The Politics of Socialism

Socialist politics, I have argued, like any other form of politics, is intricate and ambivalent. It is an attempt to modify the real social world in desirable directions, not a prophetic venture in summoning up Elysium. Under socialism, in any of its vast variety of possible forms, men and women will be a bit different from how they are under capitalism, in its no less multifarious variety: just as we are a bit different from the cast of the Iliad or the Icelandic Sagas, or from the Trobriand islanders or the Nuer of half a century ago. What they will certainly not be, as Trotsky vapidly suggested, is utterly and splendidly different. Nor will socialist societies, insofar as these are actually created, and even if they do succeed in representing a major improvement on existing schemes of social organization, prove to consist of nothing but humanly desirable states of affairs.

One major impediment to thinking about socialism is the practice of using the term to refer not to sets of specifiable human institutions, actual or potential, but to purely imaginary and stipulatively ideal conditions. About ideal socialism of this character there is no possibility of rational learning, since the discouraging lessons of historical experience are inevitably held to have no bearing upon it. Between any forms of socialism that actually exist and any form of socialism genuinely deserving of the title there falls an impermeable curtain of darkness.