Steve, thanks so much for the illuminating discussion below.
A few comments for now (i.e., perhaps more details in a future post) so as to continue a conversation that I hope at least some of our co-bloggers will find reason to join:
It is certainly true that Rawls’s Liberalism is capable of commitment to “substantial economic redistribution,” indeed, Rawls himself appears attracted to what he calls “liberal socialism,” something close if not identical to what others term “market socialism,” the four elements of which are
1. A constitutional democratic political regime, with the fair value of the political liberties.
2. A system of free competitive markets, ensured by law as necessary.
3. A scheme of worker-owned business, or, in part, also public owned through stock shares, and managed by elected or firm-chosen managers.
4. A property system establishing a widespread and a more or less even distribution of production and natural resources. (From his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 2007: 323.) [In a note, Rawls references John Roemer’s ‘Liberal Socialism,’ 1994, but I suspect that’s a typo (and if I recall correctly, this was confirmed in correspondence with the book’s editor, Samuel Freeman) and should have been Roemer’s A Future for Socialism of the same year, as I know of no book by Roemer in English with the former title. Incidentally, Rawls’s views on global distributive justice are arguably more traditionally Liberal than Leftist or radical, or, in short, insufficiently cosmopolitan by my lights.]
That said, I think there are precious few “Liberal Socialists” or “Socialist Liberals,” indeed, most self-described Liberals probably find socialism an anathema, although I’m happy to be counted among the ranks of the former for most purposes (hence my quote from Flacks and the avowed identification with aspects of Liberalism in my post).
As to “market socialism,” I’m in agreement with the late G.A. Cohen who wrote (in 1995):
I believe that it is good for the political prospects of socialism that market socialism is being brought to the fore as an object of advocacy and policy: these socialist intellectuals, even some of the fashion-driven ones, are performing a useful political service. But I also think that market socialism is at best second best, even if it is the best (or more than the best) at which it is now reasonable to aim, and that many socialist intellectuals who think otherwise are indulging in Adaptive Preference.
Now, the Adaptive Preference response sometimes has some good effects. Like the rational policy of Not Crying Over Spilt Milk, it may prevent fruitless lamentation and wasted effort. But Adaptive Preference also has great destructive potential, since it means losing standards that may be needed to guide criticism of the status quo,* and it dissolves the faith to which a future with ampler possibilities may yet be hospitable. If you cannot bear to remember the goodness of the goal that you sought and which is not now attainable, you may fail to pursue it should it come within reach, and you will not try to bring it within reach. When the fox succeeds in convincing himself that the grapes are sour, he does not build the ladder that might enable him to get at them.
As Cohen proceeds to point out, the communist ideal is not organized around the centrality of the market and that whatever the slogan “each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” precisely means, its “unambiguous message...is that what you get is NOT a function of what you give, that contribution and reward are entirely separate matters,” in sum, we have here a “complete rejection of the logic of the market.”
Leaving the communist ideal to the side, this also accounts for why I concur with Michael Harrington’s remark that the problem with the label “market socialism” is that “it implies that what defines socialism is the market relation, which is a contradiction in terms.” For “liberal radicals” or “radical liberals” I would hope that this would entail, at the very least, “socialization of the market” in addition to or by way of filling out what is intended by the term “market socialism,” rather than deference to markets simpliciter (Please see Diane Elson's ‘Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?’, New Left Review, 172 (November/December 1988): 3-44).
Market socialism, in short, should subserve the Marxist conception of the good life or the Marxist conception of “self-realization” (On this, please see Jon Elster’s essay, ‘Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,’ in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism, 1989: 127-158).
As to how to “get there,” I’m not dogmatic although I find Harrington’s model of “visionary gradualism” (in his last book, Socialism: Past and Future, 1989) or a social democratic road albeit one paved with materials fashioned from a Gandhian-like “constructive programme,” to be one possible path. Loosely and vaguely, this would involve non-violent and democratically inspired social motivation and mobilization “from below” in conjunction with State direction or guidance “from above.”
*I should note that this concern for “standards” is one of the principal reasons I fancy myself more a “radical” than a “liberal.” In other words, at bottom, I’m an unabashed utopian! Please see
here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2008/07/utopian-thought-imagination-part-1.html
here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/01/utopian-thought-imagination-part-2.html
and here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/11/utopian-thought-imagination.html
Being an unregenerate utopian means I identify “socialism” in the first instance “with the possibility of our achieving a society shaped by moral forces, not the caprice of Capital,” for “Whatever else is distinctive of socialism it must have, centrally, a morally informed vision of a better life.” Or, put differently, “the central concern for socialism is not the pursuit of this or that particular value or good, but the pursuit of the good life [in a eudaimonistic sense] in general untrammeled by the distortion of capitalist economic structures.” (From Michael Luntley’s The Meaning of Socialism, 1990).
Addendum: I believe the Left, New or otherwise, is in many respects and unavoidably “elitist” owing to its explicit and implicit models of leadership and the de facto role of “intellectuals.” As Rudolf Bahro wrote in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (English trans., 1978),
[I]n no known historical case did the first creative impulse in ideas and organization proceed from the masses; the trade unions do not anticipate any new civilization. The political workers’ movement was itself founded by declassed bourgeois intellectuals, which in no way means that the most active proletarian elements did not soon come to play a role of their own in the socialist parties and tend themselves to become intellectuals.
All the same, the crucial point is made by Dick Flacks in Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life (1988):
When leftists are true to their historical mission...they define as the goal of their elitist practice the achievement of a situation in which their leadership will no longer be necessary. A main difference between elites of the left compared with other elites is that the former seek, in principle, to make themselves obsolete.
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