On the Moral Basis of Socialism

On the Moral Basis of Socialism

The following text was delivered as a talk at the convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the spring of 1981.— Eds.

In a luminous sketch the Italian writer Ignazio Silone recalls an incident from his childhood. He once saw “a small, barefoot, ragged little man” being dragged down the streets of his village. “Look how funny he is,” the boy said to his father.

My father looked severely at me, dragging me to my feet and led me to his room. I had never seen him so angry. . . .
“What have I done wrong?” I asked him. . . .
“Never make fun of a man who’s been arrested. Never!”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t defend himself. And because he may be innocent. In any case, because he’s unhappy.”

This anecdote yields a moral perspective that sustains a politics of socialism. We are asked to concern ourselves with the victim through an act of imaginative relation. We are instructed tacitly in the oppressive weight of power. We are incited to the values of skepticism and sympathy, the two responses that, together, form the basis for whatever remains of civilization in the 20th century.

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