Politics, Economy, and Society. Paul Ricoeur
Socialism also has to consider the standpoint of governance, that is to say, the participation of the greatest number of individuals in economic decision-making. At this level, what is at issue is the realization of democracy in the economy; socialism’s ambition is to reintegrate human beings into economic and social mechanisms. Indeed, the will to satisfy human needs in the most rational way is not sufficient to define socialism. As we well know, the often vague aspiration toward a more just, more egalitarian, more communitarian society is the true soul of socialism. But this second objective lags far behind the first. Everywhere rationality is on the march, but nowhere has the participation of the greatest number in economic decisions made progress. On this level, socialism is entirely to be instituted. And yet, from the very beginning, socialism has stood against the administration of things by a technocratic oligarchy in the manner of Saint-Simon and has aimed at a democratic administration of things, exercised in the name of the masses and controlled by them. Today we are more lucid in this respect, because we have before our eyes various pathological expressions of planning, and first of all Stalinist pathology. The question is whether the Stalinist teratology is exemplary or accidental. Can it be ascribed to planning as such or to circumstances particular to Russia, to the initial poverty of that country, to external threats, to the imperative of too-rapid industrialization, to the political ideology of dictatorship, to the personality of the dictator himself, to the absence of a democratic past? The question remains; it is not erased by remarking that capitalist industrialization was itself extremely costly. The risks and the cost, both political and human, of socialist planning have to be weighed. Doubtless, the illusion that Marx still nourished when he was writing The Poverty of Philosophy has to be dispelled: “The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.”2 Today we know better, the administration of things does not suppress the governance of people, but, on the contrary, reinforces it. “Things” are themselves the products of human labor, destined to satisfy human needs. This is why the administration of things refers back to the governance of labor and the needs of people; this is also why economic power is ineluctably a governance of human beings. Managing the operations of production is a form of power of man over man; at least in its initial period, the administration of things reinforces the governance of people.
We have to admit that there are dangers proper to the planned economy. It concentrates power in fewer hands than the capitalist economy, hampered by its contradictions. Everything is coordinated at the summit, and the ultimate arbitration is performed by a small number of people who exercise almost unlimited power over collectivized goods. What is more, the material means of expression are in the hands of the ruling group: the latter can impose a rigid orientation on man-power, on the majority of professions, and exercise a sort of authoritarian centralization of all choices. To ensure long-term effectiveness, the ruling group has the economic means to evade the pressure of public opinion and mechanically direct this opinion itself.
These dangers proper to the planned economy most sharply pose the problems of industrial democracy. I will list a few of them. First of all, it appears necessary that the planning be complete in extension, but partial in intensity, and that the number of decentralized units be multiplied. No doubt only a plan total in its extension can become the least constraining plan, because only global choices can give rise to a cascade of relatively autonomous subordinate choices within the framework of these global choices. But, for the moment, this is a problem more than a program.
How can the creation of new forms of servitude by the bureaucracy be avoided? How can we ensure, on the one hand, the continuity and stability necessary to economic power and, on the other hand, the participation of the base in decisions other than by a fictional and a posteriori control, which is limited in the case of popular democracies to ratifying decisions taken at the top? Representative agencies have to be established that will debate fundamental choices. Parties, as we know them today, seem to be poorly equipped for this function, either because they represent interest groups, or because they combine together divergent interests which neutralize one another, as in the great American political parties. One would have to see what the Yugoslavian producers’ councils represent in this regard.
Moving down further, the problem of the governance of companies by the workers has to be raised: if workers’ councils do not have the power to accept or refuse increases in the rate of productivity, if they have no say in the direction of the company, if they have no iota of control in the director’s execution of policy, one cannot truly speak of a socialist economy. Ultimately, the aim of socialism is the right of each producer to decide how the surplus of his labor will be distributed and employed on all levels. Socialism is the end of that lack of freedom represented by need, and the conquest of that positive freedom constituted by participating in all stages of decision-making.
On this second level, socialism can be said to be the system where workers are the dominant social category; it is the system where the democracy of labor is contemporary with planning. And the second task can in no way be put off in the name of the first, because the more extensive and powerful the means of action at the disposal of the governance of people may be, the more democratic its institutions and mores should be. The major danger of the socialist economy lies in the entire apparatus being handed over to a ruling and privileged minority. This danger can be averted only by a radical socialization of the means of governance themselves. Now, this runs counter to the practice of a single party and to any system in which unions are reduced to the mere function of amplifying propaganda or to the role of a charitable association.
The Cultural Level: Socialist Humanism
On the third level, socialism is a culture.
This third definition is implied in the two preceding ones: if socialism gives precedence to real needs over profit and also over a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion – if socialism implies the participation of the greatest number in economic decisions – an entire conception of the human being is already outlined in this twofold exigency. The most fundamental and the most stable aim of socialism lies in its humanism. What are we to understand here by humanism? Three things, in my opinion.
1. We first find in the foreground the oldest theme of the founders of socialism: the theme of overcoming the alienation (la désaliénation) of human labor. Despite its profession of materialism, Marxism appears on this level as a fundamental humanism: it was Marxism that dismantled the mechanism by which the person lost his humanity and himself became merchandise, in the image of the fetishes he projected onto his own existence, the fetishes of merchandise and money. The profound sense of Marxism appears here: its materialism is the truth of man without truth. This truth is purely phenomenological: by this I mean that materialism is the precise description of alienated man; in this regard, the displacement of the critique of property we discussed in the first section has changed nothing concerning this descriptive truth. The alienating power of capitalism resides in the fact that, after having recognized the economic function of labor, capitalism lost its fundamental human meaning by subordinating it to the law of profit, that is to say, to the law of things and to the power of money. This is why we have never finished with this power of denunciation nor with the power of description emanating from Marx’s imposing work. I will return to this later: it is the enduring task of the Christian theology of labor to continually reconstruct the Marxist theses of alienation and overcoming alienation and to integrate them into a broad modern anthropology.
2. The second theme of this humanism is the control of the economic phenomenon by the human being. Indeed, an overcoming of alienation which was not the work of people themselves, but of a bureaucracy or an economic agency foreign to each of the workers, would only shift economic alienation into the political arena. This is why overcoming alienation has to be extended by what we have called above the socialization of the means of governance. The human significance of this theme is just as considerable as the preceding one, because it signifies that there is no socialism outside of the triumph of human responsibility over blind mechanisms, including those in politics, in the administration,