Originally published in 'Essays on the Left' (1971)

In the coming years the thought and program of socialism will have to be worked out afresh. Of course, socialism is always rethinking itself, but the present transformation will have to be the most far-reaching in the past century - since the appearance of Das Kapital in 1867.

The occasion for this rethinking is a breakdown of one of the props of our civilization, a prop of capitalist civilization to be sure, but one on which socialists counted for the transition to a higher form of society. This breakdown can perhaps best be thought of as a crisis of legitimacy, a crucial weakening of the set of beliefs, practices, and collective representations that help to hold society together. Of course, modern western societies like all societies beyond the most primitive - have been held together by a variety of legitimating ideas. Nationalism has been one such powerful idea, and no one can claim that it is on the wane. But one of the most important foundations of legitimacy has been the self-image of modern industrial society as a vast productive engine based on creative work, disciplined and rational effort, and the division of labour.

We are so used to this idea that we fail to notice it. Above all, we fail to appreciate how unprecedented it is in human history. It is not that previous societies have not had some shadowy notion of their economic organization, but no society before the rise of modern commercial-industrial civilization has ever founded its sense of its own fundamental value on this economic organization (or even on an idealized version of what it is supposed to be). The idea would have appeared grotesque to earlier civilizations. For the Greeks, the “economic” was concerned with the maintenance of life, a pre-condition for politics, which was what really distinguished human society from that of gregarious beasts. To be concerned one’s whole life only with the economic was to be in effect a slave. In the Middle Ages what was important in society was that its hierarchical order reflected and connected with the order of things in the universe.

Modern society singled itself out in that its paradigm justifying self-image was that of a productive association bent on transforming the surrounding natural world to meet the needs and fulfil the ends of man. So powerful was this justifying image that modems were impelled to project it onto other, earlier civilizations. Thus, for Marxism, the real motive force of change in history has always been the tensions within the economic organization of societies. Nascent nineteenth century anthropology interpreted primitive magic as a first, muddled attempt at technological control of the environment. Even today American political science gives us theories of “development” which assume the universality of our modern economic based categories.

The malaise of our time arises partly from the fact that this' justifying image has rather suddenly ceased to justify in the eyes of a growing number of people. The image of a society dedicated to constantly increasing production, to greater and greater prodigies of technology, suddenly seems tawdry and senseless. The constant rise in the G.N.P. goes along with an increasing demand for consumer goods, so that increasing social wealth seems to have no impact on the pool of poverty and material want which persists in contemporary industrial society. Seen in the light of humane priorities, we appear to be running as fast as possible in order to stand in the same place. And, to cap it all, this accelerating squirrel- wheel threatens to precipitate an ecological crisis which could be fatal.

This type of criticism of modern society is pretty standard stuff on the left these days. But its implications are not really thought through, and to do so properly requires much more than some minor retouching of socialist theory. To begin with, two facts have failed to register with their full impact: that the decline of its ^ economic justifying image really could threaten our civilization with breakdown, and that socialism has traditionally defined itself ^ in terms of its own version of the productive society, hence its own economic justifying image. It cannot just shrug off the challenge implicit in the fact that all such economic images are under attack today.

The fact that many young people are dropping out today reflects a much more serious threat to present society than could be concluded from the number of drop-outs. To some extent, this fact is instinctively felt by everyone, but the nature of the threat is misidentified. That a number of young people choose to live a life outside the circuit of the regular job, cellular family, gradual increase in consumption level - this by itself poses no great problem. Our society is rich and productive enough to carry a leisure class of this kind, particularly one which makes such limited mate¬ rial demands: the resources commandeered by one millionaire playboy would probably supply two or three hippie communes.

The threat which dropping out represents for society is usually understood as a threat of contagion, of increasing numbers: what would happen if all or most young people do it? But this is not very likely. There are still substantial rewards in the system and substantial sacrifices which have to be made to stay out of it. So dropping out is likely to remain limited to a minority and, even for them, to a limited period of their lives in most cases. More fundamentally, the act of dropping out presupposes a square society not only to give material support but also to give a psychological point to the action. In its very nature, it has to be a minority affair.

The sense of threat is really based on the fact that drop-outs dramatize something that everybody feels: that a life integrated in the productive system is not one of ultimate value. The hostility of the square comes from the fact that the hippy arouses in him and in all those around him something very disquieting a sense of doubt. This is disquieting not only because it calls into question the purpose of square life - an unpleasant experience in itself - but also because it is felt to question the whole basis of social cohesion, and it undoubtedly does. Modern industrial society has developed by undermining and sapping the strength of the traditional foundations of solidarity: the sense of religious community, of primary group loyalty, of allegiance to age-old authority. These foundations now tend to appear to moderns as “irrational," that is, as obstacles to the “rationalized" organization of things for the sake of production. Of course, modern society is very far from having made a clean sweep of such “irrational” ideas. Rather, one such idea, nationalism, is a child of the modern age and has grown to unparalleled proportions in our own day. But the gap opened by the decline of traditional foundations has had to be partly filled by the economic self-image of industrial society itself. The reason for playing one’s part according to the rules was no longer that all authority comes from God, or that life outside one’s community was inconceivable. It was that one was part of a vast engine of production based on peaceful negotiation and a disciplined, rational division of labour. To reject this idea would be to jeopardize this great enterprise, source of welfare, happiness, dignity for all.

The ideologues of the Enlightenment and their successors thought of this justification as founded on rational self-interest, and thus qualitatively different from the traditional foundations of solidarity which preceded it. With industrial civilization man at last comes to the age of reason, where he no longer needs childish ideologies and myths to motivate sensible, ordered behaviour. But this claim to a monopoly on rationality is another ethnocentric illusion. The simple calculation of pleasures and pains was never enough to motivate allegiance to society, but rather the great spiritual prestige of the enterprise of production itself.

Now that this prestige is waning we can see this more clearly. Industrial civilization, having brought men to an unprecedented degree of interdependence, requires an unprecedented level of co-operation. But interdependence does not by itself breed solidarity, as it should according to the philosophy of enlightened self- interest. It is terribly vulnerable to breakdown and paralysis which can be provoked by an indefinite number of small minorities. Without a widespread sense of solidarity the whole of our system is in grave danger of breakdown.

Hence the feeling of danger inherent in the phenomenon of dropping out goes beyond the fear that large numbers may follow this example. It is rather that the weakening prestige of the productive enterprise, which dropping out illustrates, threatens break¬ down in all sorts of ways: for example, in a paralysis bred of many sided intransigence, or in mass passivity before the take-over bids of small minorities. The hippy provokes disquiet as a symbol of society’s destruction rather than as its agent.

Socialist writers and thinkers have recognized these signs of incipient breakdown, and generally they rejoiced in them. But this rejoicing has been a little premature, for the full significance of such a breakdown hasn’t yet registered. In part this is because it is believed by socialists that any failure of capitalist society must lead to the advance of socialism. But on examination this belief turns out to be almost totally devoid of rational foundation. There' already is a clear historical example of a failure of capitalist society which did not result in socialism, but rather in something incomparably worse than its starting point: fascism. The only reason for faith in the inevitability of socialism is a naive Enlightenment belief in the certainty of progress and the goodness of human nature.

In fact, what usually follows a breakdown in one of the essential foundations of solidarity is a dramatic increase in the only alternative instrument of social cohesion force. Periods of declining legitimacy are periods of rapid expansion in government by force and also in violence. That is why the important transitions in our history have usually been marked by periods of strife and rule by force, which we often call revolutions. These historical precedents form the basis for a terribly fallacious argument widely espoused by writers on the left today: we are enjoined not to be too worried by the increasing violence in our society since the revolutions out of which modern democracy grew were also accompanied by violence. But to be reassured by this argument one has already to believe that some great step forward is in gestation, and no evidence is offered for this beyond faith in progress. Why should one not just as logically conclude that, since the conquests of Hitler and Genghis Khan were accompanied by violence, we must be sinking back into barbarism? It would be more realistic to hold that both alternatives, socialism and barbarism, are possible, and that neither is foreordained. Which alternative comes about depends on a number of things, but perhaps in part on what kind of socialist alternative is offered.

Socialism in its present definitions is closely tied up with the economic self-image which it has borrowed from capitalist civilization. Perhaps it would be truer to say that both visions spring from the same civilization, born of the Enlightenment and the growth of industrial society. A really adequate socialist alternative has to be rethought from the ground up.

The socialist economic vision of society is not identical with the capitalist one. In fact, traditional socialism incorporates some strands of the romantic rebellion against the economic vision. But this synthesis is an unstable one; it is a synthesis in wish only, and it cannot withstand the test of practice. This can best be illustrated from the case of Marxism, which after a hundred years still remains the basis of the most coherent and influential conceptions of socialism. On one hand, Marxism offers a vision of socialism as the fulfilment of the productive vocation of capitalism. Socialism will overcome the contradictions of capitalism, the forms of which have become fetters which prevent the immense productive powers of human society from giving their full measure. This has remained a theme of socialist rhetoric for over a century, that capitalism is inherently inefficient and wasteful, that socialism is ultimately the only rational organization of the economy.

This critique is not simple and univocal: it can mean that capitalism is inefficient in its own terms; or it can mean that socialists are applying a different standard of efficiency - effectiveness in meeting real human need - as against abstract production targets, growing profits, greater potential armaments production, and so on. In practice, socialists have usually meant both, though the accent has varied from context to context. But insofar as the second, more fundamental criticism is salient, we have gone beyond a simple reliance on the economic model; production is now seen as undertaken for the sake of some higher goal, at least potentially.

The question of the re-definition of socialism in our time turns on the definition of that higher goal or goals and the relation of the productive organization of society to it. And here traditional socialism is full of half-clarities and wishful thinking. Basically there are two answers, neither of them satisfactory. Both can be found in Marxism, which here as elsewhere retains its predominant influence.

The first answer is that in socialist or communist society, the distinction between productive work and creation will disappear. All production will take on the intensity, the freedom, the self- expressive power, the playfulness of artistic creation at its most untrammelled. Production will not thus be just a means, which has usurped the role of an end, as many people now experience it in capitalist society, a senseless squirrel-wheel. It will merge with intense self-fulfilment, with the true end of life.

But this perspective is unfortunately as implausible as it is attractive. Artistic creation itself is only free and untrammelled at privileged moments; these moments pre-suppose long hours and months of disciplined work. Even so, we would gladly settle for a world in which all productive labour could have the same creative goal and motivation as the work of artists does today. But although much could be done to relieve men from drudgery and to heighten the significance of many jobs for those who hold them by increasing their participation in the direction of the whole enter¬ prise, it would be utopian to look forward to a society in which there was no more labour which was not an antechamber to creation.

This hard fact is the basis of the second answer of traditional socialism to the alienation of productive labour: that socialist society will profit from technological advance and investment to reduce the hours of work dramatically, thus liberating men for free, creative activity. This answer accepts the continued distinction between creation and productive labour; it proposes to reduce one, perhaps ultimately to the vanishing point, at the expense of the other. We can see this solution as offering in a sense a return to the Greek polis, as it was idealized by its most fortunate citizens: a life of creative action and of full participation in public life. But where with the Greeks the material basis for this life of creative leisure was assured by slave labour, in the future socialist society machines would fill the helot role.

This is probably the most commonly held view among socialists today who are concerned with the shape of a future socialist society; and it is a perspective which many non-socialists also espouse at least in part. It looks deceptively simple: we just apply our increasing productive power to liberating men from drudgery and we open a new era of human history. We truly relegate production to a subordinate role, and one to which we need give less and less time, in order to devote ourselves to the true ends of life.

This idyllic prospect ignores certain stubborn realities. To begin with, we have to admit that we are not proceeding in this direction at all, that the immense wealth and productive power accumulated to date has not served to liberate more and more people for a life of creative leisure. On the contrary, we are probably the hardest working civilization in history. It is true that we have reduced the work week from the horrendous sixty to seventy hours that it was in the last century to more humane proportions. But reductions in the work week today do not usually mean significant reductions in the number of hours worked, but rather an increase in the number of workers for whom overtime is paid. And many people feel obliged to moonlight and thus still work sixty or seventy hours.

Why? The quick answer, which raises all the questions, is that we are absorbing our increased productivity in more and more refined consumer goods. With each rise of productive potential something new is invented which we feel we must have, and the race for this product, together with the efforts of those who haven’t yet obtained the last wave of inventions, keeps the squirrel-wheel turning.

The standard socialist response is to lay the blame at the door of the contemporary corporate capitalist system and its essential ancillary of consumer management. But the elements of truth in this charge easily distract attention from the crucial illusion under¬ lying it. The corporate system is built on this endless drive for consumer goods; it provides its focus, determines its pace, and above all entrenches its priorities in the decisions which shape the development of the economy. The corporate system has entrenched the power of these priorities, but it does not itself create these priorities, they do not exist only because of the power of manipulation. Any movement which wishes to change our economic goals in a fundamental way must fight the present hegemony of the large corporation over our society, but the corporation is not the only prop on which this consumer civilization rests. To believe that means accepting a naive, demonological, manipulative view of history. No institution creates the spiritual conditions for its own existence; it may intensify them, give them permanence, but it does not bring them into being.

The simple answer which lays the drive for consumer goods at the door of the corporate system cannot be taken seriously. Another equally simple answer is given by apologists for the pre¬ sent system; that men naturally want to possess things, and that given a productive potential which increases indefinitely there will naturally and inevitably follow a desire to possess which also increases indefinitely. Any other view of human nature, it is implied, is naively altruistic.

One does not need to have a wildly altruistic vision of man to question this theory. Men have desired prosperity throughout the ages and, given the chance, riches. But this wealth has not always, or even most often, been defined so exclusively in terms of the possession of things, in particular things, many of which have no intrinsic beauty. The problem of the ends of life cannot be so easily settled. Even if one concedes that men generally desire wealth, the important problems reappear when one tries to define what the life of a wealthy man consists in: and in particular, is wealth desirable because it is the only basis for a life of creative leisure, or is it desirable because it permits an increasing variety of possessions?

Once we set aside both vulgar socialism and corporate apologetics, we have to admit that we have not begun to understand the background to our endless propensity to consume, although such understanding has become an essential part of any adequate socialist theory. We cannot hope to change this propensity without an understanding of it, and we cannot hope to build a socialist society, one founded on more humane priorities, or one in which endless production would not be an end in itself, unless we can bring our urge to consume back into sane proportions.

I cannot claim to have the key to this mystery, but I think it is time that we engaged in some basic speculation about this problem as an indispensable prelude to more sober analysis. In this regard, there are a couple of hypotheses which seem worth exploring.

First, we find it very hard to redirect our productive powers from endless consumption to creative leisure because in fact these powers are much less our servants than we like to think. The analogy with ancient Greece might again be appropriate here. Slave labour emancipates the free for other pursuits, but it subjects them to other servitudes, those which are inseparable from life in a slave society: the brutality, the abuse of power, the perpetual fear of revolt. The same is possibly true of our technological civilization. It requires us to acquire certain skills, submit to certain disciplines, integrate ourselves in certain forms of organization, adopt certain attitudes to change, and some of these requirements may be intensified as we try to substitute automated production for human labour.

The picture of machines as the pliant servants of humanity with all options open is more a childish dream of omnipotence than a realistic prospect. Machines are extensions of our own powers, but as such they require that we be moulded to operate them effectively. The mere hardware of a modern economy is nothing with¬ out the work discipline, the bureaucratic culture, the habits of innovation which make it operational. This is not to say that we must accept holus-bolus theories of technological determinism which paint a picture of inexorable development of a society dominated by machines. Socialists have rightly been sceptical of such theories. But they are no more schematic and implausible than the theories of human omnipotence. The interesting, and useful enterprise is to identify the limited but significant degrees of freedom which a technological society allows us.

Our endless drive to consume is not accidentally connected to a society founded on the economic justifying image described above. A society which sees its ultimate significance in being a productive engine of unparalleled power must celebrate this by continually renewed tangible expression of this power. It must in some form or other glorify its products. The consumer society which we live in is one variant of this glorification. The society renews itself by recurrently giving birth to an array of “new,” freshly designed, supposedly improved products. With the renewal of our consumer durables, we are being sold renewed potency, happiness, a way of life. The hypothesis I am putting forward is that this apotheosis of the compleat consumer is not just an adventitious creation of the advertising-man, it is closely bound up with our basic images of our society and of its ultimate value.

Of course, the glorification of our products doesn’t have to take the form of the consumer society. We can also glorify our collective products. This seems to be the path taken by orthodox Soviet Marxism. Here, too, society is defined economically, but the accent is on the collective achievements of “the people,” prodigies of productive growth, technological wonders, targets met. Even capitalist societies have taken up this celebration of collective effort, as with the American moon shot.

This is a fatally inadequate vision of socialism. To substitute the glorification of collective products for that of individual products is to remain with the same economic image of society. But it is this image which is losing the allegiance of contemporary man. If socialism is to provide a creative alternative to the decay of capitalist civilization, it could not choose a worse or a more ineffective model.

Additional corroboration of this fact comes from the history of communist societies themselves. They can only maintain the pace of collective endeavour by rigid control from the top. There is pressure within these societies from the base to give more emphasis to consumer goods. This pressure, to be sure, has a very different meaning in a society where things which are by any reckoning essentials are in short supply. But one cannot help suspecting that if consumer demand in these countries were given its head it would show the same endless, insatiable character that it has here.

The collective celebration of productive power has not worked in communist societies. They do not seem to command autonomously the allegiance and enthusiasm to sustain themselves in a less repressive climate. This suggests another connection between mod¬ ern economically defined society and the drive for consumption. The collective celebrations of this society do not call forth a deep response in men. Only when a modern community defines itself as a nation do its collective acts and symbols strike a deep chord. Mod¬ ern nationalism is powerful as a public religion; the modern cult of production is not. Hence the public environments of modern industrial societies tend to be drab, if not positively injurious. The centres of modern industrial cities exercise an immense force of repulsion on their citizens, which itself contributes to their dégradation. There is thus a powerful drift in modern society towards privatization, the creation of a private space of happiness and personal meaning. The products in which our society celebrates its power thus tend to be private consumption goods.

Seen from another angle, the connection is this: the cult of production projects a vision of man as dominating, transforming the surrounding world and enjoying the fruits of this transformation. It is because we place ultimate value on this form of human life that we are ready to make production the central function of modem society. But, in order to participate in this cult, individuals have to have some tangible part in the process of transform¬ ing/enjoying. The problem is that just being part of a vast production team, even one which realizes some important achievement, is too abstract; the connection with the end result is too tenuous. The ethos of modern society stresses dominance, control; but the man in the production line feels much more controlled than controlling. It has been a constant theme of socialist aspiration to remedy this by some form of workers’ participation in management. But unless some formula of this kind can transform the worker’s relation to the whole process of production, the only way in which the average man can have a sense of control is as a consumer, a possessor of things, one who enjoys the fruits of production. This is the only universally available mode of participation in the cult of production. Hence the poor in contemporary affluent societies suffer not just from material deprivation, but from a stigma. They are excommunicated, as it were, from the dominant cult of modern society.

The drive to consumption is therefore no adventitious fad, no product of clever manipulation. It will not be easy to contain. It is* tied up with the economic self-image of modern society, and this in turn is linked to a set of powerfully entrenched conceptions of what the value of human life consists in. This is why it is not realistic to treat the infra-structure of technological society as an instrument which we can use at will for any ends we choose. Rather, as long as technological society is held together and given its legitimacy and cohesion by this economic self-image, it will tend to remain fixed on its present goals, the perpetual increase in production and the ever-widening bonanza of consumption. If we are to build a society with radically different priorities, one which will not be driven by this mania of consumption, then we have to evolve a different foundation for technological society, a quite different self-definition to serve as the basis of its cohesion.

This is no easy matter. We might at first be encouraged by the fact that the economic justifying image is losing its grip, but by itself this is no cause for rejoicing. This breakdown could simply! A render technological society more unlivable in that the only basis I for its cohesion would be the widespread use of force. There is no \ providence, no ineluctable force, which assures us that the breakdown of the cult of production must be followed by another viable foundation for a technological society. Whether this is so or not depends on a number of things, but partly on what is offered as a socialist alternative.

The preceding discussion should allow us to measure a little better what is involved in rethinking socialism for our time. For socialist thought has to tackle this central problem of evolving a different foundation for technological society if the socialist alternative is to be fully relevant to our time. To date the socialist tradition is woefully inadequate to this task. As an alternative to the cult of production it offers mainly the idyll in which productive labour is swallowed up in artistic creation, or the hope that labour can be almost entirely done away with, liberating man for leisure. But the first prospect is impossible; and the second is offered without any idea of how we can overcome the obstacles to it. Without a genuine alternative to the economic image, socialism in the West will be condemned either to offer alternative variants of the cult of production, which will certainly be ignored, or to stand by inactive in the foolish hope that any destruction of the present order will inaugurate a socialist era.

But what would be involved in elaborating such a genuine alternative? I cannot claim to have the answer. But one or two things can be said about what such an alternative would have to be.

The economic model has at its centre the notion of man as producer, as transformer of nature. Man is pure agent. Its Achilles heel is that this offers men a goal which is ultimately empty. The drive to increase production starts with certain goals - to overcome poverty, to provide education for the masses and freedom of choice. But as the production oriented society takes over, it sets its own priorities, and these end up being those of production for its own sake, a glorification of the products. When the hold of this image wanes men have the feeling that this vast and diversified activity is to no purpose, that it is all dressed up with the most prodigious means, yet with nowhere to go. Hence the dominant feeling in this period of decline of the economic image is one of emptiness. The challenge to the current model is coming from young people who cannot find a satisfactory identity in its vision of the future. It offers no form of life which makes sense.

The failure of the economic model is the condemnation of all models of human society which are based purely on an image of man as agent. Man is also a being to whom things happen, to whom things occur, who sees, hears, and feels. There is a genus of human activities in which what happens to us, or what we simply observe, is given human meaning for us, not changed for our purposes, but taken in, understood, interpreted. For the ancients, the most important of these activities was contemplation: for Aristotle this was the highest activity of man. But in modern time this contemplative function, whereby we take in and come to terms with reality, has been largely assumed by art. One of the signs of malaise in our civilization is that much of contemporary art is ^ ^ infected by the disease of the surrounding social reality, that it tries, half desperately, to become pure action, and wants to escape the exigencies of attentiveness.

In our present society the priorities governing the uses of technology and its development are almost entirely dominated by the goals of production. In an alternative society, they would be dominated, although not so one-sidedly, by a contemplative aspiration. In our present society our man made environment and artifacts are designed chiefly for some function, and then secondarily for “aesthetic appeal.” But we rarely think of them in terms of what they express about our vision of things. They do indeed express something, but this is the latent, the forgotten dimension. Exactly the opposite is the case, for instance, with Chartres cathedral, to take a very spectacular example. There beauty and function are secondary to statement. Of course it is out of the question that there be another such total, confident statement in our day.

We are more tentative, but we have not ceased wondering, imagining, thinking, in short, contemplating. It is just that we have abandoned one of our paradigm languages. We have let our architecture, and our world of useful objects, go dumb.

A civilization which recovered contemplation would have very different priorities in technology. The rage for obsolescence makes sense in our society because functional objects must be frequently replaced. But expressive objects are kept as long as possible, if they really speak. The priority would be not on serviceable materials and objects but on those which could be lived with for a long time. In such an alternative society, learning would not be confined to a preparatory phase but would be a major occupation for great numbers of people, who would return to it for prolonged periods at different points in their lives. This means that the society would commit a great part of its resources to supporting disinterested, non-functional study.

No one can say whether an alternative mode of technological society, principally organized around the goals of contemplation, would really be viable, whether it could claim men’s allegiance as the productive model did in its hey-day and still does for many today. But only some such alternative can provide a creative denouement to the crisis which our contemporary capitalist civilization is entering. That such an alternative would have to be socialist - that is, based on planning and a high degree of common ownership - must be obvious, but the converse is not true: socialism does not necessarily offer this kind of alternative.

We therefore need a rewriting of socialist theory as complete and far-reaching as that of Karl Marx a hundred years ago. The greatest of socialist theories then was born out of an acute sense of crisis. Perhaps we will be lucky enough to repeat this exploit once more.

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