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In the minds of the leading Marxist theorists of before 1917, the triumph of the proletarian revolution, the socialisation of the means of production and the setting up of centralized planning would inevitably lead to a society organized in such a manner that, after a preliminary phase of democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, the social body would then cease to be divided according to classes and the exploitation of man by man would be abolished. This would subsequently lead to an integration of the major values inherited from middle-class humanism (universality, individual freedom, equality, the dignity of the human person, freedom of expression) so as to endow them, for the first time in the history of humanity, with a quality of authenticity instead of the purely formal status that they had previously been granted in a capitalist society.
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- Copyright © 1964 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1 Dictatorship, insofar as it implies the existence of a proletarian State which applies measures of constraint to the middle class. Democratic dictatorship, insofar as this State represents the vast majority of the population and, for the first time in history, applies measures of constraint only to a small and reactionary minority.
2 The present study will also appear in a collective volume of studies, by various authors, on the same subject. This volume will be published in English, under the editorship of Erich Fromm, by Doubleday and Co. Inc., New York.
3 Anatole France once made a famous remark: that the law recognizes, both for millionnaires and clochards or bums, the same right to sleep beneath the bridges of Paris.
4 To do this, one would need enough money to publish a newspaper, to organize meetings, etc.
5 The proletariat of the Western world has some essentially reformist social layers, a phenomenon which seems to be due to the fact that the fraction of the Western working-class which has escaped, thanks to the existence of colonial markets and to union action, from the process of pauperization which Marx had predicted and expected has been much larger than Lenin had thought.
6 We feel that the opposition between tolerance and freedom of thought and expression constitutes one of the main differences between middle-class humanism and socialist humanism.
The very term tolerance indeed implies some degree of indifference to error. Born in the realm of religious belief and of faith, it corresponds to the inevitably atheistic and rationalist character of the rising middle-class and thus to a social and economic order which has suppressed trans-individual values. The classical rationalist or empirical middle-class becomes tolerant in religious matters because faith has lost, in its eyes, all of its importance and effective reality.
A socialist humanism which implies, on the other hand, the right for each man to express freely his convictions precludes any such indifference to the opinions of others and presupposes a common and permanent effort to find truth and achieve agreement through free, frank and open discussion.
7 These are realities expressed both by the most important writers of our time, from Kafka to the most recent ones such as Beckett, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Adamov, including Sartre in La Nausée and Camus in L'étranger, and also by sociologists to whom Marxism is as alien as it is to David Riesman, when he observes for instance the shift from a society which is regulated from within to one which is regulated from without. One might, of course, point out the same phenomenon by studying the evolution of modern art. In a brilliant remark, Erich Fromm pointed out the same phenomenon in his contribution to the debates of the Dubrovnik Congress when he declared that there had at first been people who travelled to learn and thus expand their knowledge, then tourists "who took cameras with them, whereas now we have only cameras that travel accompanied by tourists to service them."
8 We had first written "reformist," but discussions with several socialists, especially Italian socialists, led us then to understand that this term might prove confusing. The meaning of words indeed depends on the context in which they are used. In socialist thought of the first half of the twentieth century, discussions thus occurred concerning the two concepts of reform and revolution, the former meaning mainly an adjustment of more or less important details within the capitalist régime while the latter meant the change of the capitalist régime into a socialist one through civil war. the seizure of power by the proletarian parties and the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat which would, among other things, socialize the means of production. But we are now concerned with a third concept which can be identified with neither of these two other concepts.
This new concept consists in the idea of a transition to worker-management which can be achieved progressively in one sector after another and yet implies the possibility of more or less acute conflicts, though without the necessity of a civil war preceding such economic changes nor a synchronic transformation of society as a whole. At one time, however, such a transition might of course involve a particular nation in civil war, but might also, in other nations, be achieved without such expenditure.
Actually, such a process is analogous, in its general lines, to the one which led to the transformation of feudal society into capitalist society, a gradual economic transformation which was sometimes accompanied by civil war (in England or France), but which, in other nations, was also achieved with some conflict, of course, but without any violent revolution. One therefore has the choice of calling such a transformation a reform or a revolution, but should nevertheless be careful, in either case, to state that the term used has a meaning which is different from what it had in Marxist literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
9 At a certain point, the discussion was concentrated on a specific example which we find useful to quote here. One of the participants had defined freedom only as freedom from legal shackles, in fact as liberty from, thereby proving himself faithful to the rational philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. He quoted as an example of his view the fact that all citizens are free or not free to enter or not enter a library. We then replied that, in addition to this indisputably real and valuable freedom, there exists another freedom, liberty to, meaning freedom to build libraries which, it is important, of course, that everybody will later be free to enter. We then had to reject the proposal made by the speaker, to maintain the term liberty to designate as liberty from the right to enter the library, but to use the term power to designate liberty to, meaning the freedom to build libraries. Our reason for rejecting this proposal is very important: in current linguistic usage, the term power designates the power to destroy all libraries, in fact to counter the whole progress of freedom, as well as the power to build libraries.
10 For the same reasons, the terms positive freedom and negative freedom also prove to be incorrect, since each one of these various freedoms has both a negative aspect (its progress implying the suppression of certain shackles) and a positive aspect (its progress implying the possibility of doing certain things which had not been previously possible).
11 To appreciate the importance of this military situation in the political life of the USSR, we need but mention the obvious connections that any sociological study, however superficial, would reveal between: 1) the defeat of the revolution and the stabilization of capitalism in Germany after 1923 and the elimination of the Trotzkyists in the USSR in 1925-27; 2) the break between Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists and the stabilization of a purged Kuomintang in China in 1927 and also the elimination of rightist-deviationists in the USSR in 1928-29; 3) the reestablishment of a balance of power thanks to the development of nuclear weapons and to de-Stalinization.
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