Nine days ago, in response to a post entitled “From Each
According to His Ability,” S. Wallerstein wrote a comment to which I did not at
the time respond, but which has been rattling around in my mind, and I decided
today to have a stab at a response. Here
is his comment:
“What's fascinating about this conversation, among other
things, is that no one participating, including myself, believes in the higher
morality of Socialist Man any more. If
we were having this discussion in the 60's or early 70's, the higher morality
of Socialist Man would have been taken for granted. Anyone who talked about
monetary rewards for right choices, as Professor Wolff does above, would have
been mocked as being infiltrated from Readers Digest. I'm not sure
exactly when I stopped believing in the higher morality of Socialist Man, but
now that I see that others no longer believe in it, I realize that I haven't
believed in it for quite a few years. That's a real sea change among what might
be called the "socialist community".”
As soon as I read this comment, my mind went to the beautiful
closing passage from Leon Trotsky’s 1924 book Literature and Revolution.
Trotsky was a class act, unlike the man who had him murdered. Those who want to know more might read Isaac
Deutscher’s monumental three volume biography [Stalin only got one volume from
Deutscher. BTW, I have some lovely
personal stories about Deutesher, whom I met twice, one of which involves Mika
Bzrezinski’s father.] Here is the
passage:
“Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to
raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent,
to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise
himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you
please, a superman. It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government
which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his
technique. Social construction and psychophysical selfeducation will become two
aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting,
music, and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly,
the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist
man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art
to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and
subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his
voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The
average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a
Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
This was written in the glory days of the Bolshevik
revolution, and although Trotsky was unusually rhapsodic, he was not alone in
his belief that socialism would usher in not merely a new stage in the
development of the social relations of production but also a new era in
individual human fulfilment. I was
deeply moved [and also, I must say, somewhat amused] by Trotsky’s vision of the
man of the future [needless to say, he does not mention the woman of the
future], but the truth is I do not believe a word of it.
There are three different claims at issue here, and it is
useful to distinguish among them. The
first, expressed so beautifully by Trotsky, is that socialism will unleash the
creative artistic energies lying with the human psyche in ways never seen
before, so that all of us will become Aristotles, Goethes, or Marxes, and new
now unimaginable forms of human creativity will rise above them. The second is that just as feudalism requires
[and recreates] feudal types – lords, peasants, serfs, priests, kings and
queens – and capitalism requires [and brings into existence] capitalist types –
legally free laborers, entrepreneurs, capitalists, petit bourgeois – so socialism
requires, will call forth, and will reproduce new types, whose moral sensibilities
will resonate to the clarion call “From each according to his abilities, to
each according to his needs.” The third
claim, which I think S. Wallerstein is alluding to [though I may be wrong], is
that socialism will not only produce, but requires,
a degree of social responsibility and revolutionary morality that will make the
day-to-day motivations of men and women under socialism different from and more
admirable than the motivations of men and women in capitalist societies and economies.
Trotsky’s claim is just hogwash, and his own examples say as
much. Aristotle, Goethe, and Marx [and
Shakespeare, Austen, Palestrina, Bach, Dickinson, Michaelangelo] come from many
different stages in the development of the social relations of production, and
there is not the slightest reason to imagine that their creative abilities can
be arranged in an evolutionary, or revolutionary, sequence. Aeschylus is [at least] as great a playwright
as Ibsen, and Bach is surely a greater composer than Chopin. Trotsky was only 45 when he wrote Literature and Revolution, and we can
forgive him his enthusiasm, but no one can take his vision seriously.
Properly understood, the second claim is probably correct,
although in the absence of any true socialist society it is speculative. Clearly the personality types characteristic
of medieval France differ from those characteristic of nineteenth century
England. [For some perceptive
observations along these lines it is useful to re-read Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Also, of course, Max Weber’s famous monograph
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. And, at a deeper level, Erik
Erikson’s Childhood and Society.] What kight such socialist types look
like? Well, one could do worse than to
examine an early Israeli Kibbutz or a contemporary community collective food
market.
But it is the third claim about which I am most concerned
here, and about which I am skeptical. Does
socialism require that we all be better people, fairer, more generous, more
concerned about others, more committed to ”the cause,” more ready to make
sacrifices for the common welfare?
Lord, I hope not, because save in the excitement of
revolutionary days, this sort of spiritual transformation is simply not going
to happen. That is the import of Oscar
Wilde’s famous one-liner, “Socialism will never work – too many meetings.” A system of social relations of production
and the associated institutional arrangements is sustainable only if it can
function successfully in quotidian ways
with the ordinary run of human being.
Even in holy orders, it is only the exceptional priest or nun, destined
for sainthood, who can resist what Weber, in another context, called the
routinization of charisma.
If I may descend abruptly from the world historical to the
personal, in my own career I lived through this routinization. The Afro-American Studies Department I joined
in 1992 was staffed by an extraordinary group of men and women [more precisely
men and one woman, the Chair] all of whom had come out of the Civil Rights and
Black Liberation movements, from CORE, from SNCC, from the Panthers, from the
Black Arts Movement, from the Institute of the Black World. They had a passion and a commitment quite
unlike anything I had ever witnessed, and it inspired a series of classes of
graduate students in the ground-breaking doctoral program we created and which
I ran for twelve years. By the time I
retired in 2004, these founding members were getting ready to retire, and were
being replaced by fine, accomplished young scholars, none of whom had come out
of a movement [there being no longer a movement from which they could come.]
It is always thus, alas, and so it will be with socialism,
if or when its time comes.