Howard L. Parsons 1965
Source: Praxis, No. 2-3, 1965, pp. 207-220.
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
When I maintain here that socialism and democracy demand one another I refer to both (a) the existential workings of socialism and democracy and (b) the theories of socialism and democracy. People who believe in and try to practice true socialism as a working system, who try to follow the logic of its idea and to discover the conditions required for its fulfillment, demand democracy. As socialism develops its essential characteristics, democracy in like proportion develops. A given society that is socialistic in outline and general direction may be temporarily or partially undemocratic; decisions may be taken by the leaders without consultation of the people and in defiance of their will and their welfare. But on the whole and in the long run a society -- according to the definitions here -- cannot be called socialistic to the extent that it is not democratic. Socialism means public ownership and control of the techniques and instruments of production -- more broadly, an association of free men creating their own lives and their relations to their material world. To the extent that this creation is exercised by public, collective deliberation and action, democracy obtains. On the theoretical level, therefore, socialism envisages the time when formal democracy, like all super structures, will be transformed and people will govern themselves directly.
Likewise, democracy demands socialism, both in fact and theory. It is true that partial democracy has in fact been associated with the increasing concentration of political power in the hands of a few (as in the U. S.) or with fascism (as in the Weimar Republic). But in such cases most would agree that democracy, limited in the beginning, diminishes or disappears. Moreover, it is not democracy as such that produces oligopoly or fascism, but rather the relative weakness of democratic forces and the relative strength of anti-democratic forces. On the other side, as democracy develops, what happens? Democracy means the collective participation of people in making and executing decisions that will advance their welfare. Such participation or self-government arises out of the demand of people to meet their basic needs and fulfill their human existence. Such a demand tends to lead to a demand for the removal of exploitive institutions and a demand for the establishment of collective control of the techniques and means of production. The history of socialist revolutions since 1917 makes evident this connection, namely, that under certain conditions the democratic dispositions of people demand the forms of socialism. It is evident also that the bourgeois forms of democracy do not necessarily demand socialism -- quite the contrary. But democratic theory, as defended here, demands it; for the full significance of democratic ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity can be realized only in a socialist society.
In addition, this factual-theoretical connection between socialism and democracy carries with it an imperative or moral connection. When I say that socialism demands democracy I am doing more than merely describing a psychological, political, or historical fact or a theoretical connection. I am proposing a connection that ought to prevail, I am arguing that socialistic systems ought to be and that, implicitly, they ought to be democratic. When I speak of "socialism" or "true socialism" I am of course stipulating an ideal definition, one that I believe ought to prevail, one that I demand. We may find people who believe in or demand socialism but who do not believe in or demand democracy, as well as people who demand democracy but who do not therefore demand socialism. There is a third group who are opposed to the demands of both socialism and democracy. In my discussions with these three groups I would ultimately come up against these antagonistic demands, which would assume (at least with the first two groups) the form of antagonistic definitions of socialism and democracy. Why, then, do I define socialism and democracy in such ways that they demand each other, that I demand a mutual dependence of the two? I do so for various reasons -- the history and development of the ideal, the demands of tactics today, and so on. But the fundamental reason is a certain concept of man and of man's fulfillment. Man's fulfillment is the final demand, the categorical imperative. All these other demands -- socialism is demanded; socialism demands democracy; democracy is demanded; democracy demands socialism -- are derivative demands, hypothetical imperatives. They derive their forces as demands from the force of this categorical demand that man be fulfilled, and from the demonstration that they are the necessary means by which to achieve man's fulfillment. I will not take time here to explain and argue for the concept of man and his fulfillment that is basic to my exposition. But I shall indicate in part how socialism and democracy in their interdependence are necessary means to man's fulfillment.
Socialism and democracy as ideal have their roots in the distant past.
Not until the modern period, however, did these two great ideas, socialism and democracy, begin to grow. Under the stimulus of events like the rise of capitalism and science, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the English and French Revolutions, they spread. Democracy as an idea emerged in part in response to the demands of the merchants, entrepreneurs, traders, bankers, townsmen, emerging propertied groups, and others of the new class. They demanded political and economic freedom in the face of the restrictions of vested feudal and eccleciastical interests.
Socialism as an idea emerged in response to a more widespread and deeper need. That was the need of the peasants, the new industrial working class, and the urban poor, for a social order that would wipe out their oppression under both feudalism and capitalism. This need encompassed both political and economic demands for a transformation in society. For these groups saw that they had no prospect of seizing immediate political power. At the same time they saw that only a radical change in the existing state of affairs, i. e., an economic change, could secure to them any meaningful democratic self-rule. Thus the socialistic ideal of John Ball, the Taborites, Thomas Münzer, Winstanley and the Diggers, Babeuf, Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, all anticipated a broader and fuller democracy than that achieved by their contemporary capitalistic class, while at the same time being inspired by similar humanistic ideals.
In their demands for utopian socialism and primitive democracy alike, and for the abolition of class distinctions, they anticipated the Marxist view which demands the simultaneous destruction of both economic and political exploitation, and the simultaneous creation of both socialism and democracy.
Socialism, building itself upon the humanistic tradition of the past, has always claimed to be the inheritor and fulfiller of the democratic tradition. In the modem conception of democracy, freedom, equality, and fraternity are basic concepts. Locke's conception of freedom was that no man should be "subject to the ... arbitrary will of another man." (Essay Concerning the Origins of the State, 22.) In practice, this meant for him and his followers freedom from the tyranny of royalty and large landowners.
In the theory and practice of the bourgeois state, political freedom serves two functions. On the one hand it secures to the ruling group the opportunity to express and facilitate their economic power in the political sphere. Woodrow Wilson once remarked that while in the part [past] businessmen manipulated the politicians behind the scenes, they now enter directly and unashamedly into the affairs of government. On the other hand, political freedom serves the function of screening the great masses out of participation in the making and execution of governmental policies. Several factors may be counted on to produce this latter result: legal disqualification of voters, ignorance of the people, confusion and misinformation about the issues effected by news and propaganda controlled by the minority, the perpetuation of myths about the existence of "democracy," "freedom," "the Free World," etc. Thus emphasis is placed on verbal freedoms -- freedom of speech, press, assembly -- because these freedoms are not likely to be used by the masses. Bourgeois political democracy is based on property relations. Accordingly it cannot be broken and extended until those property relations are broken. Under bourgeois democracy, freedom to think, act, and decide is a function of ownership. Power at last comes down to economic power, and freedom is a form of power. Accordingly, freedom cannot be extended to all until ownership is extended to all, and men cannot be equal in opportunity to develop until their economic opportunities are equal.
Under bourgeois democracy the concept of "equality" was a protest and a program for a few rather than a description of the many. When a British thinker like Harrington spoke of "equality", he meant "equality of estates," in which interpretation he was followed by Locke, Madison, Hamilton, and others. Like the concept of "freedom", this definition helped to boost the rising landowners into power and to break royal rule. But it also excluded the vast mass of the unpropertied from effective political power. When the American founding fathers declared that "all men are created equal", they did not mean by this an unqualified suffrage for all. Just as the British Parliament claimed the right to represent the whole Commonwealth, so the American Congress claimed the right to represent the people. Among the French, who stressed equality more than liberty, the Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen states at the very outset: "The rights of man in society are liberty, equality, security, and property." "Property" here hung like a millstone around the neck of "liberty", "equality", and "security". The party of Babeuf realized this when, three years later, it wrote: "The aim of the French Revolution is to destroy inequality and to re-establish the general welfare. The Revolution is not complete, because the rich monopolize all the property and govern exclusively, while the poor toil like slaves, languish in misery, and count for nothing in the State." As Tawney has shown in his classical study Equality, "equality" is meaningless unless it includes economic opportunity and security.
Socialism aims at providing and guaranteeing this economic freedom and security. For it, the democratic ideal of equality means that -- through the humanistic attitudes of citizens, the collective ownership and control of property, law and its enforcement -- society will guarantee to each individual person the education, knowledge, skills, tools, opportunities, and all else needed for his own free development. Socialism aims to remove the main stumbling block from bourgeois democracy, namely, the inequalities of power and opportunity that spring from a system of property relations. It aims to give concrete and universal meaning to the concept of equality by equalizing property relations, i. e., by socializing the instruments and processes of production.
The formula, "From each according to ability, to each according to work performed", means, as Marx explained in Critique of the Gotha Program, a common or equal standard applied to all men, namely, labor. This means not only all men will have freedom or opportunity to engage in creative labor as able; it means also that they must work. As a man works, he will be rewarded: he who does not work shall not eat. Thus the exploitation of another man through the hire of his labor is prohibited. While this is a standard that is, under socialism, to be applied to all men equally, it results, as Marx observes, in inequalities: some men will be married while others are not, some men will have more children than others, etc. There is the additional difficulty of measuring and applying the standard of "labor".
The formula, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", transforms the equal standard of labor into the broader standard implicit in it, namely the equal standard of human development. In the ideal of socialism, each man is to live productively in relation to other men and the world in accordance with his unique individual powers and endowments, expressing his productive capacities and at the same time contributing to the development of others. In order to do this, his various needs must be provided for -- his need for food, bodily safety, and physical health; his need for trusting relations with others, nurture, love, and belongingness; his need for a free and autonomous identity; his need for cooperation; his need for skills, habits of work, and valid vocational objectives; his need for the mutual confirmation of others in play, work, love, and social planning; his need for symbolic expression and creation; his need for a philosophy providing standards of judgment and orientation to things of greatest significance.
All of these needs can be subsumed under one need -- the need for creative development. All men are born equal and are equal in the sense that they share this generic, essentially human need, which is always expressed in different styles and forms and thus requires different conditions for its fulfillment. Socialism declares that all men ought to be equal, that they have an equal right or claim to be fulfilled. And socialism then becomes a collective effort to guarantee this equal right of different development. It does so by democratic planning and providing a human and natural environment that will nurture every individual of the human species in his development. This does not mean that some amorphous, mysterious "state", with magical and affluent largess, confers upon individuals all the finished goods and services of a utopia. It means rather that as a necessary function of his own fulfillment the individual person acts to help others achieve their fulfillment. He cannot receive according to his needs unless he also gives to others according to their needs. Such giving -- to close associates, to children, to contemporaries, to future generations -- rises out of the nurtured recognition of a common human identity in other persons alongside a healthy respect for their differences in temperament, endowments, and needs. The sense and practice of fraternity, in short, is fundamental in socialism.
Democratic theory that developed more or less independently of capitalism tended to found itself in the idea [of] fraternity. During the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 John Ball, speaking for the peasants, artisans, and unskilled laborers revived an ancient Christian argument: "Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?" The implication is plain: all men are and ought to be brothers and sisters in one family: freely, equally, and democratically sharing benefits and responsibilities. In the next century the Taborite radicals -- democrats, free thinkers, communists -- proclaimed the pooling of goods and the equality of men based on the belief in the common origin and nature of men. Münzer and other Anabaptists took up this cry in the 16th century, and it was echoed by the Diggers and Radical Levellers in the 17th century. In the 18th century Rousseau resumed the theme of man's fraternity, but in a pagan, more sophisticated form. This was developed in the 19th century by utopian socialists in Western Europe and Russia, and by romantics like the American Walt Whitman.
Marx and Engels argued that all movements in the direction of a society of equals, living according to fraternal principles, were doomed to miscarry so long as there was no proletarian class. Hence the peasants' revolts and the utopian experiments in socialisms could not draw upon large masses of people, unified by common conditions of work, exploitation, and class interest, to carry through their ideals. Socialism, and its concomitant of full democracy, are possible, in short, only when the social principle has developed and spread among masses of people -- associations, trade unions, cooperation in industry, commerce, business, and the like.
This observation is true. But it should not lead us to assume that the passage of years automatically produces advances in socialism and democracy. Industrialization produces changes in modes of human living which are propitious to the adoption of socialism and democracy. But in advanced capitalisms it produces also countervailing forces (like the control of the mass media, the power elite, and the manipulated psychology for the organization man). Moreover, under socialism, it is evident that the transformation of human attitudes, beliefs, and values is much more difficult than Marx and Engels imagined. Here the role of ideas and of intellectuals is critical, and the problem of humanistic education is the central one. The break-up of the systems of capitalism and feudalism is now proceeding with accelerating momentum. The crucial question facing us is how to mobilize human resources in the struggle against poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment, overpopulation, illiteracy, ignorance, prejudice, apathy, passivity, inertia, individualism, exploitation, hopelessness, authoritarian attitudes, alienation, and all other non-human and inhuman conditions. This is a question that cuts across all countries, backward or advanced, socialistic or capitalistic.
An essential factor in the solution of this question is the development of an adequate theory of socialism and of democracy. Socialism and democracy, if they are to be effective as ideas, must be built on a sound theory of man, of man's fulfillment, and of the conditions required for man's fulfillment. We speak of a "science of socialism" but we have just taken the first steps in constructing such a science. That science would proceed according to the general pattern of all sciences. It would propose hypotheses about the character and conditions of man's realization as man, put such hypotheses to the test in concrete situations, observe and analyze the results, and revise the hypotheses accordingly. The science of socialism can not be developed by a few esoteric experts in isolation from their subjects. On the contrary, the very concept and practice of socialism, as we have tried to show, demands democratic decision and implementation concerning values. It demands that the people, through collaborative discussion and action, form and transform their values. This means that the leaders of socialism -- whether they be in socialist, capitalist, or feudal countries -- must interact with the people in an effort to elicit and reinforce their creative and cooperative dispositions. The problem is to educate the people in such ways that they educate themselves through cooperative, productive activity. This means that the educators -- i. e., the leading socialists -- must themselves be educated.
Many conditions are required for this. A primary condition is the development of the democratic process, including criticism and self-criticism, within leading socialist groups. The undemocratic notion that one man, or a group of men, have the answers to the problems of a society, must be rooted out. Self-criticism must cease to be a ritual for ratifying a prior decision of leaders. It must be a response to that deeper and wider demand growing out of the people's needs themselves and expressed by the people themselves. Leaders must examine themselves and their colleagues in the light of what the people need and not what the leaders want or what they think the people need. How is this possible? Only by continual direct contact and discussion with the people, so as to discover what they really feel, think, and need.
It is tautologous to say that mankind is composed of individual men and that only individual men can achieve human fulfillment. But it is important to repeat this, because leaders, as well as those led, often think of men in the mass, and because some think that the fulfillment of the individual person occurs automatically once certain conditions obtain. The authoritarian personality in fact believes that fulfillment must be forced upon people and that this is achieved by conformity to a social pattern and by suppression of individual values. The theory of socialism does not deny the use of force. But it holds that force must always be temporary and instrumental and that the ultimate force of history lies with individuals who themselves, in association, make their own history. Socialism in this sense demands democracy, not as an afterthought but as a necessity. The true socialist in the long run trusts the people because he trusts himself and finds strength in human struggle against exploitation and deprivation. But the authoritarian distrusts the people and sees them as weak because he distrusts the weakness in himself. The one is ultimately the counsel of hope and democracy, the other of despair and tyranny.
In one of its ideal senses, the term "democracy" means the mutual self-government of a given group of people. Such government is carried out to the extent that the people of the given group exercise their intelligence cooperatively in the solving of their common problems. "Government" here means controlling, ordering, ruling; and the method of ruling is mutual intelligence.
Democracy is the mutual and collective rule of the people. It should be contrasted with the rule of one or the few. Generally speaking, no matter how intelligent or experienced, no one man or group of men can be as wise or effective in ruling a group as can the members of that group. The reason is that the rule of one over many, in order to produce work, tends to become overloaded with decision-making and directive, and to make mistakes. Ordinarily the best-informed persons about the conditions of specific jobs are those who do the jobs. They are also ordinarily the most discerning of the needs and demands in such situations and the best able to suggest and carry out specific improvements.
Democracy should also be contrasted with the rule of the majority. Normally in democratic decision-making the majority will prevails. But that is not because a vote is or must be taken but because the characteristic method of democracy is consensus. In such a method the minority views (usually more than one) are integrated so far as possible with the dominant ones. This integration occurs through interchange of perspectives and deliberation. A simple counting of votes is undemocratic procedure if the voting does not grow out of a collective, serious consideration of the problem at stake and a genuine, frank exchange of perspectives on the various aspects of the issue.
Democracy should be contrasted with mob rule. It is, instead, the collective use of intelligence, and so is opposed to the collective use of passions and prejudices.
But the democratic use of intelligence does not mean that the best decisions are always made.
The supposition of those who believe in democracy is that in the long run the least fallible method of dealing with collective problems is that of collective intelligence. The cure for the weaknesses of democracy is not less democracy but in fact more democracy. For the same reason the corrective for an error in science -- where the same general method is employed -- is continued application of the method of science. The democratic method, like the scientific method, is self-corrective. To increase the probabilities of correction -- information, analysis, and diversity of initiative and perspective must be increased. For democracy, this means that its safeguard lies in intelligent, vigilant individuals who are undergoing continuing intellectual and personal growth.
The democratic method applies to the problems common to a group. It may be used in the solution of a private problem -- as in group therapy, or when one individual scientist consults others about his individual problem. Thus the method of democracy is not a panacea, and does not displace individual effort, thought, decision, and action. On the contrary, the strength of a democratic group depends on the skills, perspectives and developed intelligence which the individual members bring to it.
Usually, the critics of democracy propose some kind of rule by "experts." The theory of rule by experts has been defended by various arguments -- "natural superiority" (Plato, Hitler), "divine right" (James I), and the effectiveness of trained scientists or engineers (technocrats). Since science is the systematic use of expert intelligence in the solving of problems, we come to the question of what the relation ought to be between scientific experts and the people ruling themselves democratically, i. e., by the use of collective intelligence.
One such possible relation is that the experts rule the people. In this relation the intelligence and initiative of the many are sacrificed to that of the few. Another possible relation is that the people rule the experts. Here, the specialized wisdom, training, and experience of some of the people are sacrificed to the unspecialized perspectives of the many. A third possible relation is interaction and cooperation between experts and people: the experts provide specialized knowledge and skills in the determination of both ends and means for the solution of the people's common problems.
In actual fact the dichotomy between experts and people is only an apparent one. For experts are themselves people, sharing common human needs and problems; and many people have specialized perspectives and skills in consequence of specialized training or experience. The educational problem posed here is that of educating people both in a general, humanistic way and in some specialty.
The democratic method is not applicable to all human problems, and where it is applicable it is not always applicable in the same degree. A technical problem as such, calling for the adaptation of means to some given end, demands the technical knowledge and skill of a select few (who themselves may work democratically). For example the question is posed as to the most healthful and efficient heating and ventilating system for a given school ("Healthful" is already defined, and the general plan of the school is already given.) An adequate answer to this question requires expert knowledge and skill. Similarly, the captain's decisions as to the management of a ship are not taken democratically -- though he normally consults with his chief officers, engineer, navigator, and others before making many of his decisions. A family with small children cannot be conducted with a great degree of democracy, for the children lack the experience to qualify them as participants equal with adults. Nonetheless, the good parent seeks and takes into account the expressed perspectives and needs of the children in making his decisions. Likewise, an emergency situation, calling for an immediate decision by one person or a few persons, precludes democratic consideration by the group. For instance, a natural catastrophe strikes a group, disruptive violence is inflicted on the group by another group, or the group's life or welfare is threatened by forces from within itself. In such cases, and in all cases where decisions cannot be taken democratically, the important question is whether the ultimate goals served by the decisions -- the building of the school, the ship's purposes, the values of the family or of the group preserved by emergency action -- exemplify or produce basic human values. And such values of the common life in the long run can best be determined by the judgments and deliberations of people themselves, discussing and making decision democratically.
This same concept of democracy provides the answer to the problem of the relation between "representatives" and the people represented. The old formula was that government rests on the consent and will of the governed -- a formula that presupposed a separation between the two. As long as this separation exists, genuine representation is impossible. Yet direct democracy is not always possible -- as when a large group must be divided into small groups where face-to-face discussions involving every member can take place, so that representatives of those groups then meet for democratic deliberation. A good representative in such cases is one who accurately reflects the interests of his group. This reflection is possible as he directly, sensitively, and recurrently listens to his group. Large-scale democracy does not eliminate the principle of representation but indeed requires it. But effective democracy demands that the representative does not stand apart from the people but is in fact one of them. Precisely because he communicates with them and feels and thinks in common with them he can re-present their perspectives in other contexts.
Similarly, democracy does not rule out the principle of leadership but in fact requires it. In every group of any size leaders naturally appear as particular persons through whom the collective interests of the participant individuals are expressed, organized, and implemented. The question is whether a leader is good or bad, democratic or undemocratic -- whether he facilitates the solution of the common problems of the group.
A good leader (1) directly communicates with the people led and learns what their problems and perspectives are; (2) helps them to articulate, organize, and assess these problems and perspectives; (3) contributes to the solution of their problems by his participation in discussion of those problems and by making available to them his specialized skills; (4) helps to cultivate resourcefulness and self-sufficiency within the group and among its individuals; and (5) becomes himself progressively dispensable as the members of the group themselves acquire more power to express and fulfill their interests. In these ways a leader is effective, i. e., he elicits the energies and loyalties of his group. And in these ways his leadership is morally justified.
Hence the justification of experts, representatives, and leaders alike is that they can assist in the fulfilling of the needs of the people in ways that the people without them cannot do alone and directly. Where this creative relation between experts and non-experts, representatives and represented, and leaders and led breaks down or never adequately develops, bureaucratism and tyranny grow up. In them the center of authority and responsibility lies concentrated in the few. Hence they are always weaker than democracy, because they rely heavily on a few people, whereas democracy draws out and organizes the strength of the many. And they must always compensate for this weakness by the use or threat of coercion in order to achieve goals which are decided on at the center and from which the group, commanded to obey, must feel alienated.
As the rule of collective intelligence, democracy presupposes that the people will be educated, i. e., experienced in the use of reason in the solution of their problems. The people cannot exercise and keep supreme power and cannot rule themselves in their own interest if they lack the tools -- the knowledge and skills -- necessary for solving their problems. A relatively primitive, simple democracy, with a relatively primitive collective intelligence, can solve the problems of a relatively primitive society. For example, during the national liberation movements of recent decades, soldiers and peasants have effectively used democratic methods to solve such problems as waging guerilla warfare, organizing the economic life of villages and armies, and effecting land reforms. But problems of a more advanced stage of society demand a more advanced level of education. Problems like the development of water supply, agriculture, transportation, and industry require specialized training of many different kinds for their effective solution. They require the education of the people in scientific ways. Because such education -- and, with it, the implicit democratic demands that tend to accompany scientific education -- has been lacking in those underdeveloped countries where socialist revolutions have occurred, the methods of building socialism have sometimes been un-democratic in the extreme.
The justification for democracy is human and pragmatic. It is an established principle of human experience that to the extent that a person participates in making and implementing decisions affecting his own interest, he will understand the decisions and their consequences more clearly, assume more initiative and responsibility in putting the decisions into practice, experience more satisfaction from his activity, and defend his interests more effectively, than if he does not so participate. Men feel identified with what they themselves create and with the process of its creation. They indeed create their identity in such a process. They care about what they do and produce to the degree that they put themselves into their decision-making, their plans, and their acts. A sense of a bond of interdependence, of ownership, arises at those points where man voluntarily moves out toward the world and other men to create new things and relations. But when such decisions are made by other men and orders for action are handed down by those other men -- men do not feel "in it". They feel alienated from the action they undertake, even if it means the production of food or some other vital necessity. Their morale efficiency are relatively poor. And if they have enjoyed a previous taste of freedom, they will resent the coercion and control of their free, self-initiating, and self-controlling activity.
This same principle -- participation in decision and planning increases productivity -- applies where two or more people are engaged in solving a common problem. It is indeed reinforced by the principle that collectively men can solve their common problems more effectively than they can separately. This is an ancient principle, required for the organization of every human group and society. A society, so far as it coheres as a unit, is a set of cooperating individuals working for common values. Democracy aims to make this cooperative principle explicit and conscious, to develop intelligence in the organization and maintenance of the public life. Man is necessarily and naturally a social creature. When he interacts and communicates with other persons under certain favorable conditions, his mind and personality are formed and transformed. New perspectives and modes of action are created in consequence of such interaction -- perspectives and modes of action not previously possible for individual persons separated from such interaction. The deliberation and action of men in a group, when conditions are favorable, elicits their interests, talents, experiences, and perspectives. It stimulates and reinforces their drive in solving the problem before them. It generates esprit de corps and morale. It evokes, corrects, integrates, and develops individual perspectives, and through common speech and action makes such perspectives the common property of all. Thus it simultaneously nurtures individuality and group solidarity. Individuality stimulates and enhances the energies, the life of felt quality, and the intelligence of the group, and this group life in turn determines how effectively its problems will be solved.
Democracy as a form of social, creative activity provides outlet for man's social, creative needs. Democracy is man's natural, human way of life, his home. Separated from that way of life, through which he becomes his true self and is fulfilled, man becomes an alien.
How can this free, equalitarian fraternity of men come about? Only as men begin to establish the material and social conditions which are the necessary base for such a creative fraternity of individuals. When one defines those conditions, one defines socialism. Believers in socialism assume that if people as a society own the means and control the activities of production, in the long run they will do so in their own interest and for their own good. They also assume that people in the long run know what they need and what their own fulfilled good is. Both of these assumptions are shared by believers in democracy, which in common with socialism puts its final faith in man and his intelligence.
Historically both "socialism" and "democracy" have carried both narrow and broad meanings. Under the narrow meanings, determined by the limitations of class thought, each tended to be confined to a special sphere -- democracy to politics, socialism to economics. But under the broader meanings the kinship of socialism and democracy becomes very plain and it is difficult to find where one ends and the other begins. In its narrow sense, socialism has been thought of as extension, into the economic sphere, of the democratic principle of politics. Thus it has been called "economic democracy". But democracy as a human method for solving common human problems directly implies a total socialism. For the democratic method is collective intelligence, planning, and fulfilled of plans -- and this is precisely the method of socialism, which requires collective ownership as well. Similarly socialism in its broad, humanistic sense -- demanding that man be fully social and cooperative in his productive life -- directly implies free, equalitarian, fraternal democracy as a way of life. Socialism and democracy meet at the point where they answer the question: Who shall rule the people, and how? Their answer: the people shall rule, by cooperative intelligence. Intelligent problem-solving always involves a plan of action. Whoever may originate the plan, it is the people who must be consulted as to its value, as to the subordinate plans, and as to their roles in carrying out these plans. And it is the people who must in the end carry out the plan.
The relations between democracy and socialism can be understood by considering the relations between the psycho-social activities of men and the economic materials and processes of their lives. These two sets of activities interpenetrate, so that a full definition of each eventually leads to the other. Historically, the term "democracy" is connected with a bourgeois tradition which concentrates on man's expression of ideas, speech, writing, discussion, deliberation, debate, enactment and interpretation of laws, and the like -- in short, on man's mental and social activity defined as popular self-government. As we have observed, the bourgeois definition of democracy delimited it to a small class, while the dispossessed classes of Europe broadened and deepened that definition to embrace the economic context of man's life. And with the establishment of the first socialist country in the U. S. S. R. in 1917, this deepened concept of democracy, developed in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, achieved its first concrete form. Since the time of Marx and Engels, however, the term "socialism" has referred mainly to the economic processes and conditions necessary to man's development. And just as in the U. S. S. R. the imperative economic demands for factories and machines took precedence over the "higher" values, so the literature on economics has greatly overshadowed humanistic studies like those on democracy. Nonetheless, the definition of socialism has reached out to include the psycho-social activity of man. We see now in Europe and the U. S. a new convergence and dialectic of these two traditions, democracy and socialism. Liberal humanists are turning their attention to Marxism, while Marxists are undertaking new studies in humanism.
It is perhaps a truism to say that men must act to bring mind and matter, collective human decision and economic life, into fruitful relations, so that economy releases the physical and mental powers of men and so that the freedom of men reacts to strengthen the material base of their live. But orthodox, static, undialectical, or fatalistic thinkers forget this and assume that democracy automatically develops once the first steps of economic socialism have been taken. Such thinkers try to imprison this creative, dialectical process of human development -- democratic socialism -- in fixed economic, political, and intellectual forms. They quote great thinkers of the past to prove their points. But no one man, or group of men, can anticipate the problems and conditions of all men. Nor can they foresee what new perspectives the creative association of new generations will bring forth.
It is increasingly acknowledged by socialist thinkers that they have neglected scientific investigation of the psycho-social side of this dialectic -- i. e., the origins, nature, functions, changes, conditions, and humanistic control of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values, and other activities of mind, personality, and interpersonal relations. It is evident to them that the economic base and framework of socialism does not guarantee the optimum, healthy, and creative development of persons. It is further evident that such an economic base cannot itself function effectively apart from that healthy and cooperative state of mind and action which we have called "democracy". Hence what is needed is research concerning the character of healthy personality, the conditions that obstruct the development of such personality, and the conditions that conduce to its development. As we indicated, such research must be conducted in connection with actual experiments which enlist the cooperation and initiative of the people, leaders, and experts.
Are such studies a threat to socialism? They are if they divert scientists and men from the task of improving the system of socialism through improving men, and of improving men through improving socialism. Studies can advance socialism still another step if they open the way to the creation of men who are more profoundly democratic and healthy than before, and who can therefore discern and bring into being the conditions for a better social order. Socialism demands democracy and democracy demands socialism. And in this mutual and evolving demand we find the basic pattern for the creative fulfillment of individual man and human society.