The Young Radicals: A Symposium

A few hundred years from now (if there are any human beings left), historians will look back on the time we live in and call it the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. I believe this transition is the fundamental thing going on in the world today, and that everyone must define his politics in relation to it. I consider myself a radical in that I applaud the coming of socialism, and seek to assist rather than to resist it.

At the same time, I regard socialism as a mere apparatus rather than an apocalyptic consummation. Public ownership of the means of production, and public economic planning, are the necessary housekeeping devices for any modern society seeking to cope with its problems. Whether a given society which possesses this socialist apparatus will be a humane society is quite another question. It is, as I see it, a question which depends not on historical forces, but on human activity, on ourselves. The choice facing modern nations is not, capitalism or socialism?, but, a humane or an inhumane socialism? Just as De Tocqueville advised his fellow-aristocrats that democracy was inevitable and that they should seek, rather than resisting, to humanize it, so we should be telling the American public th...