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III. The doctrinal core of the
Socialist Program: secularism - "liberté, egalité, fraternité"
1. The Rights of Man in the
Self-Managing Society: to Become Informed, Dialogue and Vote
We
have already seen that the SP plans to educate the citizen from the cradle to
the grave, molding his soul at work and leisure, in culture and art, and
influencing even the arrangement of his own home. How will this affect
individual freedom?
At
this point what was said in the beginning about the relationship between and
liberty and equality in the trilogy of the French revolution is confirmed.
Indeed, if liberty means having nothing and no one above oneself, and
consequently doing anything one wishes - for this is the radical and anarchical
sense of the term - the self-managing citizen is only apparently free. But at
no moment of his life will he be really free.
The
self-managing citizen will find the realm of his purely individual choices, in
which he manifests the unique and unmistakable character of his personality,
ever more restricted. Both at work and at leisure he will be free to become
informed, to dialogue and to vote. But decisions will normally be made by the
community. His freedom will be limited to saying what he wishes in public
debates and to voting as he likes. As a voter, he is free to choose names and
cast his ballot in the decision-making assemblies. As an individual, he is
pushed by the Program to the very limits of nonbeing. 35 This is not
done directly by the State, but rather by a social fabric or mechanism
comprising business and non-business self-managing groups.
The
real power structure in the self-managing society starts out from the
assemblies, moves up through the committees and other agencies of society
until it finally reaches the State - that is, until self-management heads for
the final dissolution of the State and the distribution of its powers to
small, autonomous communities. 36 The worker could envision the power
structure in the shape of a diamond. At one end is his own company, in which he
is a speaking and voting molecule. At the opposite end is the State. But the
State would be at the top of the diamond and the workers' assembly at the
bottom. We are not suggesting here that self-management, once established,
would be a mere façade behind which the State would manipulate everything. That
could happen. But we are not discussing the deformations that a self-managed
society could suffer once established. We are only considering what the genuine
socialist mirage would be if applied in its entirety.
So,
it would be consistent with the Program to suppose that:
a)
Once the self-managing society is established, the powers of the State will
"gradualistically" wither;
b)
But in establishing it by law, the State is omnipotent. As long as the law
serves as the foundation and rule of that society, it will live by virtue of
the omnipotence of that act which organized and established it. And at least as
long as the State exists, it may at any time abrogate or expand this act as it
wishes;
c)
In the societies of the West, the State does not exercise such ample powers.
Countries in both East and West have generally adopted the principle of the
sovereignty of universal suffrage. But in the West this sovereignty is self
restrained by the recognition of greater or lesser individual liberties. In the
East the principle of government by the people has no practical value, and it
is clear that it will have none in the self-managing society, where the
liberty of the individual is restricted to speaking and voting in the
assemblies.
The
State decides everything in a self-managing society. It annihilates the family
and supplants it. It allots to the self-managing molecules the tatters of
rights that will remain for them in society. It has unlimited power to legislate
on all self-managing undertakings, whether they be businesses, schools, or what
have you. It teaches. It forms. It levels. It fills one's leisure time. In
short, it installs itself in the mind of the individual. All that is left to
him is his condition as a robot whose only signs of life are becoming informed,
dialoging, and voting. This trilogy would be the concrete implementation of the
other: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."
In
a word, the self-managing society has its own morality and its own philosophy,
37 which the robotized worker will inhale even in the air he breathes.
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