The Future Will Be Radical

The Future Will Be Radical

Will an epochal transformation of the very conditions of human life be carried through by elites on behalf of their own purposes, or will people finally seize control of their destiny?

If the prodigies of human creativity now transforming the structures of the globe take place under the aegis of the multinational corporations and governments dedicated to their interests, life will become more ingeniously bureaucratic and manipulative. The air we breathe will be at risk. There will be more new poor in advanced countries with prosperous minorities, precarious majorities, and a growing class of the marginalized. There will be more children dying in the Third World in order to maintain the old international order of injustice.

These judgments are not prophecies. They are simply the present writ large. The socialist alternative to these horrors is not guaranteed by a benign history or any other kind of providence and it is, as any socialist who has thought about the last hundred years must acknowledge, problematic even at the best. It is also the hope for freedom and justice in the next century.

There is, in short, no question as to whether the future will be radical. Our one world, our microbiology and photonics and superconductors have already settled that. What is at issue is whether this epochal transformation of the very conditions of human life shall be carried through by elites of whatever kind on behalf of their own purposes or whether men and women can, by being as radical as the work of their own hands and brains, finally seize control of their destiny. Will that ever happen in all of its fullness and perfection? I doubt it. Is it an ideal that can, and must, inspire people to the very practical approximations we can make of it? I think so.

Michael Harrington (1928–1989) was a founder of DSA and a member of Dissent’s editorial board. This text is excerpted from “Toward a New Socialism,” from our Spring 1989 issue.