One Hundred Years of Socialism''

One Hundred Years of Socialism'' Book review
Donald Sassoon's ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' begins in 1889, when delegates from all over Europe gathered at a political convention in Paris, surveyed the vast fields of misery and exploitation in their unhappy authoritarian continent and voted up a set of propositions that seemed, at the time, to represent wild-eyed radicalism at very nearly its most extreme.

The delegates at Paris (and at a subsequent congress in Erfurt, Germany, in 1891) came out in favor of the following: democracy and equal rights for all, including women; separation of church and state; free education, including higher education; free medical service; graduated taxes; the eight-hour day and decent work conditions; and the right to organize unions. They called for a fair division of wealth and for an end to the cycles of economic panic and depression. They contemplated ambitious schemes of international cooperation to overcome the ancient rancors of parochial nationality. And, in order to carry forward those several extravagant ideas, they formed the peaceable organization that, after many twists and turns, would be known as the Socialist International.

Has any political movement ever produced a more visionary and yet more realistic program? In the late 19th century, the only country in Europe (or anywhere else) to legislate some of those ideas was Germany, in a modest way. Sweden adopted a number of them in the years before World War I, followed by a few other European countries, in dribs and drabs. But then, in 1945, the dam broke, and in Europe's western half a 30-year era of social reform got under way, more or less along the lines that had been suggested in 1889 and 1891. In large sectors of Western European life, most spectacularly in the Scandinavian countries, poverty -- that which even Jesus said we would always have with us -- genuinely disappeared.

Sassoon, a teacher of history at the University of London, hops from country to country around Western Europe, following socialism's several national strands (though certain of those strands, like Spain's anarcho-syndicalists, do not interest him). The breadth of his knowledge leads him to be a little contradictory in assigning responsibility for the social progress. In some passages he credits the Socialists, but in others he acknowledges that non-Socialists of various stripes have sometimes taken the lead: Christian Democrats in Italy, liberals in Britain, conservatives in France. But perhaps the main point is that, in the postwar years, most of Western Europe arrived at a consensus for social democracy (meaning a democratic compromise between socialism and capitalism), and it hardly mattered whether the leaders of that consensus called themselves Socialists or something else.

The remarkable prescience of the late-19th-century Socialists may also account for certain of Socialism's difficulties in later years. At the Erfurt congress of 1891, the theoretical portion of the congress statement was written by Karl Kautsky, the ''orthodox'' Marxist, who believed that capitalism was unreformable, except marginally, and that sooner or later it would collapse, to be followed by a Socialist rise to power and a state-owned economy. Even then, some of Kautsky's comrades knew otherwise. Eduard Bernstein, the ''revisionist,'' who wrote the practical half of the same statement, understood very well that capitalism could be reformed, and that socialism ought to be pictured as an ever-changing work in progress, not as a giant state. But the Socialist movement, instead of choosing between these two positions, elected to endorse Kautsky's idea in theory and Bernstein's in practice. And as the years went by and Socialism's insights and proposals proved to be realistic enough, the movement found no great reason to straighten out the confusion.

Europe's Socialist parties became, as a result, ever less coherent in doctrinal matters -- participating in governments that, in theory, they had to view as hopelessly reactionary, and promoting reforms that, again in theory, had to be insignificant. Sassoon shows how costly this muddle was -- how the confusion sometimes led the Socialist parties to excessive timidity, at other times to excessive ambition, and how, even so, rethinking the old doctrines proved exceedingly difficult. The cleverest of the European Socialists -- the Swedes -- rejected orthodoxy in favor of revisionism in the 1930's. The German Social Democrats did the same in 1959.

But the British Labor Party abandoned its orthodox call for a nationalized economy just last year, at the behest of Tony Blair. And while the Socialists in various countries went on dithering, the real-life consequences of the doctrinal confusion grew ever worse -- especially after 1975, when, as a result of the newly global economy (which undermined the old Keynesian state remedies) and the arrival of women in the work force (which undid the traditionally masculine Socialist political culture), the entire movement went into a bit of a crisis.

Communism posed a different set of problems. Communism began as an anti-democratic heresy within the Socialist ranks, which was hard to combat and had the further debilitating effect of encouraging the Socialist leaders to cling still more rigidly to the old orthodoxy. Sassoon is a good enough Socialist to provide a few salutary condemnations of the Communists and their sorry influence. During the cold war, most of the Socialist parties lined up with NATO and the United States, as was logical, given the Socialist commitment to democracy, and Sassoon appreciates their decision. And yet, as if in evidence of the confusions that flourished in certain parts of the Socialist movement, he lapses at times into a mood of fond regret regarding the Communists, as you might do over a beloved cousin who has joined Murder Inc. Even the French Communists, who were always the worst of the worst, more Stalinist than the Stalinists, arouse a few affectionate remarks.

Sassoon has a tendency to shudder slightly at the mention of the United States, which introduces a further distortion into his book. Americana is not his strong suit. His bibliography goes on for 57 pages, yet lists not a single work by Michael Harrington, America's leading Socialist in recent times. Harrington's last book, ''Socialism: Past and Future,'' explores some of the same ground as ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' and with a surer touch for theoretical nuance, though with many fewer facts. Sassoon might have learned from Harrington to see America's prewar New Deal as something of a model for Europe's postwar social democracy, and in that fashion might have learned how America has helped and not just hindered the Socialists of Europe.

While I am on the topic of Sassoon's flaws, I might as well also complain that his text goes on for almost 800 pages, which induced in me a fear, after a while, that his title was actually ''Eight Thousand Years of Socialism.'' Still, he tells some interesting stories (I recommend especially his account of French Socialism during the presidency of Francois Mitterrand), and the book as a whole, all 3 pounds of it, must be considered a genuinely major contribution to political understanding -- not only in regard to the past. Just now the Socialist International's suddenly rejuvenated affiliates have won elections in Britain and France, and Socialist parties of one sort or another currently govern most of the countries of Europe, yet the United States appears to be full of political commentators who simply cannot understand how that could be. For surely, we are told, an all-but-unregulated market economy is the last word in modern wisdom.

It is true that the Socialists in various European governments today don't exactly know what to do about economic policy. Bernstein-style revisionism has triumphed everywhere among present-day Socialists (except perhaps in a few dark corners of the French Socialist Party), and socialism, as a result, has modestly shriveled into what it always should have been: an ethical orientation, not an economic how-to guide. The Socialist policy makers will have to muddle through, unguided by dogma. But there is a reason that Europeans vote for Socialists today, and Sassoon's country-by-country tour through the last hundred years makes that reason elaborately clear. Europeans vote the way they do because over the years Socialist-style programs have created, in an atmosphere of freedom, a substantial degree of social equality and well-being -- in several material respects, more equality and well-being than we Americans have ever known.