Politics, Economy, and Society. Paul Ricoeur
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back in her hands the power over the forces that unceasingly escape her, this is doubtless the endless task that truly deserves the name of permanent revolution.
3. But this is not all: new meanings of socialism have appeared as a result of the very practices of socialist societies, and they stem much more from the self-critique of these societies than from the critique of earlier societies. There is a danger not only that socialism is reduced, as we have just said, to the reign of administration and bureaucracy, but, more fundamentally, that it expresses the renewal of the project of bourgeois societies under another form: namely, a simple technology of well-being. Bourgeois society had conceived of capitalism itself as the means of attaining – through competition, the spirit of enterprise, risk and wager – the fundamental objectives of a utilitarian ethics. It might happen that socialism would be simply the renewal, by means of a better rationality and a better technology, of the same hedonistic ethics. Socialism would then be only a more advanced and more rational industrialization, pursuing the same dream of the Promethean conquest of nature and well-being. It would then only have pursued in a more rational manner the mastery of the world by means of a society of total satisfaction.
This danger is not a fiction; for a century, we have witnessed the gradual downfall of the great dream of the founders of socialism to base the most fundamental meaning of human activity in work. Yet, work appears more and more as merely the economic cost of leisure, while leisure appears more and more as a simple amusement and a simple compensation for the hardship of work, in proportion as labor is overtaken by mass technologies that insidiously pursue its degradation. We are completely capable of foreseeing and even glimpsing the dangers of a society of consumption, even of a society of abundance, in which socialism would be reduced to the paltry triumph of the socialism of the common man. At this level, it is therefore essentially a spiritual danger that lies in wait for socialism: this danger is already at work in the welfare state and in Scandinavian socialism.
In order to confront this danger, we must unceasingly return to what is least technical and closest to the “heart” of socialism. More profoundly than a technology, socialism is the cry of distress, the demands, and the hopes of people who have been the most humiliated. This is why today we cannot separate socialism from solidarity with the most underprivileged fraction of humanity, from the poverty of underdeveloped societies. The socialist motivation is fundamentally tied to the slave revolts, otherwise it is no more than that rational and dehumanized calculation whose ghost never ceases to haunt us. As Péguy said, “The affairs of socialism have never ceased to be the affairs of humanity.” The welfare state’s weakness lies in the absence of a human perspective. The strength of the socialist camp is, precisely, the sentiment of a collective work in action. For this reason, the friendship without borders extended to those who labor and suffer, and the keen sentiment of belonging to a single humankind, must never fade. Here is the place of utopia, which I have stressed so many times in this journal. Without utopia, there remain only calculation and technocracy. It is on this level of the unending spiritual elevation of socialism that the true dialogue with Christianity should be instituted, maintained, renewed.
Notes
1 1 André Philip was a former minister, a Socialist militant since the 1920s, and a member of the Christianisme social movement, someone Paul Ricoeur considered to be his “mentor in politics.” André Philip’s presentation was published under the same title, “Socialism Today,” in the volume cited above.
2 2 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishing, 1955), p. 80.
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