Abstract
Presentation of Heller: Socialism and the Australian Labor Party
Agnes Heller and her comrades out of the Budapest School had no small effect on the intellectual life of Australia. Australia, in turn, had its effect on them. Still self-identified socialists into the 1980s, the intersection was bound to occur, however uncanny it may seem now, 40 years and a world away. Heller was invited by the Kooyong branch of the Federal Electoral Association of the ALP to deliver a view on the prospects for socialism into the 1980s; and here it is. She took the local brief, in the field indicated by the historic debate over the Socialist Objective since 1920; but her message was general, and in a sense rather European than Antipodean.
We are delighted now to be able to reprint Agnes Heller’s intervention in that political debate of the Australian Labor Party. Given its vintage and its peculiarity, we present this text as a document. It is discussed further in the pages of this issue in the accompanying paper by Ziyi Fan entitled ‘Agnes Heller: Changing Aspects of Her Socialist Theory in the 1980s’.
What was Agnes Heller doing giving advice to the ALP; and why was the ALP interested in her views? This may have been a moment of last gasp for the ALP, or part thereof, in its enthusiasm for the socialist objective or the idea of socialism. 1983 saw the election of the Hawke and then Keating Governments, and the rightward turn of the ALP, its embrace of globalization and what was then called economic rationalism, later neoliberalism. This involved the transformation of Labor, as actor and as acted upon. Labor and socialism had long been connected in the left imagination and in the minds of its enemies, but this was, as the German Social Democrats had earlier said of their own maximum program, the Sunday china.
What might this mean, or have meant: intervention? Along with others like R.W. Connell, intellectuals were to be occasionally rolled out as legitimation for the broader, too often lost horizons of the ALP. Maybe the East European credentials offered momentary interest. They had seen the future, and it did not work. This coloured the reception of the Hungarians on the broader Australian left, who of course thought that they knew better than those who had travelled the path of so-called actually existing socialism. These are indeed worlds away, when today the prospect of even a moderate managerial ALP is enticing.
We thank Michael Underdown, then Convenor of the Kooyong FEA, for his kind assistance in the process. The lecture was originally delivered at a symposium on ‘Socialism: The Answer!’, organized by the Kooyong Federal Electorate Assembly, Australian Labor Party, at Kew on 30 May 1981, a decade after Lukacs’ famous letter to the TLS, 15 February 1971. Also speaking at the event were R.W. Connell, Senator Gareth Evans, and Peter Milton MP. Let that voice from the archive echo across these lands.
Peter Beilharz
Introduction
Agnes Heller was the foremost pupil and co-worker of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. She was one of the Hungarian philosophers who signed the protest letter at the Korcula summer school against the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and, in 1973, along with other members of the Budapest School, was dismissed and temporarily banned from publishing in Hungary. Agnes Heller now teaches in the Sociology Department at La Trobe University (Melbourne).
Only a few months before our Symposium Dr Heller was awarded the Lessing Prize by the State of Hamburg. At a gala evening in the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, Senator Wolfgang Tarnowski explained that the prize jury wished to honour ‘a courageous thinker, who was a Marxist, but not a dogmatic’. In his laudation, Volker F.W. Hasenclever pointed out that Agnes Heller’s philosophical work, by theorizing everyday life (e.g. The Theory of Need in Marx), showed the way to new thought and action.
Agnes Heller’s path to this theme was explained by György Lukács himself in a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement on 15 February 1971. He had been requested to suggest the ‘Books of the Future’, and in reply sketched the ‘internal cohesion’ of the Budapest School. Dr Heller’s early works on Aristotelean ethics and the Renaissance human represented more than just historical analyses, Lukács maintained: They describe epochs – the end of antiquity and the Renaissance city-state – in which alienation was least developed.…It was precisely this problematic which led Agnes Heller to her hitherto most mature work, the monograph Das Alltagsleben (‘Everyday Life’), in which the main theme is the examination of the dynamic totality of the system of everyday fields of activity and forms of thought.
We were greatly honoured to have Agnes Heller participate in the Symposium, along with Professor Bob Connell, Senator Gareth Evans and Peter Milton, M.P. Many of those who attended expressed the wish to see this paper in print, and we are grateful to Dr. Heller for permission to publish it.
Michael Underdown (Convenor)
Why we should maintain the socialist objective
Whether or not a party representing the interests of labour should commit itself to the ‘socialist objective’ has been a much debated issue in the 150-year-old history of the labour movement. Bernstein’s well-known dictum that the movement is everything, the final goal is nothing, was in its time echoed not only by social democrats but by radical syndicalists as well. Both these groups regarded the ‘socialist objective’ as a dangerous, or at best as an impotent idea: dangerous, because it hampers the pursuit of parliamentary politics of reform; impotent, because it hinders the complete identification with the daily class struggles of the unions. Quite recently, an ideologist of the Italian Communist Party, Mario Tronti, gave voice to the same conception, suggesting that the party should drop the ‘socialist objective’ altogether because it was meaningless in terms of a syndicalist tradition.
Such a basis for the rejection of the ‘socialist objective’ is not completely unfounded if one takes into account the history of the labour movement. It is common knowledge that for the majority of the parties representing it, the ‘socialist objective’ has been an empty slogan having no bearing at all on their strategy or tactics. It has rather been preserved as a relic, and locked away in vaults so as to be forgotten. On the other hand, for the communist parties (over a certain, fairly long period for all of them, and at present, for many of them) the ‘socialist objective’ has served as a weapon against democracy and also against a considerable part of the working class itself. The question of what the ‘socialist objective’ really meant could not even be raised, it having been dogmatically defined once and for all.
But even if the challenge to this objective is not wholly unfounded, it is a gesture of self-complacent pragmatism or of despair rather than an act of sound reasoning. If the possible conflict zones of the coming decades are taken into account, one will immediately become aware of the dangers involved in a citizenry without imagination. On the surface of events, it seems as if there are no social or economic alternatives to the present state of affairs; as if the future of Western societies can be conceived only in terms of a more or less progressive taxation. Without inspiring the collective imagination about possible alternatives, labour parties could easily find themselves in limbo, surrounded by a passive and completely depoliticized electorate that has been thoroughly exposed to the influence of a monopolized mass media, and is incapable of coping with any conflict situation successfully.
As the stringency of the revival of the ‘socialist objective’ and the foreseeable conflict zones of the near future are interdependent, a glance at the latter will help clarify the former.
In the 20th century there have been two social projects claiming to be either socialist or heading toward socialism: on the one hand, the Bolshevik project in the Soviet Union and in its East European sphere of influence, and on the other hand, the radical project of the welfare state in Sweden.
As is well-known, the Soviet experiment brought about a totalitarian political structure and a socio-economic system of domination which cannot be understood if we remain in terms of a dichotomic model of socialism-capitalism. This system is neither socialist nor capitalist, though time and space do not permit me to elaborate here on how it functions. What is of relevance is rather the recognition of the conflict zones that emerge in this part of the world. The liberation movements of this area, which began a quarter of a century ago and which of late have attained at least a temporary victory in Poland, will escalate – in spite of probable setbacks and even defeats – during the next decades. Should labour parties fail to produce a long-term policy coping with this conflict zone they will eventually lose their credibility. One may object that this conflict zone is both far removed from and has no real relevance for the political actors in Western democracies. This is a narrow-minded view, given that countries and nations ceased long ago to be isolated entities and ever since have been entangled in an international network of mutually influencing conflict zones. But designing a long-term policy that adequately copes with this conflict zone implies precisely the thematization of the ‘socialist objective’, and this is so for at least three interdependent reasons. The first reason is the most obvious one. The ‘imagination deficit’ I have just hinted at is responsible for the identification of existing alternatives with possible ones. Should someone as much as mention the ‘socialist objective’, the threatening image of Soviet societies enters people’s minds almost spontaneously. It is not sufficient to define the ‘socialist objective’ as democratic, given that such a qualification does not supply anyone with alternative images; images which are not only different from, but rather contradictory to, the Soviet system of domination. It has to be stated unambiguously that the Labour parties support the opposition in Eastern Europe; that they support those being ruled (not governed) and not those ruling them, and that this is not in spite of, but in fact results from their socialist objective. At this point the second reason emerges: that if a more vigorous image of the ‘socialist objective’ was presented, then the fairly pragmatic policies of certain labour parties and movements, when confronted with the problems of this conflict zones, might be transformed into more principled and more independent policies. I wish to make quite clear what I mean here by the adjectives ‘more principled’ and ‘more independent’. Certain labour parties share the general ills of the left in that they make their opinions and decisions on vital issues wholly dependent on the corresponding decision of conservative parties or that of the United States. Should the latter support an action, they automatically reject it; should the latter reject an action, they automatically support it. This dependence I call pragmatic because it is not led by principles but by quasi-instinctive political automatisms. The truly shameful decision to support participation in the Olympic Games in the Soviet Union, a country in which prisons and prison camps are full of political prisoners whose only crime is that of having independent opinions, is only one example of perfidy among many. Another example is the obvious reluctance of the British TUC to take sides with Solidarity until the Polish workers solved the problem by liquidating the state-owned corporative unions, the negotiating partner of the TUC. These and similar decisions make labour parties far from innocent in the eyes of East European dissident movements, and should such suspicions become overwhelming they could in themselves contribute to the turn of these movements toward conservatism and fundamentalism. The third reason illustrating the importance of reformulating the ‘socialist objective’ is the consideration that the resurrection of the labour movement will be an episode – even if a great and heroic episode – in the histories of East European countries if the Western imagination giving birth to a new view of socialism fails. Western labour parties, by thematizing the issue of socialism in a new understanding, could perform a world historical service to movements which know what to refuse but do not yet know what to establish.
Now I turn to the second socialist project, to the model of a radicalized welfare state. This has been and still is the guiding image of most labour and socialist, and even certain communist parties, and it became partially influential for certain groups within the Democratic Party of the United States. Although it is Sweden alone that has become what we might call a ‘total’ welfare state, all others having only taken certain steps (to varying degrees and with varying resolutions) in this direction, the tendency is nevertheless unmistakable over the last 20 years, despite setbacks and inconsistencies. A brief outline of the characteristics of the welfare state is in order, though I do not claim to be describing any state in any particular historical period. These features are the following: increasing state intervention in the economic sphere, limitations on the scope of competition, limitations on the market mechanisms, a high rate and a progressive system of taxation, and extensive public spending. All this made possible the implementation of socio-economic rights (formulated in the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations), such as the right to work, or full employment; the right to education, or free education in public schools, including tertiary level and above, providing the means for long-term study via an expanded system of grants and state-backed loans; the right to health care, or a free health service for the population; the legal introduction of the equal opportunity principle for women and those belonging to minority groups, and the protection of the marginalized and the poor. Naturally, I consider the implementation of the above socio-economic rights as an important progressive step in recent history. Yet, I have to add that there are certain social ills inseparable from even the best and most sincere welfare state; for example, increasing bureaucratization, increasing centralization, and last but not least, paternalism.
By the crisis of the welfare state I do not primarily mean an economic crisis. The interplay of various circumstances to which such states have fallen victim is generally known. There is no need to elaborate on the concerted power of international capitalism mobilized against the welfare state. It is also an obvious fact that capital has fled those countries with progressive taxation in order to invest in despotic states in which unions are outlawed and taxation is supplanted by bribes paid to government officials. It is equally well known, yet cannot be over-emphasized, that the re-emergence of unemployment, which has shaken the basic creed of the welfare state, namely the ‘right to work’, was not caused but only suffered by the welfare state. That which I specifically call crisis here is the astonishingly meagre degree of support given to the welfare state by its own beneficiaries. Instead of defending their social achievements against their enemies, these beneficiaries were ready to vote against this state the moment that certain economic disfunctions not caused by it – disfunctions such as world inflation – set in.
The first symptom of the crisis of the welfare state was the defeat of the Social Democratic Party of Sweden in the general election of 1976. Ever since, conservative monetarist policies have achieved substantial victories. But there is no need for prophets to forecast that this turn towards monetarism will be a short-term episode in modern Western history. Monetarist policy cannot cope with economic ills any better than the welfare state can, though it abolishes the most important institutions guaranteeing a minimum of life security and mobility for the working and lower middle classes. Just a month after the Australian Government’s further push towards monetarist policies, a new swing indicating a return to the welfare state had already begun in Europe. The crisis of the coalition government in Sweden due to disagreement regarding the issue of progressive taxation, the swing towards Labour in British by-elections and, most importantly, the socialist Mitterrand’s victory in the French presidential elections – all these are unmistakable signs that the tide has turned. But precisely for that reason, and because of the probability that the tide will turn elsewhere as well, it becomes even more mandatory for labour parties to face the reality of, and look for the causes of, the crisis of the welfare state. The simple reintroduction of traditional welfare institutions will not qualify for a programme. The question of whether the model of the welfare state is democratic and socialist enough has to be raised. Thus the discussion about the ‘socialist objective’ is again on the agenda.
Herein lies the answer to the question as to why the beneficiaries of the welfare state in fact voted against it at the sight of the first serious economic disfunctions. I have already mentioned that the welfare state is bureaucratic, centralistic and paternalistic. These are three features in common between the East European and the welfare model, despite substantial differences between them. In what follows I shall restrict myself to paternalism, given that bureaucracy and centralism are not features only characteristic of welfare states even within the Western context. Paternalism is an institutionalized attitude of the state towards its citizens. The state cares for them, provides them with a feeling of security. Life can be tolerable in the welfare state but it cannot become a good life. (To avoid here any superfluous Aristotle exegesis, so much for the difference: a tolerable life is either imposed through, or ‘donated’ by, higher authorities, a good life is self-created.) It cannot become a good life for the simple reason that the political passivity of the population, endemic in all capitalist democracies, spreads rather than recedes. Although economic conflicts still exist, and for a liberal-conservative taste may even flare up in an exaggerated way, at least in countries with strong trade unions, the population is more or less completely depoliticized. The citizens simply express their wishes like children before Christmas, and it is up to the good parent, the state, to meet these demands according to its own deliberation by distributing presents in keeping with its financial resources. The citizenry does not articulate political and social issues; it is the formulation of specific (mostly material) demands alone that matters. Thus the welfare state continues to atomize the citizenry which does not participate in decision making and direction setting and will feel no responsibility for the decisions involved in, and the consequences of, this direction setting, and cannot even be blamed for it. This system can work smoothly only up to the point where all wants can be met, in different proportion but at an increasing pace. Should it happen otherwise, a depoliticized and passive population will turn its back on the welfare state, and nothing is more understandable than that. No wonder then that the only notable social movements within welfare states have been directed precisely against those states led by the false ideology of ‘saturated needs’ and an (allegedly existing) ‘total affluence’. However, this false ideology expressed a vital need for the pluralism of lifestyles and self-determination which had been curtailed by the paternalistic features of the welfare state.
One can object to this criticism in that the failure of the welfare state could be detected in other respects. Even though it decreased inequality in income, it did not decrease inequality in wealth. All hitherto existing welfare states have been states of class societies. Even though they changed the structure of capitalism more or less, they did not even try to modify capitalism (as a social relation) in any substantial way. These statements are roughly true even granting that the fury of the upper classes and big money directed towards the welfare state may indicate that something did happen in this direction as well. But those analysing the shortcomings of welfare states only in these respects usually suggest the nationalization of industry as the only all-inclusive remedy. Without denying that, for certain reasons, the nationalization of certain huge enterprises and branches of industries might be necessary and even inevitable, I do not think that the radicalization of the welfare state via nationalization will bring us substantially closer to democratic socialism. This is why I look for the basic ills of the welfare state in its overcentralizing and paternalistic streak, a feature which would only become more marked should a programme of overall nationalization be instituted. State ownership does not eliminate the relation of wage labour but makes wage earners entirely dependent on a homogeneous and all-embracing power structure. It preserves, rather than transforms and reduces, the hierarchy within the workplace, the monolithic structure of technology, the division of mental and manual aspects of the same production process. Domination by a state bureaucracy, the members of which are not directly owners of what they manage, is no less an undesirable form of domination than that of the capitalists, who do own what they manage, though such a bureaucracy allows even less room for pluralism and manoeuvring within the framework of its system than the capitalists do in theirs. The substitution of a hierarchical gradation for social classes, the only change it might achieve, can turn out to be something more malignant than benign, given that classes are normally bearers of conflict, and that without their existence – in other words, in a social situation which is corporative at the top and totally disjointed-atomistic at the bottom – isolated individuals would be completely at the mercy of an all-powerful state, and would be so even if their civil rights remained intact. In such a situation, the right to organization can be observed; so can the freedom of opinion. Yet what really matters is that in a system of hierarchical gradation powerful organizations cannot come about, and that a population involved in an atomized struggle for higher positions is very unlikely to have an opinion upon, even less a say in, its own matters at all. Given that in all probability the present economic and social crisis will be long-lasting, and cannot be solved either by monetarist policies or by a simple return to the patterns of hitherto existing welfare states, the consideration of the solution which I called ‘the radicalization of the welfare state’ (Ivan Szelenyi termed it ‘the state mode of production’) is not excluded. But from the joint standpoint of democracy and socialism such a perspective looks rather gloomy.
The programme of an all-embracing nationalization does not inspire social imagination. Moreover, it does not even need this inspiration, given that it is conceived of in the spirit of rationalization; a spirit which is embedded in the patterns of instrumental rationality and which, according to social theorists from Weber to Castoriadis, has already dominated the capitalist scenario for a long period of modern history. Should the ‘socialist objective’ of the labour parties be defined in the same spirit, and should it fail in inspiring and directing social imagination towards alternative solutions, then, though these parties might prove capable of introducing certain new institutions, these institutions will not stand the test of either democracy or socialism.
After the criticism of these two models of socialism it is a natural expectation that I should define the content of ‘genuine socialism’. But an exact catalogue of the elements of ‘genuine socialism’ cannot be given, since it is a movement constituted by, and carried out through, the trials and errors of the citizenry of the various communities within a democratic state. Instead of identifying socialism with the radicalization of the welfare state I would rather identify it with the radicalization of democracy. Socialism is a long-term social experiment undertaken not by a bureaucratized and centralized state apparatus but by the citizenry as a whole, by a citizenry capable of discussing social and political issues, capable of participating in all forms of decision making at every level, and thus taking full responsibility for its decisions. The concrete constituents can only be defined by those who create it and practise it. Only one thing can be stated of this social experiment in advance: given that a citizenry consists of various communities with differing value systems and preferences, a social movement created by it would offer a wide range of lifestyles, and hence be pluralist.
Even though one cannot define the content of ‘genuine socialism’, one can enumerate certain preconditions for it. Marx once remarked that in capitalism democracy stops at the factory gate. We can now add that it stops at the doors of the offices and department stores as well. Of course, nationalization would not change this situation in the slightest. Self-management in the factory, the office, the department store is the first and basic precondition of radical democracy, even if it is only a precondition and not its guarantee. It is an ancient wisdom that only those who own a part of the ‘body economic’ of society are able and ready to share the responsibilities of the body politic. A pertinent objection here is that self-management does not put an end to commodity production and to the market, and may eventually substitute collective egoism for private egoism. This could, but I see no reason why it should, perforce be the case. Besides, interest conflicts are not alien to democracy and eliminating them would mean the elimination of a social dynamic as well. It is both the way and the channels through which interest conflicts are settled that really matters. One at least might have the confidence that if private egoism could co-exist with liberal democracy, then collective egoism could be self-restricted within the institutional framework of radical democracy. It must also be borne in mind that only a system of self-management could bring about a reunification of the mental and manual aspects of the same productive process, could trigger and implement alternative technologies inherent in various lifestyles, and could thus put an end to the tedium and uniformity of the labour process, the punishment for this homologous modern technology.
These considerations regarding ‘genuine socialism’ might appear to have carried me away from the matter under examination, namely from the ‘socialist objective’ as formulated in the programmes of labour parties to date. But this departure is only apparent.
If socialism is the radicalization of democracy, it cannot be viewed as a distant goal which may be achieved by certain measures taken by any party in power, regardless of whether this party wins the election by a substantial majority and observes all rules of parliamentary democracy. Naturally, without majority support and without the strict observance of parliamentary rules, radical democracy has, by definition, no chance at all, but the former is not a sufficient ground for the latter: it can in no way guarantee success. The monolithic character of lifestyles and the passivity of the electorate must not be taken as fait accompli. Labour parties should inspire social imagination: they should invite the working class and the middle classes to discuss what socialism means for them. Labour should encourage thinking about socialism; it should encourage suggestions about alternative socio-economic solutions and lifestyles and should stimulate the notion that conceptions of the ‘natural’ course of things should be viewed as ‘unnatural’. It should promote acts of emancipation from the weight of an immobile fantasy which takes the existing for granted and sees the not-yet-existing as impossible. By this I do not mean to say that everything is possible, only that we cannot exclude certain possibilities, should their social preconditions be clarified in rational discussions, before embarking on social experiments toward them. It was not Karl Marx but the sceptical Max Weber who once said: ‘Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.’
But not even the establishment of a democratic public sphere can be achieved by a decree or a measure. Such establishment means primarily the opening up of channels for all the movements, social experiments and initiatives which have come about in the last 20 years but which could never develop their potentialities because of bureaucratic and centralistic pressures. Opening up of channels means not only ‘permission’ but encouragement and financing as well. Even the measures taken in the direction of the pluralization of lifestyles may not really be successful without such substantial encouragement. The institutionalization of self-management in nationalized industry, long-term state loans for workers who want to buy a factory in order to establish communal ownership, breaking down the monolithic character of the mass media – all these necessary measures can bring about satisfactory results only if they are backed by movements and initiatives from an increasing number of active citizens. The more active the citizenry is, the less centralized the decisions should become. And this pertains not only to decisions but to institutions as well. There is no reason why self-managed factories could not establish their own schools, child-minding centres and healthcare systems according to their own particular needs, and get a collective tax rebate if they do so. The paternalistic character of the welfare state can be gradually dispelled, and this can occur simultaneously with the establishment of high-level substitute institutions by various communities of citizenry. Of course, neither decentralization nor de-paternalization can take place overnight. But a trend in this direction can be touched off.
This is not an easy step to take, the less so since in the foreseeable future certain serious difficulties will have to be faced. We shall all have to put up with relative scarcity (in terms of the Western world) due to both the limits of natural resources and ecological problems. I think that neither monetarist conservatism nor traditional welfare policies will be able to cope with this situation. Either they will promise everything and deliver practically nothing, in which case their respective constituencies will turn away from them, or they will not promise anything, and so will get no initial popular support at all. But the constant recycling of the same policies cannot go on forever. People seeking alternatives will be mobilized – one way or the other. What kind of mobilization, what kind of alternatives follow from such a situation is precisely the question to be raised. It takes a lot of social blindness not to see the increasing influence of various ante-diluvian types of fundamentalism, neo-Nazism, terrorism and the spontaneous collective outbursts of anger and frustration. The parties of labour have the obligation to break through this vicious circle and propel popular movements in more rational and more democratic directions. Let me repeat: this is not an easy task. It would have perhaps been easier when we had our economic honeymoon, but we have missed that bus. It is far more difficult now because labour parties in power have to deal with much greater pressures: the blackmailing tactics of multinational, and the actions of both states governed along monetarist lines and of big money at home. Traditional welfare states are very unlikely to resist this pressure and will in all probability lose ground again, perhaps even to parties with a fundamentalist-populist support. But were labour parties ready to inspire socialist imagination, to open up channels for active pluralism, to promote the establishment of democracy inside the gates of factories, offices and department stores, to contribute to the creation of a new public sphere and of an authentic citizenry thereby, they would stand a real chance. This would be a self-created world, and we are fond of what we have created ourselves. We do not relinquish it easily, even if we have to cope with difficulties. The interests and obligations of labour are basically identical in the long run, and the run does not seem to be very long.
Policies based on principle do not, it is true, exclude pragmatic considerations. Inspiring social imagination in respect of technological, social and political alternatives, and opening up channels for initiatives and movements cannot be immediately rewarded in terms of polls and electoral successes. Momentary setback and even defeats have to be taken into account in advance. Of course, if the defeats are grave and continuous, there must be something wrong with the principles themselves, but a few defeats do not prove their inadequacy. There are even defeats which are worth ten victories. The preference for pragmatism as against a politics of principles in international affairs; a preference motivated by a short-sighted nationalist egoism is always ill-conceived. The flirting of Chancellor Schmidt with Giscard d’Estaing against Mitterrand was as disgraceful as the flirting of certain labour parties with certain despotic third-world powers. Here again, the tangible rewards of power politics momentarily gain the upper hand against human dignity, which is not an old-fashioned and empty term but a precondition of a worthy political figure. Parties as well as individuals have to have their dignity, and the dignity and credibility of a democratic party aiming at the radicalization of democracy make it mandatory to support the cause of democracy and its radicalization the world over. This, again, is not only a dignified but also a clever policy. Parties which aim at the radicalization of democracy, or even at the radicalization of the welfare state, will repeatedly suffer from the attacks of multinationals, of big money, and various types of imperialism. In order to be steadfast they will need each other’s firm support, and they will not get it in their hour of need should their foreign policy be based on pure pragmatism.
I declined to offer any definition of ‘genuine socialism’. Nonetheless, I wish to conclude my presentation with a thought of Rosa Luxemburg very much in harmony with those presented here by me. It reads as follows: ‘Socialism is free pluralism in all areas of life.’ It would give us some hope if labour parties actively subscribed to this definition.
Agnes Heller