On Disobedience_ Why Freedom Means Saying _No_ to Power - Erich Fromm [22]
moted.
While it is not possible today to make concrete and detailed plans for the final socialist goals, it is possible to formulate in a tentative fashion the intermediate goals for a socialist society. But even as far as these intermediate goals are concerned, it will take many years of study and experimentation to arrive at more definite and specific formulations, studies to which the best brains and hearts of the nation must be devoted.
Following the principle that social control and not legal ownership is the essential principle of socialism, its first goal is the transformation of all big enterprises in such a way that their administrators are appointed and fully controlled by all participants—workers, clerks, engineers—with the participation of trade union and consumer representatives. These groups constitute the highest authority for every big enterprise. They decide all basic questions of production, price, utilization of profits, etc. The stockholders continue to receive an appropriate compensation for the use of their capital, but have no right of control and administration.
The autonomy of an enterprise is restricted by central planning to the extent to which it is necessary to make production serve its social ends.
Small enterprises should work on a cooperative basis, and they are to be encouraged by taxation and other means. Inasmuch as they do not work on a cooperative basis, the participants must share in the profits and control the administration on an equal basis with the owner.
Certain industries which are of basic importance for the whole of society, such as oil, banking, television, radio, medical drugs, and transportation, must be nationalized; but the administration of these nationalized industries must follow the same principles of effective control by participants, unions and consumers.
In all fields in which there is a social need but not an adequate existing production, society must finance enterprises which serve these needs.
The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. In order to accomplish this aim, society must provide, free for everyone, the minimum necessities of material existence in food, housing, and clothing. Anyone who has higher aspirations for material comforts will have to work for them, but the minimal necessities of life being guaranteed, no person can have power over anyone on the basis of direct or indirect material coercion.
Socialism does not do away with individual property for use. Neither does it require the complete leveling of income; income should be related to effort and skill. But differences in income should not create such different forms of material life that the life experience of one cannot be shared by, and thus remains alien to, another.
The principle of political democracy must be implemented in terms of the twentieth-century reality. Considering our technical instrumentalities of communication and tabulation, it is possible to reintroduce the principle of the town meeting into contemporary mass society. The forms in which this can be accomplished need study and experimentation. They may consist of the formation of hundreds of thousands of small face-to-face groups (organized along the principle of place of work or place of residence) which would constitute a new type of Lower House, sharing decision-making with a centrally elected parliament. Decentralization must strive at putting important decisions into the hands of the inhabitants of small, local areas which are still subject to the fundamental