d’abord parce que ce processus doit, même s’il naît d’abord sur le terrain national, nécessairement s’épanouir sur l’arène internationale et demeure donc tributaire du développement inégal de la révolution dans les différents pays; ensuite parce que durant toute cette phase transitoire subsistent de puissantes tendances à la reproduction du système bureaucratique, des relations d’oppression et subordination: c’est pour cette raison que Petr Uhl insiste sur la nécessité de l’existence d’un “double circuit”: celui de l’autogestion naissante et celui qui s’incarne dans les syndicats, dans les organes de défense des intérêts immédiats des travailleurs. Il en va de même du droit de grève: “Le droit de grève devra rester dans nos principes et nos lois, encore longtemps après la dernière grève de l’histoire de l’humanité” (p. 344). Nous l’avons vu, les divergences qui séparent Uhl de Bahro sont, quant aux conséquences pratiques, de taille. Sur certains points essentiels, comme le rôle de la classe ouvrière dans un processus révolutionnaire, dans le cadre du socialisme “réel”, la réalité — en l’occurrence les événements polonais — tranche. Sur d’autres, le débat demeure largement ouvert. Bahro, par exemple développe inlassablement l’idée que le passage du proto-socialisme au socialisme authentique implique l’accès de tous les hommes à une forme de savoir et d’intelligence polytechniques, à une maîtrise des processus complexes d’une société développée: «tous les hommes, écrit-il, sont potentiellement des intellectuels susceptibles d’acquérir les capacités de penser dialectiquement la hiérarchie des rapports sociaux et d’intervenir activement comme expérimentateurs et comme bâtisseurs» (p. 343). Si Uhl part, comme lui, de l’idée que l’ensemble des hommes sont virtuellement porteurs des mêmes dons et

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capacités, il considère en revanche qu’il “est virtuellement impossible qu’une personne puisse exprimer ses opinions sur l’ensemble des problèmes” (p. 262). En d’autres termes, l’exercice de la démocratie directe repose sur un principe fondamental: s’expriment sur une question ceux qui sont directement concernés. A cela s’ajoute le rôle nécessaire de ceux qu’il désigne, anticipant sur les événements polonais, comme les «experts»: les spécialistes qui conseillent dans l’ensemble des domaines, mais ne disposent pas du pouvoir de trancher à la place des intéressés. Gageons que ce débat fondamental resurgira en plus d’une occasion dans la pratique. Il demeure qu’avec toutes ces différences, la position de Rudolf Bahro, comme celle de Petr Uhl incarne de manière saisissante le retour de l’humanisme marxiste radical, non pas certes au sens de l’éternité de l’Homme-majuscule et de ses valeurs éternelles comme le vide des Cieux, au sens de cet humanisme bourgeois — valeurs partout à nouveau florissantes en ce temps d’obscurcissement de la Raison de l’histoire. Le retour d’un humanisme radical qui, précisément prône une nouvelle intelligibilité de la société et de l’histoire dans l’espace absolu du socialisme «réel», une nouvelle transparence du rapport de l’homme à ses produits et ses semblables, à la nature, une praxis qui porte l’autoactivité des hommes au-delà de l’horizon de la société de classe, de l’Etat et de la division du travail. Bref, une nouvelle anthropologie marxiste. Une refondation de l’humanisme marxiste radical, sans contamination, d’autant plus remarquable qu’elle est à contre-courant d’un certain marxisme contemporain qui, à force de chanter le déclin de l’homme a fini par laisser échapper le fil de l’intelligibilité historique.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

R. Bahro, L’Alternative (Paris, 1979). P. Uhl, Le Socialisme emprisonné (Paris, 1980). R. Havemann, Morgen (Munich, 1980). Voir sur cette question Le Marxisme face aux pays de l’Est de Marc Rakovski (Paris, 1977). L’Alternative, notamment les derniers chapitres. Paris (1975). Voir son interview dans Der Spiegel n°50 (1980).

RÉSUMÉS CLAUS OFFE, Quelques Contradictions de l‘Etat-providence moderne L‘État-providence a servi de principale formule de paix des démocraties capitalistes avancées pour la période qui a suivi la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Cette formule de paix consiste, à la base, de l’obligation explicite du dispositif d’État de fournir aide et soutien aux citoyens qui souffrent des besoins et des effets spécifiques de la société de marché; et de la reconnaissance du rôle régulier des syndicats tant dans les conventions collectives que pour la mise au point d’une politique d’intérêt public. Récemment, la théorie et la pratique de l’État-providence ont fait l’objet d’attaques de la part de la droite conservatrice et de la gauche socialiste. On trouvera ici l’analyse des principales critiques que nous offrent ces points de vue opposés, de certaines de leurs convergences majeures, et de ce qui peut emporter ou non la conviction dans ces critiques contraires. L’article se termine par quelques considérations sur le processus politique qui décidera, finalement, des résultats possibles différents dûs aux instabilités propres à l’État-providence contemporain.

JOHANNES BERGER, Changer les types de crises des sociétés occidentales L‘auteur cherche à clarifier la nature précise de la crise et du dilemme des Étatsprovidence contemporains. Il soutient que les théories classiques de la crise économique ne suffisent pas à rendre compte de l’État-providence contemporain et de ses instabilités naturelles. Après l’analyse de ce qui est caractéristique de la crise de l’État-providence et des phénomènes de crises propres à cette forme de capitalisme, j’examine trois «solutions» possibles aux dilemmes de l’État-providence. Ce sont la «solution» conservatrice qui vis à la destruction de l’État-providence; la «solution» socialedémocrate qui consiste en un modèle corporatiste de politique; et la «solution» radicale démocrate fondée sur l’idée de participation et d’économie autonome. Les faiblesses des deux premiers types de «solution» font l’objet d’une discussion, surtout en ce qui concerne les zones de conflit du sous-emploi et de l’écologie. Malgré l’absence d’un agent politique pour amener une solution démocratique radicale, celle-ci paraît plus raisonnable et plausible er comparaison avec les faiblesses des deux autres solutions.

GYÖRGY MARKUS, Planifier la crise: Remarques sur le système économique des sociétés de type soviétique. L‘auteur cherche à analyser la structure et les tendances de crise des sociétés contemporaines de type soviétique (sociétés d’Europe orientale). J’essaie de montrer comment ce système est à la fois «irrationnel» et «rationnel». Il est «irrationnel» dans la mesure où il mène au gaspillage et à l’inefficacité économique endémiques. Ce n’est pas simplement un trait fortuit du système mais une partie intégrante de son fonctionnement. Mais cette forme d’ „irrationalité“ apparaît „rationnelle“ dès qu‘on pénètre jusqu‘à la fonction objective de but de ce type de système. La fonction de but de ce type de société est proprement politique — c’est une forme de domination sociale qui ne se limite pas à la

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sphère d‘économie proprement dite mais qui renferme toutes les fermes d‘interaction sociale. Pour peu qu’on comprenne cette fonction de but et la façon dont elle affecte la structure toute entière, on peut voir comment ce qui apparaît «irrationnel» d’un simple point de vue économique devient intelligible et «rationnel». Le système analysé, cependant, est fondamentalement instable et crée son propre déséquilibre — lequel encourage les tendances à la crise dans ces sociétés de commandement.

MIMMO CARRIERI et LUCIO LOMBARDO RADICE: L‘Italie d‘aujourd‘hui: Crise d’un nouveau type de démocratie Les auteurs présentent une chronique et une analyse de propositions contraires pour la réforme des institutions en Italie durant la dernière décennie. Nous suivons le développement et les tensions entre les stratégies contraires de «compromis historique», d’ „ouverture à gauche“ et d‘ „alternative démocratique“ — le brusque tournant à gauche du Parti communiste italien. Nous analysons trois phases de discussion de propositions pour la réforme des institutions: la première qui remonte au début des années soixante-dix était axée sur la discussion d’une «Seconde République» qui aurait mené à l’exclusion prolongée de la gauche de tout pouvoir réel; la seconde, survenue au milieu des années soixante-dix a été dirigée par les Socialistes et portait sur des propositions de réforme basées sur le modèle français de système électoral majoritaire à deux tours; la troisième phase, qui a commencé en 1979 est axée plus directement sur le genre de réforme exigé pour faire face à la crise de gouvernabilité. Nous terminons par une brève discussion du noeud de la «situation italienne» — la possibilité d’une transformation socialiste de la société italienne par des voies démocratiques.

NANCY FRASER, Foucault et le pouvoir moderne: Aperçus empiriques et confusions normatives L‘attention de l‘auteur se porte sur l‘analyse du pouvoir et de la connaissance par Michel Foucault. La réalisation majeure de Foucault consiste en un exposé empirique nourri des premières étapes de l’émergence de quelques modalités particulièrement modernes du pouvoir. Ses aperçus ont une signification politique importante et résultent de sa méthode généalogique unique de la description sociale et historique de micropratiques. Mais par la même occasion, son mode d’analyse fait naître de graves problèmes, dont le principal est de trouver le moyen de procéder à une critique politiquement engagée sans faire usage d’un cadre normatif. L’auteur cherche à déterminer précisément quels sont les aperçus empiriques de Foucault, comment sa méthode généalogique mène à de sérieux problèmes et à quelles questions politiques et normatives il faut encore faire face.

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DEUTSCHE ZUZAMMENFASSUNGEN CLAUS OFFE, Einige Widersprüche des modernen Wohlfahrtsstaates Der moderne Wohlfahrtsstaat hat als wirkungsvollste Friedensformel der fortgeschrittenen kapitalistischen Demokratien nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg gedient. Diese Friedensformel besteht im wesentlichen aus der expliziten Verpflichtung des Staatsapparates, denjenigen Staatsbürgern Hilfe und Unterstützung zu gewähren, die unter den spezifischen Notwendigkeiten und Auswirkungen der Marktgesellschaft zu leiden haben, und aus der Anerkennung einer offiziellen Rolle der Gewerkschaften sowohl in den Tarifverhandlungen als auch in der politischen Öffentlichkeit. Theorie und Praxis des Wohlfahrtsstaates sind in der letzten Zeit Ziel von Angriffen der konservativen Rechten wie der sozialistischen Linken geworden. Vorgelegt wird eine Analyse der gewichtigsten Kritikpunkte aus den beiden konfligierenden Perspektiven, einigen ihrer wichtigsten Konvergenzpunkte sowie dessen, was an den unterschiedlichen Kritiken überzeugen kann und was nicht. Der Aufsatz schließt mit einigen Überlegungen über den politischen Prozeß, der letzten Endes darüber entscheiden wird, welche von verschiedenen möglichen Resultaten sich aus den inhärenten Instabilitäten des modernen Wohlfahrtsstaates ergeben werden.

JOHA N N ES BERGER, Zur Veränderung der Krisen-Typen westlicher Gesellschaften Der Autor versucht, den spezifischen Charakter der Krise und des Dilemmas der modernen Wohlfahrtsstaaten zu erhellen. Er versucht zu zeigen, daß die klassischen Theorien der ökonomischen Krise für ein Verständnis des modernen Wohlfahrtsstaates und der ihm inhärenten Instabilitäten nicht angemessen sind. Nach einer Analyse der Grundmerkmale von Krisen und Krisenphänomenen in der wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Form des Kapitalismus untersucht der Autor drei mögliche „Lösungen“ der Dilemmata des Wohlfahrtsstaates: die konservative „Lösung“, welche die Zerstörung des Wohlfahrtsstaates zum Ziel hat, die sozialdemokratische Lösung, der ein korporatistisches Modell der Politik zugrunde liegt, und die radikal-demokratische Lösung, die auf der Idee der Partizipation und der ökonomischen Selbstverwaltung basiert. Das Unzureichende der ersten beiden „Lösungs“-Modelle wird diskutiert, besonders in Hinsicht auf die Konfliktzonen Arbeitslosigkeit und Ökologie. Obwohl der radikaldemokratischen Lösung ein politischer Agent fehlt, der sie durchzusetzen vermöchte, scheint sie im Lichte des Ungenügens der anderen beiden vorgeschlagenen Lösungen die vernünftigere und plausiblere zu sein.

GYÖRGY MARKUS, Die Planung der Krise: Bemerkungen über das ökonomische System der Gesellschaften des sowjetischen Typs Der Autor versucht, Struktur und Krisentendenzen der zeitgenössischen Gesellschaften des sowjetischen Typs (d.h. der osteuropäischen Gesellschaften) zu analysieren. Er versucht zu zeigen, inwiefern dieses System zugleich „irrational“ und „rational“ ist. Es ist „irrational“, insofern es zu notorischer Verschwendung und zu ökonomischer Ineffizienz führt. Hierbei handelt es sich nicht einfach um zufällige Begleiterscheinungen

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eines solchen Systems, sondern vielmehr um einen integralen Bestandteil seines Funktionierens. Aber diese Form der „Irrationalität“ kann auch als „rational“ angesehen werden, sobald die objektive Zielfunktion dieser Art von System mit in Betracht gezogen wird. Diese Zielfunktion ist eine inhärent politische: Es handelt sich um eine Form sozialer Herrschaft, die sich nicht nur auf die Sphäre der Ökonomie im engeren Sinne beschränkt, sondern alle Formen der sozialen Interaktion umgreift. Sobald wir diese Zielfunktion und die Art, wie sie die ganze Struktur der Gesellschaft beeinflußt, verstanden haben, können wir begreifen, wie das, was unter einer bloß ökonomischen Perspektive als „irrational“ erscheint, einsichtig und „rational“ wird. Das analysierte System ist jedoch auf fundamentale Weise unstabil und bringt sein eigenes Ungleichgewicht hervor, wodurch Krisentendenzen in diesen autoritären Gesellschaften hervorgerufen werden.

MIMMO CARRIERI UND LUCIO LOMBARDO RADICE, Italien heute: Die Krise einer neuen Form der Demokratie Die Autoren präsentieren eine Chronik und eine Analyse der konfligierenden Vorschläge für eine institutionelle Reform in Italien während des letzten Jahrzehnts. Sie zeichnen die Entwicklung der und die Spannung zwischen den sich widersprechenden Strategien des „historischen Kompromisses“, der „Öffnung nach links“ und der „demokratischen Alternative“ nach, d.h.: die scharfe Wende der Kommunistischen Partei Italiens. Drei Phasen der Diskussion von Vorschlägen für eine institutionelle Reform werden analysiert: In der ersten Phase, beginnend in den frühen siebziger Jahren, ging es um die Diskussion einer „zweiten Republik“, welche zu einem weitgehenden Ausschluß der Linken von der effektiven Macht geführt hätte. Die zweite Phase, die Mitte der siebziger Jahre begann, wurde von den Sozialisten initiiert; die Diskussion konzentrierte sich auf Reformvorschläge nach dem Modell des französischen Mehrheitswahlrechts in zwei Wahlgängen. In der dritten Phase, die 1979 begann, konzentrierte sich die Diskussion unmittelbar auf die durch die Krise der Regierbarkeit notwendig gewordenen Reformen. Die Autoren schließen mit einer kurzen Diskussion des Kernproblems der „italienischen Situation“, nämlich der Frage nach der Möglichkeit einer sozialistischen Veränderung der italienischen Gesellschaft mit demokratischen Mitteln.

NANCY FRASER, Foucault über moderne Macht: Empirische Einsichten und normative Konfusionen Die Autorin konzentriert sich auf Michel Foucaults Analyse von Macht / Wissen. Foucaults wertvolle Einsichten bestehen in einer reichen empirischen Beschreibung der frühen Stadien der Entstehung einiger spezifisch moderner Formen der Macht. Diese seine Einsichten sind von wesentlicher politischer Relevanz; sie sind das Ergebnis seiner ungewöhnlichen genealogischen Methode einer sozialen und historischen Beschreibung von Mikro-Praktiken. Sein Verfahren der Analyse jedoch führt zugleich zu schwerwiegenden Problemen. Diese sind zentriert um das Problem, wie eine politisch engagierte Kritik ohne Voraussetzung eines normativen Rahmens möglich ist. Die Autorin versucht genau zu bestimmen, worin Foucaults empirische Einsichten bestehen, inwiefern sein genealogisches Vorgehen zu ernsthaften Problemen führt und welche politischen und normativen Fragen noch zur Lösung anstehen.