Challenges Facing Social Economists in the Twenty-First Century: A Radical Democratic Perspective

Introduction The Cold War--that great, defining phenomenon of the post-World War II era--is now over. As we approach the twenty-first century, super-power rivalry between the USA and USSR need no longer serve, as it has for several decades, to obfuscate our understanding of economic relationships or to constrain our imaginations concerning social reform and reconstruction. Social economics face multiple challenges in the twenty-first century. One over-arching challenge for our discipline is to reassess, in a post-Cold War context, the social meaning o the contest between contending systems of economy and to identify some of the leading guideposts for and elements in prospective social change. This essay explores some of the major issues in this project. It is taken here as axiomatic that such reassessment of the past and formulatio of guidelines for the future entails a significant normative component. Values are themselves social facts (Elliott, 1980) and do not cease to be so by virtue of being ignored or by being ceremoniously evicted, so to speak, from the front door of one's argument only to re-enter surreptitiously by the rear. The ethica perspective presupposed here postulates three central goals of public life and discourse--liberty, equality, and community (Elliott 1987; 1987a). The paper's working hypothesis is that construction of authentically democratic institution and processes, throughout society and economy as well as politics, is now requisite, not only for enhanced and balanced achievement of these fundamental public goals, but for sustainable, broad-based prosperity in economic life as well. Whether the context is former "actually existing socialist societies" or contemporary western industrialized capitalist societies, substantially enhance democratization is the "way forward." Has Socialism Failed? By the late eighties-early nineties, it had become clear that if the western powers, notably the United States, had not "won" the Cold War, the Communist powers had "lost" it. Moreover, this central fact has been accompanied by radical political change and the potential for social and economic transformation. Communist rule over East Europe has been overturned. The Communist Party of the former USSR has shattered, and its assets have been confiscated. A "Commonwealth of Independent States" (CIS) has been substituted for the old Soviet system. Plans and proposals for economic decentralization, marketization, and privatization have been formulated and, partially, implemented. Many Western observers make even stronger claims. It is common to encounter the view that recent experiences in East Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrate "systemic crises" in central planning, the failure of socialism and the triumph of capitalism, even the "end of history" (see Fukuyama 1989; Heilbroner 1989).(1) Succeeding comments offer an alternative reassessment. The view adopted here is that recent crises in Soviet and Soviet-dominated societies cannot plausibly be attributed to "socialism" because socialism, at least in the pre-World War I sense of the term, never emerged in the Soviet Union or under Soviet auspices in East Europe. Although it is commonly asserted that socialism "has been tried and failed," what has actually "been tried and failed is not socialism but history's first serious attempt to introduce socialism" (Sweezy, 1993, pp. 5-6). Perhaps the most compelling discordance between socialist vision and Soviet practice was the failure to establish a thorough-going working-class democracy, wherein ordinary working people, through cooperative democratic processes, (1) elect their own managers and directly oversee their own work and production, an (2) elect their own accountable and responsible governmental leaders and thereb indirectly control policies affecting their collective lives. Both the totalitarian rule of Stalin (Hilferding, in Howe, 1971) and the authoritarianis of his successors were characterized by centralized Party and state power and control over political and economic life ("statism" in Horvat's, 1982, terminology). …