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By Root 170 0

for the unfolding of man. It needs smoothly working teams of workers, clerks, engineers, consumers; it needs them because big enterprises, led by bureaucracies, require this kind of organization and the “organization man” who fits into it. Our system must create people who fit its needs; it must create people who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; people who want to consume more and more; people whose tastes are standardized and can be easily anticipated and influenced. It needs people who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle of conscience, yet who are willing to be commanded to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; it needs people who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the aim to make good, to be on the move, to go ahead. Production is guided by the principle that capital investment must bring profit, rather than by the principle that the real needs of people determine what is to be produced. Since everything, including radio, television, books and medicines, is subject to the profit principle, the people are manipulated into the kind of consumption which is often poisonous for the spirit, and sometimes also for the body.

The failure of our society to fulfill the human aspirations rooted in our spiritual traditions has immediate consequences for the two most burning practical issues of our time: that of peace and that of the equalization between the wealth of the West and the poverty of two-thirds of mankind.

The alienation of modern man with all its consequences makes it difficult for him to solve these problems. Because of the fact that he worships things and has lost the reverence for life, his own and that of his fellow men, he is blind not only to moral principles, but also to rational thought in the interest of his survival. It is clear that atomic armament is likely to lead to universal destruction and, even if atomic war could be prevented, that it will lead to a climate of fear, suspicion, and regimentation which is exactly the climate in which freedom and democracy cannot live. It is clear that the economic gap between poor and rich nations will lead to violent explosions and dictatorships—yet nothing but the most half-hearted and hence futile attempts are suggested to solve these problems. Indeed, it seems that we are going to prove that the gods blind those whom they want to destroy.

Thus far goes the record of capitalism. What is the record of socialism? What did it intend and what did it achieve in those countries in which it had a chance of being realized?

Socialism in the nineteenth century, in the Marxian form and in its many other forms, wanted to create the material basis for a dignified human existence for everybody. It wanted work to direct capital, rather than capital to direct work. For socialism, work and capital were not just two economic categories, but rather they represented two principles: capital, the principle of amassed things, of having; and work, that of life and of man’s powers, of being and becoming. Socialists found that in capitalism things direct life; that having is superior to being; that the past directs the present—and they wanted to reverse this relation. The aim of socialism was man’s emancipation, his restoration to the unalienated, uncrippled individual who enters into a new, rich, spontaneous relationship with his fellow man and with nature. The aim of socialism was that man should throw away the chains which bind him, the fictions and unrealities, and transform himself into a being who can make creative use of his powers of feeling and of thinking. Socialism wanted man to become independent, that is, to stand on his own feet; and it believed that man can stand on his feet only if, as Marx said, “he owes his existence to himself, if he affirms his individuality as a total man in each of his relations to the world, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, loving—in short, if he affirms and expresses all organs of his individuality.