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The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist and Development

The Quest for a Liberal- and Development:

Against the

By Vjeran Katunarić

The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist Democracy and Development: Against the Behemoth

By Vjeran Katunarić

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the

Copyright © 2018 by Vjeran Katunarić

All for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0907-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0907-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Introduction ...... ix

Chapter One ...... 1 Liberal Faced with the Behemoth

Chapter Two ...... 9 The Higher of the New Power Elites

Chapter Three ...... 16 The Impossible Self-Production

Chapter Four ...... 27 Endless Wars between the Madding Narcissuses?

Chapter Five ...... 39 Liberal Socialist Openness and Neoliberal Exclusiveness

Chapter Six ...... 44 Irrational Sources of the

Chapter Seven...... 54 The Intellectual Self-Closings

Chapter Eight ...... 66 The Alienated Workers in the Former Yugoslavia and Contemporary Venezuela

Chapter Nine...... 78 The Elective Affinities to Non-Democracy

Chapter Ten ...... 86 A Brawl in the or the Common Ruin?

vi Table of Contents

Chapter Eleven ...... 91 A Liberal-Socialist Agenda for the 21st Century

Chapter Twelve ...... 102 Imaging Strategies of Liberal-Socialist Policies Designing / Performing / Protecting and Stimulating / Decision-Making / SWOTing / Conclusions with an Epilogue / Epilogue

Chapter Thirteen ...... 156 Towards a Democratic World

Chapter Fourteen ...... 166 Conclusions The Old and the New Behemoth / The Soviet Rejection of the New Behemoth / The Behemoth’s Experts and Intellectuals / The Irresistible Charm of the / The Self-Incurred Immaturity / A View to the Future

References ...... 180

Index ...... 191

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is my sixteenth book, with the first one published in 1978. Most of them were written in Croatian. Some parts of this book integrate various topics dealt with in the other books within a common framework that may be termed the dialectics of societal development. In the growth of knowledge about this process, I have mostly learned from my late professors Rudi Supek and Ivan Kuvačić, sociologists and colleagues at the famous journal Praxis, which gathered leading minds of socialist and liberal thought in the former Yugoslavia and the world at large. They were preoccupied with the issue how sociological theory might be adapted for the sake of building an of an advanced socialism. One of their central tenets, for which I am immensely grateful, is that socialism must be a form of society in which the is obliged to take part in various types of activity, but must also be free to get out of the collective for any reason, thus alternating between the social and personal aspects of life. The idea of a dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective is entrenched in most parts of this book, with a focus on liberal or as the most appropriate political and economic framework for the of human society in the coming future. In the preparation of this book I am especially indebted to my colleagues and friends, in particular Dragan Lalović for many fruitful dialogues, including criticisms, on the topic of as, what he maintains, a mission impossible for both liberal and socialist thought. Next, I am also grateful to Biserka Cvjetičanin for many years of our collaborative work on cultural policy research, which served as a platform for designing the policy of in this book. My special gratitude goes to John Jacobs. His extraordinary work in editing of the manuscript made many places in the book clearer and much easier to read than beforehand. Last, but not least, I am deeply indebted to Blanka Katunarić for her encouragement to continue with writing the manuscript based on an idea that leads through an uncharted territory rather than routine pathways of a theory about society. Her genuine interest shown in my reading aloud of parts of the manuscript corresponded to her concerns about the future of

viii Acknowledgments humanity, which she expressed in another way through her abstract paintings. Given that I have written so much about the opportunities and pitfalls of contemporary societies in their to come up with a really bad habit—which is to purposely impose upon themselves and others schemes of development which their leading elites know very well cannot provide adequate answers to the main problems of development; but I am not sure that my arguments have reached the right ears—this book is most probably my last to put forth some reasonable hope for our and our common future as a society of humanity par excellence. For holding on to this last thread of patience I must thank eventually many of my anonymous readers, at least those from the area of the former Yugoslavia, a country that for some stirred a hope in many of us. This book is dedicated to all the victims of the tremendous delusions that dismembered the country into the hopeless parts of what Monty Python called “something completely different”.

Zadar, 9 September 2017 Vjeran Katunarić

INTRODUCTION

[T]he meeting went on and on. (Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs)

You will die when you begin to doubt your ideals. (Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević, Mojsije [Moses])

[T]he fundamental and final purpose of the revolution was not, as some have thought, to destroy religious and weaken political authority. (, The Old Regime and the )

This book is not written as another tribute to the laudable writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. Of course, it is to his credit that he first recognised counterrevolutionary processes in the pioneer democratic countries, i.e., France and the United States, thus uncovering self-defeating elements within the democratic revolutions (Tocqueville 2010 [1856]; Tocqueville 2000 [1835]). One such element is the penchant for centralized government. Another is the emergence of the new aristocratic class in the shape of industrial capitalists. He noticed that they, like the old aristocrats, distance themselves from the workers. Nevertheless, Tocqueville shied away from because, as he admonishes, it converts equality into the strongest source of a new . Tocqueville’s criticisms represent central points of reference in political and . Most authors, including contemporary Marxists, share Tocqueville’s pessimism as regards the present-day democracy. This is not surprising, since no sober commentator can close his/her eyes before the tremendous rise of social inequalities along with the revival of at the top and the bottom of contemporary societies. These processes do not represent a chapter of social egalitarianism and obviously do not fit Tocqueville’s anti-egalitarian tenets—apart from the fact that they have some relevance in the study of early Soviet socialism. Against his explanation, however, speaks the very fact that eventually the idea of equality was abandoned in the policies of both socialism and . At the same time, and probably for that very reason, the (core) meaning of liberty (for all) has also been dramatically changed. Eventually, the longer the increase of social inequality lasts, the heavier

x Introduction the consequences. One consequence is the exhaustion of the willingness for along with the imagination of a more equitable society. Evidently, democratic optimism lived briefly, when democracy was young and flourished in a few countries. Typically, political movements smell of optimism until they reach their peaks: in that moment they feel that everything is . This sense was so strong that both democratic parties, i.e., liberal and communist-socialist, assumed that they even did not need each other as partners in democracy. Precisely this is the crux of the main argument in this book, i.e., how the decoupling of the motto, born in the French revolution, namely liberty and equality (cum fraternity), has gradually destroyed democracy. This certainly does not represent the crux of Tocqueville’s explanation. The ambiguous political moves for and against democracy, both in the first liberal-democratic societies, France and the United States, and in the first socialist-, the Soviet Union, have undermined the lawful interdependence between liberty and equality. In , the and privatisation became unconditional and exclusive . Liberty is constitutional, but only halfway. Alone, without informed by educational, health, , and other policies, limited to free facilitated increasing social inequalities. Eventually, the latter debased liberalism into the neoliberal doctrine of the unfettered market and of the minimal, i.e., military and police, , eventually stripped of its socially protective functions. In the case of the Soviet Union, in terms of the overall distribution of the relative , except among the political elites, engendered a totalitarian regime in which liberty was ruled out as the “bourgeois ”. Of course, the modern democracy had its stellar moments. However, these were short-lived. Apart from the first year of the French Revolution, before the introduction of the state terror, and the first years of the October Revolution in Russia under Lenin’s leadership, the great moments shone forth in the French Third , then in the anti-war movement in the United States which signified the termination of the war in Vietnam, as well as in the rise of in parts of the West and of elements of in Yugoslavian countries in the second half of the 1960s. In those cases, the hope for a more equitable society twinkled in and broader society. Still, again, the barriers to such developments were much stronger. This book explains why this happened, why the two democratic repelled each other like halves of a broken magnet. It will also

The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist Democracy and Development xi be shown later in the book that some affinities exist within these democratic ideologies, even in parallel from their beginnings, toward non- democratic ideologies. The same tendency is also equally responsible for the failure of , a democratic ideology devised as a sustainable mixture between liberalism and socialism. The main philosophical explanation of the non-democratic tendency within democratic ideologies concerns their “self-incurred immaturity”, as designated the immaturity of humanity as regards its unpreparedness to cease with wars and consequently inaugurate a long era of peace (Kant 1784). A similar fault is identified by leading liberal and socialist authors, such as Mill, Marx and Trotsky. They were intellectually ahead of their time, replete with authoritarian rather than democratic habits.1 Yet, they tended to ignore the uglier face of the revolutions, Jacobins and American vigilantes among liberal , or consider Stalinists, as in the case of Trotsky, just as bureaucratic perverts. Albeit by the end of the rule of , the Party was prepared to initiate a process of de-Stalinisation and somewhat democratise the political atmosphere in the Party, this attempt was rendered useless and all too late to remove the democratic deficit. Hypocrisy marks the liberal democratic mannerism in today’s West, with a which is openly impressed by the of big corporations and is obviously prepared not only to cast off any idea of the economy democracy, but also to eliminate the classical liberal mechanism of the three independent branches of power (judicial, parliamentary and executive power) by means of securing support in all three branches for the operation of those big corporations. Another source of the divergence between the two originally democratic and basically non-contradictory ideologies of freedom and equality emerged from a niche in Big and social science, as well. It is the idea of a self-producing system. Although the idea was born from a metatheory of biology (the latter meticulously elaborated in functionalistic ), and not from empirical research, it captures the conundrum of the tendency toward separation between liberalism and socialism, and individual and society alike. The broad obsession with the idea of self-production, especially in American politics since 1960s, has been reinforced by the diffusion of of pathological narcissism.

1 Otherwise, this seem to be a very old republican vice that can be traced from ’s Republic to some European Renaissance towns’ epigram that reads Obliti privatorum publica curate (freely translated as “The public sphere should not succumb to the private sins”) (cf. Lonza 2006).

xii Introduction

The core in self-sufficiency created a cultural black hole that absorbed the rest of the democratic potential and opened the way to re- strengthening the linkages with authoritarian ideologies. As a result, both ideologies have established their partnerships first of all with nationalism2 and then an array of non- or anti-democratic ideologies. Another consequence is the enthronement of “crisis ” and the demotion of the agenda of disarmament and peace that was ostensibly pivotal in the international politics of the 1980s, which signified a peak in the process of the détente between the West and the East. Due to such a complete degradation of democratic values, the contemporary crisis of cannot be taken as a replication of previous declines in history, such as of the of Byzantium, Turkey and Britain, or of the -states of Venice and Genoa. Their collapses were followed by the relatively fast rise of new empires and states (cf. Thomson 1998). The contemporary decline is much more devastating. The capitulation of socialism brought into question the of at least one democratic , social equality, and probably of both equality and liberty, for their is fundamentally interdependent. Last, but not least, the contemporary decline casts doubt on the possibility of the peaceful survival of a large part of humankind. Instead, millions, tomorrow probably hundreds of millions, from the global South are prepared to migrate through deserts and seas, knowingly risking their lives to reach a place in the global North. Meanwhile, the former democratic contenders who have become antagonists become more similar rather than more different through their ideological defaults. Thus, the contemporary neoliberalism resembles the former “actually existing socialism” in that it rules over its parts of the world by its version of Politburo. The Communist Politburo had its seat in the Kremlin, whereas the corporate one has many seats, thanks to the worldwide networking of the neoliberal hegemony, in the boards of the World Bank, IMF and, of course, in a host of big corporations (cf. Stiglitz 2002). This way the contemporary post- that have arisen both from the old democracies in the West and the new democracies in the East, advance their agenda of re-establishing links with undemocratic countries, from China to Middle East sheikdoms. It seems now that the

2 In this book as well as in many other works, is not designated merely as a conservative ideology, although nationalism was progressive for a relatively short time, like in anti-colonial movements (which, again, were not necessarily democratic). Later on, nationalism became mainly an authoritarian ideology, as many nation-states, shortly after their establishment, denied the existence of some national minorities or persecuted them (Tamir 1993).

The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist Democracy and Development xiii

West takes both its own pre-democratic past and the undemocratic traditions of non-Western countries as its model for the new . Even though some other processes affected the decline of democracy, such as the economic crises that hit both capitalistic and socialistic , the self-closing of the democratic ideologies furnishes the most vigorous cause of their decline. Since the beginning, the belief in self-sufficiency was vested among the Soviet communists with the doctrine of Bolshevik socialism as a one-size-fits-all for export as a salutary for a world exploited by or feudalism (cf. Trotsky 1980 [1930]). This animus led the Soviet Union to totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is what has depicted as the closed society (Popper 1944), though liberal capitalism is by no means an , at least for installing forms of democracy other than representative. In a similar vein, once (neo)liberalism joined the different conservatisms, the closed society of the Western hemisphere developed into an antagonistic society, for it cannot be maintained without real or fabricated enemies. So, neoliberalism replicates the liability of Soviet socialism. For instance, writes about neoliberalism as a great economic irrationality, for it paradoxically implements austerity policies during recessions. This nonsense is, he contends, the product of “unthinking”, thus echoing ’ allusion to proponents of the doctrine of the self-propelling market (Krugman 2015). Slavoj Žižek addresses the general shortcomings of neoliberalism as the product of a new fundamentalist ideology, for it typically ignores the bad consequences of its doings. This in turn reopens, he suggests, chances for a new socialism (Žižek 2015). Is the situation really favourable for the emergence of a new socialism? In any case, to come back to the centre-stage, a new socialism must necessarily re-establish its links with liberalism. The same goes for a renovated liberalism. This is the platform of this book. Various chapters will provide arguments in favour of a under democracy. It presupposes that the can and must be reinstalled, this time at a regional and, moreover, a global level in order to recover the balance between liberty and equality for the sake of humanity as a whole. If any lesson can be learnt from modern history, it is that the two principles are symbiotic. If one is depreciated, the other one is, too. The increase of social inequalities in any society primarily threatens people belonging to the lower social classes, which almost everywhere constitute the social majority. While some authoritarian regimes (Brezhnev’s Neo-Stalinism, Tito’s somewhat softened repression in Yugoslavia or Gaddafi’s religious-

xiv Introduction military regime of Libya) provided welfare benefits for workers and other citizens, these benefits made for a zero-sum in terms of democratic principles. People enjoyed welfare privileges at the expense of , primarily the , the very basis of any democracy. This contradiction obscured the outlook for building a truly democratic society out of these regimes. The latter will more likely arise from a common and deliberate effort by (formerly) advanced democracies, including the United States, and some former socialist countries, including Russia. Such an achievement may further pave the way to a cosmopolitan democratic state, a topic which will be developed more in the concluding chapter of this book. Now several notes follow which clarify mostly what this book is not about. This remark is inspired by critical comments on some of the author’s earlier works dealing with similar topics; nevertheless, most arguments in this book are rather more specific, more elaborated and as such new. Granted, this book does not discuss (Rousseau and his present-day followers), as the author does not understand Republicanism as a missing link between Liberalism and Socialism, nevertheless such a position is theoretically legitimate, of course, depending on its capacity to explain why divergences between liberalism and socialism have prevailed or why republicanism in some countries, mostly in the United States actually, is a proxy for the between corporations and far-right movements, including nationalism. In a couple of footnotes, starting with this one,3 it will additionally be clarified why the author considers Republicanism as a democratic, yet non-liberal and non-socialist, ideology that, except in the above-mentioned conservative and regressive forms, was never translated into a democratic political practice in the sense of “non-domination” as a for all (why this does not mean equality then?) (cf. Maynor 2003). Nevertheless, in another part of this book, in particular in Chapter 12, a position will be expounded that may fit the definition of modern republicanism. It is about the of aristocratic or elite culture that might perhaps become the in a

3 Such a republican is, for instance, Charles Taylor, who interprets Rousseau as the mastermind behind : “There are no direct followers of Rousseau today, but this master idea of the general will does animate a number of views about democracy which are very alive in our day … the most influential heir of Rousseau in this sense is Marxism, and in particular its Leninist variant. There is an assumption deep in Marxism that conflictual opposition comes from class society, that once this is overcome, an underlying harmony of purpose emerges, in which ‘the free development of each become the condition for the free development of all’” (Taylor 1986/2017).

The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist Democracy and Development xv democratic society as well—unlike primitive egalitarianism, such as uravnilovka in earlier socialism, for instance. Also, this book does not focus on China as an example of the appropriate synthesis of socialism and liberalism. This is primarily because of China’s infamous record on and freedoms. One can only hope that China will become able to shift its politics toward democracy and condemn such tragic events as the killing of students protesting on Tiananmen Square in 1989, a committed directly by the Communist Party. Next, this book does not provide a list of political parties or movements with liberal-socialist components nor does it analyse differences in their programmes. Instead, much more attention is devoted to the dividing lines between social liberalism and liberal socialism as the two probably closest, yet not integrated, political-economic doctrines. Furthermore, this book does not properly discuss the merits of the classic works of socialism, e.g., Marx, Engels and Lenin, or of liberalism, e.g., Locke, Hobbes and Mill. Likewise, and referring to other critical remarks, the thesis that and neoliberalism are different doctrines is correct. Nevertheless, they do not come from different planets. For instance, no liberal classics explained why or when the market should be free or regulated or to what extent or with what presumable consequences. Correspondingly, one cannot blame , for instance, because he strongly argued against any governmental intervention in the market and emphasised that government must serve the market and not vice versa. He can be blamed for ignoring the worst political consequences of imposing his model in the case of Allende’s and Pinochet’s Chile. This is his moral, civic and intellectual responsibility, whether he possessed such virtues or not. However, finding a proper solution for the problem of the balance between state and market was primarily a task for socialist thought, notably its classics, although even nowadays socialist thought, as it stands, is not substantially closer to a solution probably because a good part of does not consider economy as its domain, but rather leaves it to neoliberals and subsequently blames only them for terrible years in the world economy. To be sure, a point of balance between the and the free association of producers, whether associated by market or some other way, is not fixed once and forever. Nevertheless, the thesis, very popular among many Marxists, that the actually existing socialism of the 20th century did not correspond to Marx’s is not entirely true. The crux of the problem with sanctifications of liberal and socialist or communist classics probably lays in the fact that they could not know everything or

xvi Introduction predict the future, as we cannot either, simply because any empirical prediction or recommendation generated on this basis or formulated in a way that deviates from the neoliberal model is obstructed in many ways by the new focal centres of the central power, which keep a close eye on new developments in the scientific communities. Finally, the merits of liberalism and socialism, such as whose , whether that of the free market or socialist planning, is closer to the needs of humanity (cf. Williamson 2017), are also beyond the scope of this book. An appropriate answer staying in line with the arguments in this book might be that does not necessarily correlate with the middle between the two opposing sides. The truth is more pragmatic and is rather around the middle—and is not fixed. If nothing else, both parties may change their positions. Even in the case of an ideal cooperation or balance, e.g., in the distribution of seats in parliament or in corporate boards, within a democratic system, their merits will certainly change contingently, i.e., depending on situations in which the merits come (interchangeably) to the forefront. Everyone can achieve their best results when their abilities are wanted, whether participating or managing in freedom and creativity or in equality and with others. In politics and society, though, it is impossible to proclaim a winner in the Olympic manner, i.e., for all . At any rate, this book takes into account different theories and disciplines.4 Finding solutions to the major problem of democracy and sustainable development requires many efforts for which academic and policy communities are not prepared enough. The same is true for broader society. It lacks some important virtues, primarily social solidarity and changing habits of learning about the world. The key explanation in this book is that the problem mostly originates in power elites and their strategies of selective ignorance and of irresponsibility. It is the greatest misfortune for a society to be led by people who are equally or even more immature than the rest of society. This is the case of the new negative selection that we, who lived under the former socialism, experienced as the main cause of its decay. In a similar vein, today’s leading figures expeditiously spend our remaining time and resources. Their last option seems to be initiating endless local wars. In parallel to these rebuffs we, of course, necessarily lose purely academic arguments, as well.

4 For the same reason the chosen references in the book are just a tiny sample of the large body of references from different areas, ranging from a psychological explanation of the economic irrationality of neoliberalism to a pseudo- of the monadic element in systems theory to Kant’s concept of the self-incurred immaturity of humanity.

The Quest for a Liberal-Socialist Democracy and Development xvii

The last part of the book maps out ideas for a sustainable and democratic economy and society based on a permanent peace. In this regard, especially due to the swiftly vanishing arguments for peace, the end of the book brings a surprise—even for someone whose habits of thought are not different from his habits of heart. This time the heartbeats were somewhat faster than what the power of the mind can follow. It is the presumption of the durable existence of a primordial and very large community of peace in space, which is far from us in terms of miles and light-years, but not so far for a balanced mind and heart. This postulate sounds risky, as a deus ex machina in the old Greek dramaturgy, yet only for positivist and other non-humanistic science, not otherwise.

CHAPTER ONE

LIBERAL SOCIALISM FACED WITH THE BEHEMOTH

Liberal socialism1 appeared earlier in the 20th century, as a reformist ideology endorsing the mixed economy—in Germany in the works of and , in in those of Carlo Roselli, in Great Britain in those of R. H. Tawney, in Hungary in those of Oszkár Jászi, etc. (Gaus, Kukathas, 2004). Some of their ideas were implemented in the Western welfare states’ policies following the end of the Second World War and between the 1960s and the early 1980s in policies of liberalization in some Eastern communist countries. Certainly, this period is most important for understanding the assets and liabilities of liberal socialism, at least in the former Yugoslavia. The first impediments on the road to liberal socialism arose between the two world wars. Economist, political thinker, and second president of the Italian Republic, , recognized a fundamental problem of democracy as a tendency within the democratic ideologies toward self- closing, which eventually may lead to their self-erosion. To avoid this major threat, Einaudi recommended that liberalism and socialism, as the (only) two democratic ideologies, next to , establish dialogue and co-operation. For him, liberal socialism is basically a pragmatic idea that should be dedicated to providing practical solutions for the sake of establishing equilibrium between liberal and socialist principles:

In the face of concrete problems, can never be a liberalist or an interventionist or a socialist at any cost. From time to time he opposes protective customs , because he that economic activity is maximized when the path is open without limits to competition from foreign … If the solution is liberalist, it wins out not because it is

1 Other names include Socialist Liberalism, , Organized Liberalism, and , sometimes even Social Liberalism, although they do not always have the same meanings, esp. as far as Social Liberalism is concerned. 2 Chapter One

liberalist but because it is more advantageous than the others. (Einaudi, 2006: 74)

Despite the moderate approach, liberal socialism was not a challenge to the rising ( in Einaudi’s terms) in Italy. Admittedly, implemented many of the policies of socialism (e.g., full employment, social healthcare and housing), but it grew into a totalitarian ideology similar to Stalinism that redesigned Marxism- as an entirely anti-liberal ideology geopolitically framed as “” (Stalin, 1978[1938]). In between the two world wars, different ideologies offered a variety of new deals between and populaces (cf. Mann, 2012). The most famous one, the American , was left-centred in contrast to preceding governmental politics in favour of industrial corporations and banks. Earlier, Fascists in Italy and a decade later Nazis in Germany, militarists in Japan, and their counterparts in other countries, launched their versions of welfare regimes in combination with nationalist and racist resentments. One basic feature of the extreme right welfare policies was the exclusion of the others, and this was intended only for compatriots of the same race. Such politics reached their apogee in with the “final solution” (Endlösung), the programme of annihilation of Jews and other “lower races”. A similar, yet non-racist, blueprint of welfarism as a means of social integration was introduced by liberal and socialist parties. Yet, soon their sectarianisms purified the socialist elements in liberalism, and, vice versa, the liberal elements in socialism. Over time, the purified contents became increasingly similar to the non-democratic ideologies of their forerunners, i.e., feudal and monarchs. Hence, former enemies became allies. Such, for instance, is the alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia first established in 1933. At first glance this looked like a of convenience. But, political , as all other truths, have limited duration and varied scope. Also, they change their substantial beliefs and eventually become similar to a non-democratic ideology, rather than the other way around. This is because the regression of democracy runs its course faster than the progression of authoritarian regimes toward democracy. This trend is further caused by different historical trajectories. Authoritarian rule lasted for thousands of years, practically from the beginnings of civilization or first empires. Modern democracy, on the other hand, is young and frail. The Soviet system passed through several phases, from Lenin’s New Economic Politics (NEP), which introduced the market prices for agricultural and industrial products, to Stalin’s terror over peasants followed by his Liberal Socialism Faced with the Behemoth 3 terror over the intelligentsia and other members of the middle class. From 1926 onwards, was completely centralised with no sign of liberalization until Stalin’s death (1953), more precisely until the end of the short-lived reforms authored by Nikita Khrushchev (1957-1963) (cf. Nove, 1975). The elements of the Soviet new deal occurred afterwards, during Brezhnev’s era of neo-Stalinism, which will be addressed in Chapter 2. On the eve of the Second World War, the geopolitical platforms of the main players on the European stage were prepared both for war against the Soviet Union and for with it.2 Where did this ambiguity come from? It is not immaterial to argue that the conservative West expected a lot from Hitler. Although a bizarre right extremist, he was expected to establish a new outpost of the Western bulwark against . Basically, Hitler was deeply ambiguous. On one hand, he admired Western colonialism and racism alike. On the other hand, he was deeply disturbed by the German defeat at the hands of the Western powers allied in the Entente in the First World War. Russia was also a member the Entente, but it had to withdraw from the war due both to the demoralisation of its army and to revolution in the country. Western conservatives led by British Prime Minister Chamberlain, who in 1938 signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler (due to which the latter dismembered Czechoslovakia and annexed the Sudetenland, the part in which the German diaspora lived) assumed that Hitler would soon turn the tables and attack the Soviet Union. He was expected thus to complete the mission of the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations and various anti- Communist factions in the 1920s. These, nevertheless, failed along with the anti-Bolshevik White Army that launched an anti-Semitic image of . The were labelled as the organiser of the Jewish conspiracy against the Christian West, this time under the guise of anti- capitalism. In his speeches, Hitler also propounded the anti-Semitic image of the Bolsheviks, but not on the grounds of the Bolsheviks’ anti- Christianism.

2 Note: most facts and data in this chapter, concerning the natural history of the Second World War, are not properly referenced, since they belong to general history and most of them may be taken for granted. Another reason, of course, is technical, i.e., the avoidance of accumulating too many references from various research areas in the book. Of course, some interpretations, such as some specific reasons for the decision of the United States to enter into the war are solely the author’s and are specifically connected to the general topic of the book, i.e., the between liberalism and socialism in various periods, including the last world war. 4 Chapter One

Actually, Nazis started their political campaigns against Bolshevism earlier on with the spectacular Great Anti-Bolshevist Exhibition from 1936 to 1938. This was the first serious attempt at a symbolic positioning of the Nazi ideology vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks and, indirectly, the West. Yet, the exhibition was not properly an announcement of an imminent war against the Soviet Union (see http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda- archive/anti-bolshevism.htm). Also, the follow-up from the German invasion of the Soviet Union was more reminiscent of what happened with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia than the ideological ferociousness of the White Army by the end of the First World War. What followed the Munich Agreement, however, was a shock to the Western Alliance—not Hitler’s occupation of , Czechoslovakia, and France, but the fairly unexpected German-Soviet (Ribbentrop– Molotov) pact from 1939 to 1941. Albeit short-lived, the pact was a warning sign to the West, primarily Great Britain which, amid the frequent German air-attacks, was not defeated. It was obvious that Hitler needed a provisory peace with Russia in order to penetrate deeper into Western Europe. The Munich Agreement, thus, was Hitler’s geostrategic gesture indicative of his strong resentment toward his Western neighbours. It was also clear that Hitler’s racism was by no means the same as Western racism in general, including anti-Semitism. Hitler’s racism served rather to reinforce his imperialistic ambition. Besides, he had decided to build the West Wall as a bulwark against possibly new breakthroughs from the West (cf. Short, Taylor, 2004). For Germany, the wall was a clear indication of distrust toward France and Great Britain, despite their whiteness. It turned out that without victory in this “intra-racial” war against Anglo-Saxons, non-allied Romans, i.e., France, and Russia, it was practically impossible for to win the war against the “lower races”, i.e., colonised peoples, as well. Actually, Hitler considered direct war(s) against subaltern races not only unnecessary, for these peoples alone were weak enemies, but also futile as long as their white masters are not defeated. More than any defeat in the previous war, in which he was a soldier of the German Army, Hitler was offended because of the humiliation of Germany by the imposition of enormous amounts in war retributions. Last, but not least, at the end of the First World War, Germany established a peace treaty with Russia. This act could by no means be taken as a sign of German defeat or capitulation, unlike with the Western Entente. The new pact with Soviet Union, signed in 1939, symbolically reinstated the terms of 1917, when Germany was still waging war against the West. Now, Hitler secured a provision of peaceful coexistence with Russia. Liberal Socialism Faced with the Behemoth 5

Likewise, he established the terms of internal coexistence between the two faces of German ideology. One was socialism in an exclusive, nationalist- racist form combined with an authoritarian welfare policy inherited from Bismarck. The other face of the new German ideology was anti-Communism in combination with a form of domestic monopolistic capitalism (the Krupp family). The ideological pedigree was further complicated by the spectacularisation of Hitler’s godlike figure and his anti-intellectual speeches. It was a storm of words coming from an obscure background consisting of Teutonic Siegfried and an updated patriotism. In a similar vein, his internationalism was feigned mostly for tactical reasons, contingent on the military alliances with Italy and Japan. The Soviet Union was also a war enemy, yet less ideological than military. For Hitler, the Red Army represented the strongest menace from the East, yet not equally obnoxious as the West, for Russia did not actually defeat or humiliate Germany in the previous war. Likewise, and , leaders of the communist uprising in Berlin in 1919, were not properly Lenin’s novices. Also, the Soviet Union did not provide military assistance to the communist rebels. In sum, German ideological resentment against the Soviet Union was comparatively weaker than its imperialist resentment toward France and Great Britain. The latter were viewed along with the US, as enormous wealthy economies basically owned, according to Nazi propaganda, by a Jewish . Besides, powerful Jews in the Soviet Politburo, such as Trotsky, had at best political, but not financial, power. Thus, the Soviets could not destroy German economic power other than by military means. Why then did Hitler cancel the Pact and invade the Soviet Union? Again, the ideological motives were probably less relevant. Even Hitler’s military motives were questionable. How might he have counted on being able to conquer Russia, Great Britain, and the world as the whole, or at least Asia (with the support of Japan)? Evidently, he did not have that capability nor did his generals believe that he was such a military genius. The only explanation left concerns Hitler’s irrationality. He had a grandiose ego-projection that manifested a pathological narcissism combined with a delusional desire to rule over the whole world. In this case, two forms of pathological narcissism were merging, his own personal form and that of the German collective. The collective pathological narcissism resulted from years of mass rallies and meetings, with Hitler as the central figure, all of which served as a brain-washing machinery that was as efficient as liberalism in Weimar’s Germany was inefficient in planting its roots in traditional community-based Germany. 6 Chapter One

Franz Neumann named this tendency of transforming the masses, uprooted from their idyllic , into a huge bureaucratic and military machinery a “Behemoth”, with an obvious reference to the omnivorous monster of the (Neumann, 2009[1944]). Nevertheless, as will be shown in Chapter 3, the pathological narcissism is the product of the economic and as much as of the exclusive ideologies. The ideological tendency was crystalized in the theory of autopoietic, or self-producing, systems that are allegedly immanent in all living . This was the most popular part of the general systems theory embraced both by American and Soviet scholars interested into upgrading cybernetics after the Second World War. On the other hand, there was no direct link among the Nazi, Western, and Soviet technocratic ambitions, except in developing space technology as the most powerful branch of the military buildup, which significantly shortened the path of ballistics from departure to the end point on the Earth. Naturally, the common denominator of all these efforts is an ever-increasing power of destruction. Now, let us go back again to the stage of the Second World War in order to elucidate the role of the fourth big player, namely, the United States. As at the beginning of the First World War, the United States did not want to take sides (except to support the British), although it was close to the cause of Western anti-fascism, although not close to the Soviet Union as an ally. The United States waited for three reasons. One was the sense of exceptionalism in the American international doctrine, based on the unpreparedness of the American public to accept a massive engagement, and the consequent losses, in another world war taking place in Europe. The other reason was, of course, the war that was going on with Japan in the Pacific. And the third reason was that it assumed that it had already secured dominance in the world in 1919 with the and the fall of last three historical empires, i.e., Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian. Yet, the new version of the Russian empire, i.e., the Soviet Union, was threatening to rise again after the defeat of the German Army in Stalingrad by the end of 1942 and the subsequent breakthrough of the Red Army into Eastern Europe. Soon thereafter, the United States opted for the Soviet Union as the new, yet only temporary, ally.3 Both the American and the Soviet ideology, the liberal and the socialist-communist, were already “vaccinated” against the mutual approach. So, any prospect

3 Symptomatically, at the beginning of 1943, following the destruction of the German Army on the Eastern front, even Fascist Italy, Romania, and Hungary were prepared to abandon their alliances with Germany. Liberal Socialism Faced with the Behemoth 7 for their convergence toward a liberal or democratic socialist order did not exist until the 1980s. Most recent versions of the New Deal economy had been incorporated into the welfare-states in the West under American control and in a way (e.g., full employment) in the East under Soviet control. Although new versions of welfarism lasted for decades, they were absorbed by the Cold War enmity. For, sometimes it looked as if another world war was underway. Still, even after the breakdown of Eastern socialism- communism, when the door was open for the breakthrough of neoliberal capitalism into Eastern Europe, the design of the global free-market offered a reminder of the warning issued by classical sociologist Émile Durkheim about the of the free and deregulated market. He maintained that such an anomic interplay among market forces is another version of the brute of the Hobbesian natural state, i.e., the continuation of the war by other means (Durkheim, 1964[1883]: 203-204). The martial character of the free market has been reshaped thanks to Western neoliberalism, which then moved beyond the West, into areas, including the new Russia, where it showed its ugliest face in terms of crony capitalism. Russia under Putin has entered a capitalist wilderness inside the country and undertaken some military expeditions in the neighbouring north Caucasus and Ukraine countries, in imitation of the republican-styled White House and Pentagon-directed in the Middle East. Yet, beforehand it entered the war against Chechnya as its internal territory. What were or still are the corresponding aggressive strategies in the American zones of interest? Analogous cases include the “Arab springs” with a series of brutal civil wars from Libya to Syria, mainly countries ruled by various dictators reluctant to sell their most valuable resources to multinational corporations. Nowadays, similar sabre-rattlings take place around the Baltics, Serbia, Poland, North Korea, China, Qatar, and everywhere else where conflicts for natural resources, including strategically important territories, involve local or smaller countries, as well as superpowers and big multinationals. This also sets the stage for the process of transition for formerly mature democracies into post-democracies. It brings about a new authoritarian rule that, like its predecessor in earlier centuries, enters international wars primarily to tighten control over their home societies. The same conditions obtained during the Cold War era. The new cold war in preparation similarly creates the conditions for an anomic international society, i.e., one without any respect for strict , with a long series of “hot” wars waged with increasingly more technological conventional arms complemented by new generations of robotised soldiers. Their main task would be to serve 8 Chapter One the many-headed monster, the newest appearance of the behemoth, by destroying everything that moves and hinders the business of the multipolar capitalistic imperialism. Unfortunately, the current destabilisation of the international order as a result of the reintroduction of the free market and are not the only destructive impulses. The new behemoth appears in the form of an expansion of supply and demand that is additionally fuelled by expansive militarisation in many areas in the world, especially in divided societies in which the hunger for arms is insatiable. Still, the main impulse toward destruction comes from the inside, where the monadic ideological core of the system is digging a black hole, the most energetic of which is the financial. Into this hole, the enormous amounts of that major banks receive from indebted citizens and countries virtually disappear; they never return through reinvestments. Also, debt forgiveness has been removed from the agenda. This is why the whole destruction is radial rather than just externalised. Indeed, it first destroys external objects, but sooner or later it completes its destructive wave with the devastation of the interior of the disoriented power system. This account of the destruction will be developed further in the coming chapters. Therefore, the process leading to the collapse of the welfare states in both hemispheres in the 20th century began with the growth of a deeply asocial, immoral, and arrogant ego at both the individual and collective levels. It has given rise to extraordinary authoritarian states and to corporate . Both are insensitive to the hardships in natural, social, and broader international environments. The first contours of the new behemoth emerged shortly after the end of the Second World War with the renewal of ideological polarization between liberalism and socialism and between the USA and the USSR, respectively. These ideologies did not look like their original blueprints produced during the French Revolution, when human intuitions of freedom and solidarity with others were deeply interwoven.

CHAPTER TWO

THE HIGHER IMMORALITY OF THE NEW POWER ELITES

In first decade of the Cold War era, American sociologist C. Wright Mills astutely described the outgrowth of authoritarian and fundamentally irresponsible elites under capitalism and socialism as “the higher immorality”. By this he primarily meant the replacement of the core of democratic ideology by “empty rhetoric”:

Perhaps nothing is of more importance, both as cause and as effect, to the conservative mood than the rhetorical victory and the intellectual and political collapse of American liberalism … They have brought into public view the higher immorality as well as the mindlessness of selected upper and middle circles. And they have revealed a decayed and frightened liberalism weakly defending itself from the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters …The higher immorality can neither be narrowed to the political sphere nor understood as primarily a of corrupt men in fundamentally sound institutions. Political corruption is one aspect of a more general immorality … The higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite; its general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society …

“Crisis” is a bankrupted term …; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality. For genuine crises involve situations in which men at large are presented with genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly opened to public debate. The higher immorality, the general weakening of older values and the organization of irresponsibility have not involved any public crises; on the contrary, they have been matters of a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out. (Mills, 1962: 332-345)

Also:

As a political ‘,’ liberalism has been historically specific to the rising middle classes of advancing capitalist societies; Marxism, the proclaimed creed of working class movements and parties. However, in 10 Chapter Two

each case, as power is achieved, these political become official ideologies, and—in differing ways—are engulfed by nationalism. In terms of each, the world encounter of the super-states is defined, and from either side, fought out. In the Soviet Union, Marxism has become ideologically consolidated and subject to official control; in the United States, liberalism has become less an ideology than empty rhetoric. (Mills 1962: 20)

These remarks elucidate what has changed in the modern ideological makeup and why. Mills explains that these ideologies used to be open- ended and democratic-oriented because it was useful to their rise to power, when one needs more friends than foes, so to speak. Thereafter, the ideologies became self-assertive and exclusionary toward their former allies.4 After the end of the terror, the ruling groups established a variety of social contracts with the lower social strata. In the United States, the contract was based on the growth of the welfare state provisions,5 which has given a taste for among the working and the middle class. In practice, the government policy continued the one-hundred-years- old “politics of maintaining paternalism” that was commenced in the agricultural South of the 19th century and ended only in 1965 (Alston, Ferrie, 1989). The new consensus, like the old one, was populistic. In this way, it was easier for the post-democratic political order that emerged by the end of the 20th century, especially for the Republican governments with a neoliberal affinity for welfare programs that are mostly encouraged by corporate greediness. This was unavoidable in a democratic victory won by a tiny majority vote (or the Zifferndemokratie, numerical democracy, as called it). Such a tailored majority imposes

4 The first exclusions happened during the years of the Jacobin terror shortly after termination of the revolutionary turmoil in France. In a similar vein, the Bolsheviks liquidated the centrist and leftist factions remaining after the October Revolution (Bone, 1974). In the United States, the regime was less brutal, for elements of liberal democracy were still alive, and liquidations of political enemies subtler and actually fewer than in revolutions. In America, the terror was mainly focused on leadership, seen as the fifth column of Soviet Communism, a feeling which was intensified by mainstream obsession with the Red Scare (cf. Knox, 1973; Goldstein, 2014). 5 Welfare programmes, prior to the 1960s and Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty”, mostly due to sharp criticism by conservatives, were rather weak in comparison to Franklin Roosevelt’s policies in the 1930s. Still, the United States had a tradition of welfare policies before Harry Trumann and Dwight Eisenhower and has continued them in subsequent decades. The Higher Immorality of the New Power Elites 11 restrictive and basically undemocratic rules upon essentially the rest of the society. The Soviet sort of welfare state that followed the era of terror was also based on or the “organic consensus” (Zaslavsky, 1994). This policy was mostly embraced by manual laborers. They preferred job security to markets risks and a political pluralism that basically favoured the expansion of the job market, but no longer with permanent jobs. Eventually, when a consensus could no longer be maintained on the grounds of job security and social security, the Soviet regime launched a policy of official nationalism typical of the imperial rule, in which the central elite secured the loyalty of local elites of different in the numerous provinces, but also, directly or indirectly, introduced horizontal, interethnic conflicts. Thus, the policy of the Soviet power elite was ambiguous and likewise of a higher immorality. Sometimes it stressed the key role of the working class, sometimes that of , in particular the role of Russian nationality, as the political cement of the multinational society. In a similar vein, in the United States—albeit without an ideologeme analogous to the role of the working class in Soviet politics—welfarism became a transclass policy. Still, in the 1950s, most supported governmental campaigns against “reds”. Accordingly, Soviet Communism, the key ally in the war against Nazism, took the place of Nazism in the American ideological scheme.6 Something similar marked the rise to power of Donald Trump. To penetrate to the roots of his strategy, with considerable doses of nationalism, racism, and sexism, the whole political shift which replaced the “progressive” neoliberalism of the , and which abandoned the old welfarism and joblessness of the many white manual laborers, but still respected political correctness (cf. Fraser, 2016), to a regressive neoliberalism, one must go back to the beginning of the welfare state era in the United States and some other Western countries. The American social consensus was not made on the premises of national consensus typical of the European welfare states, which had a longer tradition of coupling state and , where the state takes care of keeping a social balance and of reducing the proportion of social inequality,

6 “The White House began to perceive the Soviet Union as replacing Nazi Germany, as the epitome of totalitarian expansionism, and when governments in Greece and Turkey were threatened by Communist influence, Truman determined on an epochal change to American foreign policy” (Heale, 1998: 3). Nevertheless, he did not engage in the use of nuclear weapons against the great enemy, as he did in the case of Japan (see also footnote 20 in Chapter 12). 12 Chapter Two accordingly (Chirot, 1994). Of course, such a system is, to reiterate again, not necessarily democratic. The authoritarian welfare system was established by the end of the 19th century in Prussia with Chancellor Bismarck’s reforms. These reforms forged a consensus between the ruling power, embodied by him, and a large portion of the trade unions. Bismarck’s deal is structurally similar to the policies of social democrats in Germany and other Western European countries after the Second World War. These policies were based on a democratic consensus defined as a tripartite alliance among the private sector, trade unions, and the government. Likewise, social democrats were inclined to international cooperation in peace. In any case, the synthesising motto “freedom and equality” was and continues to be more theoretical than practical, although and socialists, and even communists (primarily the “Euro- Communists” in Spain, France, and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s,), were recognized as democratic agonists. Yet, doubts overwhelmed the sense of democratic fairness.7 Another difference between authoritarian and democratic corporatism lays in the willingness of the latter to open the door to a competitive ideology of democracy, whether socialist or liberal, in particular in designing economic policy. Nonetheless, it would be far-fetched to assume that, for instance, Swedish policy, directed by Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who, next to , was the most left-oriented European

7 Ambiguities in this regard were prominent among classics on both sides. For instance, Marx did not want Communist revolutions to eliminate free speech, although he was not entirely clear in this respect. Likewise, in his Capital he devised a dualistic concept consisting of state planning, on one hand, and “free associations of producers,” on the other (Marx, 1996[1894]). Furthermore, how far the fissure between theory and practice might be troublesome illustrates Marx’s political debacle in his rivalry with anarchists in the Paris in 1871. Similarly, his lifelong friend and collaborator Engels was politically defeated by anarchists in the . Max Weber’s political theory and practice represents an analogous example of liberal ambiguity. Theoretically, he advocated a combination of the bureaucratic welfare state and liberalism. He even expressed his admiration for socialism, which he saw basically as the idea of human brotherhood. Nonetheless, he strongly criticized the Bolshevik Revolution as the strongest source of bureaucratization in history. In his political commentaries on international affairs he was a German cultural nationalist who advocated the strengthening of the prestige and the influence of Germany. Furthermore, he shared the classical liberal belief in a “democratic peace” (as a product of the growth of international ). Lastly, again similarly to Marx, he was unsuccessful in his attempts at a political career (defeated as a candidate of a in the elections for the city assembly in Frankfurt am Main).