Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy on Superphysics

Introduction By Richard Swedberg

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy consists of around 400 pages of dense text and would take the average reader around twenty hours of concentrated reading. For those who can ill afford to invest this amount of time, the following selection is recommended: Chs. XI–XIV, which give the essence of the argument why capitalism cannot survive; Chs. XV– XVI, where Schumpeter explicates why socialism can indeed work; the important Chs. XX–XXIII in which different theories of democracy are discussed; and the famous chapters on the way that contemporary capitalism works (Ch. VII, “The Process of Contemporary Capitalism” and Ch. VIII, “Monopolistic Practices”).

Introduction By Richard Swedberg

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is one of the great classics in twentieth century social science.

Marx The Prophet

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PART I The Marxian Doctrine

MOST of the creations of the intellect or fancy pass away for good after an hour or a generation.

Some, however, do not. They suffer eclipses but they come back again. They come back not as unrecognizable elements of a cultural inheritance.

Marx The Sociologist

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Pure German philosophy was Marx’ starting point.

Marx' Theory

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Marx’ theory has 2 propositions:

The forms or conditions of production are the fundamental determinant of social structures.

These structures in turn breed attitudes, actions and civilizations.

Marx illustrates this as:

Marx The Sociologist

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The stratifying principle consists in the ownership, or the exclusion from ownership, of means of production such as factory buildings, machinery, raw materials and the consumers’ goods that enter into the workman’s budget.

Marx The Economist

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AS AN economic theorist, Marx was a very learned man.

I have called Marx a genius and a prophet.

Yet it is important to appreciate it. Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not. But nothing in Marx’s economics can be accounted for by any want of scholarship or training in the technique of theoretical analysis. He was a voracious reader and an indefatigable worker. He missed very few contributions of significance. And whatever he read he digested, wrestling with every fact or argument with a passion for detail most unusual in one whose glance habitually encompassed entire civilizations and secular developments. Criticizing and rejecting or accepting and coordinating, he always went to the bottom of every matter.

Marx The Economist

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Marx’ theory of value is unsatisfactory.

The right is not all on one side.

Many faulty arguments have been used by its opponents.

The essential point is not whether labor is the true “source” or “cause” of economic value.

Marx The Economist

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In doing so he not only displayed much keener perception of the nature of the problem involved, but he also improved the conceptual apparatus he received. For instance, he replaced to good purpose Ricardo’s distinction between fixed and circulating capital by the distinction between constant and variable (wage) capital, and Ricardo’s rudimentary notions about duration of the processes of production by the much more rigorous concept of “organic structure of capital” which turns on the relation between constant and variable capital. He also made many other contributions to the theory of capital.

We will however confine ourselves now to his explanation of the net return to capital, his Theory of Exploitation.

Marx The Teacher

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IV. A DMINISTERING C APITALISM?

So far, then, we have not seen any convincing reason why the experiments in political responsibility that socialist parties made after 1918 should not have been perfectly successful. To repeat: in some countries— in Sweden for instance—socialists merely continued to consolidate a power they had acquired before; in others, power had come naturally to them without having to be conquered by revolutionary action; in all countries, they seemed to be much more in a position to grapple with the great problems of the time than was any other party.

As I have put it before, they almost seemed to monopolize the essential conditions for success. Moreover, though most of them had not had any previous experience in office, they had acquired plenty of experience of a most useful sort in 17 This of course particularly applies to the communist group or groups in the United States. The conditions of American politics are not favorable to the growth of an official communist party—a few county treasurerships do not go far from the recruiting standpoint. But the importance of the communist element must not be measured by the membership of the official party. Those intellectuals who are either straight communists or fellow travelers have really no motive to join it. They have every motive to stay out of it, for they are much better able to serve if, without carrying the badge, they conquer positions on opinion-producing committees or in administrative bodies and so on, remaining free to deny, with perfect truth, that they are communists in a party sense. Such invisible groups are incapable of concerted action except for the lead from Moscow.

Marx The Economist

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The doctrine of surplus value does not make it any easier to solve the problems above.

Those problems are created by the discrepancy between the labor theory of value and the facts of economic reality.

Marx The Teacher

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In the Marxian argument sociology and economics pervade each other.

Marx The Teacher

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Marx’s synthesis embraces:

all those historical events—such as wars, revolutions, legislative changes
all those social institutions—such as property, contractual relations, forms of government

Non-Marxian economists are treat these as disturbing factors or as data, which means that they do not propose to explain them but only to analyze their modi operandi and consequences.

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

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Two examples will illustrate the merits and the demerits of the Marxian synthesis as a problem-solving engine.

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

Vienna was its center; Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Max Adler were its leaders.

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

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Marxian synthesis has 2 fundamental premises:

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

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Modern economists with Marxist sympathies really should know better than to say that even now their bourgeois colleagues do not see the relation between the trend toward protectionism and the trend toward big units of control, though these colleagues may not always think it necessary to stress so obvious a fact.

Marx The Teacher

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PART II Can Capitalism Survive?

PROLOGUE

CAN capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can. But this opinion of mine, like that of every other economist who has pronounced upon the subject, is in itself completely uninteresting. What counts in any attempt at social prognosis is not the Yes or No that sums up the facts and arguments which lead up to it but those facts and arguments themselves. They contain all that is scientific in the final result. Everything else is not science but prophecy. Analysis, whether economic or other, never yields more than a statement about the tendencies present in an observable pattern. And these never tell us what will happen to the pattern but only what would happen if they continued to act as they have been acting in the time interval covered by our observation and if no other factors intruded. “Inevitability” or “necessity” can never mean more than this.

Marx The Teacher

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Perhaps some readers feel that a proviso should be added about the distribution of the total monetary income. Until about forty years ago, many economists besides Marx believed that the capitalist process tended to change relative shares in the national total so that the obvious inference from our average might be invalidated by the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer, at least relatively.

Marx The Teacher

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These results each time consist in an avalanche of consumers’ goods that permanently deepens and widens the stream of real income although in the first instance they spell disturbance, losses and unemployment.

Plausible Capitalism

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THE argument of the preceding chapter seems to be exposed to a reply that is as damaging as it is obvious. The average rate of increase in total available production that obtained during the sixty years preceding 1928 has been projected into the future.

Plausible Capitalism

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But is not all that we might be tempted to infer from “maximum performance of an optimally selected group” invalidated by the further fact that that performance is not geared to social service—production, so we might say, for consumption—but to money-making, that it aims at maximizing profits instead of welfare?

Outside of the bourgeois stratum, this has of course always been the popular opinion. Economists have sometimes fought and sometimes espoused it.

Plausible Capitalism

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Let us take the second stride.

The Marshall-Wicksell analysis of course did not overlook the many cases that fail to conform to that model. Nor, for that matter, had the classics overlooked them. They recognized cases of “monopoly,” and Adam Smith himself carefully noticed the prevalence of devices to restrict competition 6 and all the differences in flexibility of prices resulting therefrom. But they looked upon those cases as exceptions and, moreover, as exceptions that could and would be done away with in time. Something of that sort is true also of Marshall. Although he developed the Cournot theory of monopoly 7 and although he anticipated later analysis by calling attention to the fact that most firms have special markets of their own in which they set prices instead of merely accepting them, 8 he as well as Wicksell framed his general conclusions on the pattern of perfect competition so as to suggest, much as the classics did, that perfect competition was the rule. Neither Marshall and Wicksell nor the classics saw that perfect competition is the exception and that even if it were the rule there would be much less reason for congratulation than one might think.

The Process Of Creative Destruction

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The theories of monopolistic and oligopolistic competition show in 2 ways that capitalism is unfavorable to maximum performance in production.

A belief that it always has been so.

This believes that output has been expanding despite the secular sabotage from the managing bourgeoisie.

Monopolistic Practices

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The criticisms against the profit economy are inadequate.

Monopolistic Practices

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On the other hand, enterprise would be impossible if favorable situations for profitable price, quality and quantity manipulation were not known.

This requires a strategy that in the short run is often restrictive.

Monopolistic Practices

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“Rigid Prices” has been receiving so much attention recently.

I define Rigidity as a price that is less sensitive to changes in the conditions of demand and supply than it would be if perfect competition prevailed. 7

Capitalism is Anti-Progress

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Another Marxist doctrine is that in the era of big business, the chief aim of entrepreneurial activity becomes:

the maintenance of the value of existing investment as the conservation of capital
stopping all cost-reducing improvement

Hence, the capitalist order becomes incompatible with progress.

Monopolistic Practices

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What is a monopoly?

(a) Monopolist means Single Seller.*

Monopolistic Practices

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(b) The theory of simple and discriminating monopoly teaches that, excepting a limiting case, monopoly price is higher and monopoly output smaller than competitive price and competitive output. This is true provided that the method and organization of production—and everything else—are exactly the same in both cases. Actually however there are superior methods available to the monopolist which either are not dawn to the effect that even though some pressure can be exerted on them in the short run, long-run developments might eventually destroy practically all that was left on the lists.

Monopolistic Practices

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Glancing back we realize that most of the facts and arguments touched upon in this chapter tend to dim the halo that once surrounded perfect competition as much as they suggest a more favorable view of its alternative.

I will now briefly restate our argument from this angle.

Closed Season

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It is for the reader to decide how far the preceding analysis has attained its object. Economics is only an observational and interpretative science which implies that in questions like ours the room for difference of opinion can be narrowed but not reduced to zero. For the same reason the solution of our first problem only leads to the door of another which in an experimental science would not arise at all.

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

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A fundamental change is upon the capitalist process.

Want and effective demand are not the same thing

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For every state of human wants and of technology, there is for every rate of real wages a definite amount of fixed and circulating capital that will spell saturation.

If wants and methods of production had been frozen for good at their state in 1800, such a point would have been reached long ago.

The Opening Up Of New Lands

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The opening up of new lands is a unique opportunity for investment which cannot ever recur.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant that humanity’s geographical frontier is closed for good—which is not in itself very obvious in view of the fact that at present there are deserts where once there were fields and populous cities—and even if we further grant that nothing will ever contribute to human welfare as much as did the foodstuffs and raw materials from those new lands—which is more plausible—it does not follow that total output per head must therefore decline, or increase at a smaller rate, during the next half-century.

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

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An analogous argument applies to the widely accepted view that the great stride in technological advance has been made and that but minor achievements remain.

So far as this view does not merely render the impressions conceived from the state of things during and after the world crisis—when an apparent absence of novel propositions of the first magnitude was part of the familiar pattern of any great depression—it exemplifies still better than did the “closing of humanity’s frontier” that error in interpretation economists are so prone to commit. We are just now in the downgrade of a wave of enterprise that created the electrical power plant, the electrical industry, the electrified farm and home and the motorcar. We find all that very marvelous, and we cannot for our lives see where opportunities of comparable importance are to come from. As a matter of fact however, the promise held out by the chemical industry alone is much greater than what it was possible to anticipate in, say, 1880, not to mention the fact that the mere utilization of the achievement of the age of electricity and the production of modern homes for the masses would suffice to provide investment opportunities for quite a time to come.

The Civilization Of Capitalism

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LEAVING the precincts of purely economic considerations, we now turn to the cultural complement of the capitalist economy—to its socio- psychological superstructure, if we wish to speak the Marxian language— and to the mentality that is characteristic of capitalist society and in particular of the bourgeois class. In desperate brevity, the salient facts may be conveyed as follows.

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

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Pre-capitalist man is in fact no less “grabbing” than capitalist man.

Peasant serfs for instance or warrior lords assert their self-interest with a brutal energy all their own. But capitalism develops rationality and adds a new edge to it in two interconnected ways.

The Civilization Of Capitalism

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There is finally all that may be grouped around the symbolic centerpiece of Gladstonian liberalism. The term Individualist Democracy would do just as well—better in fact because we want to cover some things that Gladstone would not have approved and a moral and spiritual attitude which, dwelling in the citadel of faith, he actually hated.

The Obsolescence Of The Entrepreneurial Function

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IN my theory of vanishing investment opportunity, a reservation was made in favor of the possibility that the economic wants of humanity might some day be so completely satisfied that little motive would be left to push productive effort still further ahead. Such a state of satiety is no doubt very far off even if we keep within the present scheme of wants; and if we take account of the fact that, as higher standards of life are attained, these wants automatically expand and new wants emerge or are created, 1 satiety becomes a flying goal, particularly if we include leisure among consumers’ goods.

The Destruction Of The Protecting Strata

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So far we have been considering the effects of the capitalist process upon the economic bases of the upper strata of capitalist society and upon their social position and prestige.

The Destruction Of The Institutional Framework Of Capitalist Society

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The capitalist process destroyed the institutional framework of feudal society.

Growing Hostility

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The capitalist process produced that atmosphere of almost universal hostility to its own social order.

The capitalist process:

eventually decreases the importance of the function by which the capitalist class lives.
tends to break down its own defenses

Capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own.

The Civilization Of Capitalism

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2. The Sociology Of The Intellectual

Nevertheless, neither the opportunity of attack nor real or fancied grievances are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the emergence of active hostility against a social order.

The Civilization Of Capitalism

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There is, however, another factor. One of the most important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the facilities for higher education.

The Civilization Of Capitalism

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The modern picture has:

increasing means
increase in the standard of life and in the leisure of the masses that changed and is still changing the composition of the collective patron for the tastes of whom the intellectuals have to provide.

There was and is the further cheapening of the book and newspaper and the large-scale newspaper concern. 8 There is now the radio. And there was and is the tendency toward complete removal of restraints, steadily breaking down those short-run attempts at resistance by which bourgeois society proves itself so incompetent and occasionally so childish a disciplinarian.

Decomposition

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Faced by the increasing hostility of the environment and by the legislative, administrative and judicial practice born of that hostility, entrepreneurs and capitalists—in fact the whole stratum that accepts the bourgeois scheme of life—will eventually cease to function. Their standard aims are rapidly becoming unattainable, their efforts futile. The most glamorous of these bourgeois aims, the foundation of an industrial dynasty, has in most countries become unattainable already, and even more modest ones are so difficult to attain that they may cease to be thought worth the struggle as the permanence of these conditions is being increasingly realized.

Considering the role of bourgeois motivation in the explanation of the economic history of the last two or three centuries, its smothering by the unfavorable reactions of society or its weakening by disuse no doubt constitutes a factor adequate to explain a flop in the capitalist process—should we ever observe it as a permanent phenomenon—and one that is much more important than any of those that are presented by the Theory of Vanishing Investment Opportunity. It is hence interesting to observe that that motivation not only is threatened by forces external to the bourgeois mind but that it also tends to die out from internal causes. There is of course close interdependence between the two. But we cannot get at the true diagnosis unless we try to disentangle them.

Decomposition

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In order to realize what all this means for the efficiency of the capitalist engine of production we need only recall that the family and the family home used to be the mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit motive.

Economists have not always given due weight to this fact. When we look more closely at their idea of the self-interest of entrepreneurs and capitalists we cannot fail to discover that the results it was supposed to produce are really not at all what one would expect from the rational self-interest of the detached individual or the childless couple who no longer look at the world through the windows of a family home. Consciously or unconsciously they analyzed the behavior of the man whose views and motives are shaped by such a home and who means to work and to save primarily for wife and children. As soon as these fade out from the moral vision of the businessman, we have a different kind of homo oeconomicus before us who cares for different things and acts in different ways.

CLEARING DECKS

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CAN socialism work?

Of course it can. No doubt is possible about that once we assume, first, that the requisite stage of industrial development has been reached and, second, that transitional problems can be successfully resolved. One may, of course, feel very uneasy about these assumptions themselves or about the questions whether the socialist form of society can be expected to be democratic and, democratic or not, how well it is likely to function. All that will be discussed later on. But if we accept these assumptions and discard these doubts the answer to the remaining question is clearly Yes.

CLEARING DECKS

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My definition agrees with all the others.

It turns on an exclusively economic point.

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation—the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society.

The Socialist Blueprint

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FIRST of all we must see whether or not there is anything wrong with the pure logic of a socialist economy. For although no proof of the soundness of that logic will ever convert anyone to socialism or, in fact, prove much for socialism as a practical proposition, proof of logical unsoundness or even failure in an attempt to prove logical soundness would in itself suffice to convict it of inherent absurdity.

The Socialist Blueprint

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To facilitate matters we will assume that means of production are present in given and, for the moment, unalterable quantities.

Now let the central board resolve itself into a committee on a particular industry or, still better, let us set up an authority for each industry that is to manage it and to cooperate with the central board which controls and coordinates all these industrial managers or managing boards. This the central board does by allocating productive resources—all of which are under its control—to these industrial managements according to certain rules.

The Socialist Blueprint

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But no great difficulties arise if we go beyond the precincts of the theory of the stationary process and admit the phenomena incident to industrial change.

So far as economic logic is concerned, it cannot be held that socialism of the kind envisaged, while theoretically capable of coping with the recurrent tasks of the administration of a stationary economy, would necessarily fail in the solution of the problems presented by “progress.” We shall see later why it is nevertheless important for the success of a socialist society that it should embark upon its career not only as richly endowed as possible by its capitalist predecessor—with experience and techniques as well as with resources—but also after the latter has sown its wild oats, done its work and is approaching a stationary state. But the reason for it is not in any inability of ours to devise a rational and uniquely determined course for the socialist society to take whenever the opportunity for an improvement in the industrial apparatus presents itself.

The Socialist Blueprint

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So would that family likeness between commercial and socialist economy which the reader cannot have failed to notice all along. Since this resemblance seems to have given pleasure to non-socialists and some socialists and to have annoyed other socialists, it is just as well to restate explicitly in what it consists and to what it is due.

It will then be seen how little reason there is for either the pleasure or the annoyance. In trying to construct a rational schema of a socialist economy we have made use of mechanisms and concepts traditionally specified by terms that are familiar to us from our discussions of the processes and problems of capitalist economy. We have described a mechanism which is immediately understood as soon as we utter the words “market,” “buying and selling,” “competing” and so on.

The Socialist Blueprint

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The tactical advantages to be reaped by placing oneself on this standpoint are indeed obvious enough to explain what at first sight looks like surprising broad-mindedness. A competent socialist who sees as clearly as any other economist all the weaknesses of Marxian and of popular arguments can thus admit whatever he feels should be admitted without compromising his convictions because the admissions refer to a historical stage that (so far as it ever did exist) is safely dead and buried; he is enabled, by judiciously confining his condemnatory verdict to the non-competitive case, to lend qualified support to some indictments, such as that in modern capitalism production is for profit and not for the consumption of the people, which otherwise would be merely silly; and he can baffle and puzzle good bourgeois by telling them that socialism will only do what they really wanted all along and what their own economic ulemas always taught them.

Comparison Of Blueprints

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I. A PRELIMINARY POINT

THE reader who has followed so far will naturally expect me to embark upon a comparative appraisal of the socialist plan. Perhaps it would be wise to disappoint that expectation. For nobody who is not completely lacking in a sense of responsibility can fail to see that comparison between a system which we have lived with and a system which as yet is but a mental image—no socialist will accept the Russian experience as a full-weight realization—must be extremely hazardous. But we will take the risk, bearing in mind all the time that beyond the realm of fact and argument over which we are going to travel there is the realm of individual preferences, convictions, evaluations into which we cannot enter. And we will improve our chances of success by severely restricting our goal and frankly recognizing difficulties and pitfalls.

Comparison Of Blueprints

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This definition does not identify economic efficiency with economic welfare or with given degrees of satisfaction of wants.

Even if any conceivable socialist economy were sure to be in our sense less efficient than any conceivable commercial economy, the majority of people—all in fact for whom the typical socialist cares—might still be “better off” or “happier” or “more content” in the former than in the latter. My first and main reply is that relative efficiency retains independent meaning even in such cases and that in all cases it will be an important consideration. But secondly I do not think that we lose much by adopting a criterion that neglects those aspects. This however is a very debatable matter on which it is just as well to be a little more explicit.

The Case for the SUPERIORITY Of the SOCIALIST BLUEPRINT

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Thus our criterion of superiority or inferiority after all covers more ground than it seems to. But if we stand by it, what is that strong case for the superiority of the socialist blueprint of which I spoke before? The reader who has perused the analysis in Chapter VIII may well wonder.

The Case for the SUPERIORITY Of the SOCIALIST BLUEPRINT

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As a matter of blueprint logic, the socialist blueprint is drawn at a higher level of rationality.

This, I believe, is the correct way of putting the matter. It is not a case of rationality versus irrationality. The farmer whose reaction to hog and fodder prices produces the hog cycle is, individually and from the standpoint of the moment, acting perfectly rationally. So is the management of a concern that maneuvers in an oligopolistic situation. So is the firm that expands in the boom and restricts in recession. It is the kind and scope of rationality that makes the difference.

The Human Element

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A WARNING

IT IS likely that many opponents of socialism will accept my result.

But their assent will mostly take the following form:

“Oh well, of course, if you had demigods to direct the socialist engine and archangels to man it, all that might well be so. But the point is that you have not and that, human nature being what it is, the capitalist alternative with its pattern of motivations and its distribution of responsibilities and rewards after all offers, though not the best conceivable, yet the best practicable arrangement.”

Demigods and Archangels

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Returning to our bourgeois who talked about demigods and archangels, we can easily dispose of the first; no demigods will be required to direct the socialist engine because, as we have seen before, the task to be solved will— once transitional difficulties have been disposed of—be not only no more difficult but easier than the task that faces a captain of industry in the modern world.

The Record Of Socialist Parties

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As soon as we turn to an examination of the records of socialist parties, doubts will inevitably arise about the validity of their contention that they have uniformly championed the democratic creed.

A Mental Experiment

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Suppose that a community, in a way which satisfies the reader’s criteria of democracy, reached the decision to persecute religious dissent. The instance is not fanciful. Communities which most of us would readily recognize as democracies have burned heretics at the stake—the republic of Geneva did in Calvin’s time—or otherwise persecuted them in a manner 6 In plain English, this saying of one of the more prominent leaders meant that they fully realized the risk involved in staging bolshevism in a country entirely dependent on capitalist powers for its food and with French and Italian troops practically at its door, but that, if pressure from Russia via Hungary should become too great, they would not split the party but would try to lead the whole flock into the bolshevik camp.

IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

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We have a starting point from which to proceed with our investigation. But a definition that is to serve us in an attempt to analyze the relations between democracy and socialism is not yet in sight. A few preliminary difficulties still bar the outlook.

The Setting Of The Problem

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I. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

NOTHING is so treacherous as the obvious. Events during the past twenty or twenty-five years have taught us to see the problem that lurks behind the title of this part. Until about 1916 the relation between socialism and democracy would have seemed quite obvious to most people and to nobody more so than to the accredited exponents of socialist orthodoxy.

The Common Good and the Will of the People

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THE 18th-century philosophy of democracy has the following definition: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will.

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE and INDIVIDUAL VOLITION

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However conclusively those arguments may tell against this particular conception of the will of the people, they do not debar us from trying to build up nother and more realistic one. I do not intend to question either the reality or the importance of the socio-psychological facts we think of when speaking of the will of a nation.

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

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It remains to answer our question about the definiteness and independence of the voter’s will, his powers of observation and interpretation of facts, and his ability to draw, clearly and promptly, rational inferences from both. This subject belongs to a chapter of social psychology that might be entitled

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

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Definiteness and rationality in thought and action 11 are not guaranteed by this familiarity with men and things or by that sense of reality or responsibility.

Quite a few other conditions which often fail to be fulfilled would be necessary for that. For instance, generation after generation may suffer from irrational behavior in matters of hygiene and yet fail to link their sufferings with their noxious habits.

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

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IV. REASONS F OR T HE S URVIVAL O F T HE C LASSICAL D OCTRINE

But how is it possible that a doctrine so patently contrary to fact should have survived to this day and continued to hold its place in the hearts of the people and in the official language of governments?

Another Theory Of Democracy

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1. Competition For Political Leadership

Most students of politics have by accepted the criticisms on the classical doctrine of democracy in the preceding chapter.

Most of them accept another theory which is much truer to life and at the same time salvages much of what sponsors of the democratic method really mean by this term. Like the classical theory, it may be put into the nutshell of a definition.

The Principle Applied

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The theory outlined in the preceding section we are now going to try out on some of the more important features of the structure and working of the political engine in democratic countries.

The Inference

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I. Some Implications Of The Preceding Analysis

THE theory of competitive leadership has proved a satisfactory interpretation of the facts of the democratic process. So we shall naturally use it in our attempt to unravel the relation between democracy and a socialist order of things. As has been stated before, socialists claim not only compatibility; they claim that democracy implies socialism and that there cannot be true democracy except in socialism. On the other hand, the reader cannot but be familiar with at least some of the numerous pamphlets that have been published in this country during the last few years in order to prove that a planned economy, let alone full-fledged socialism, is completely incompatible with democracy. Both standpoints are of course easy to understand from the psychological background of the contest and from the natural wish of both parties to it to secure the support of a people the great majority of whom fervently believes in democracy. But suppose we ask: where lies the truth?

The Inference

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Parliament is in session, he is lucky if he has a couple of hours in the morning left for thinking things over and for real work. Individual miscarriages and defeats of a government as a whole are not infrequently due to physical exhaustion of the leading man or men. 4 How could he, so it might well be asked, undertake to lead and supervise an administrative organism that is to embrace all the problems of economic life?

The Nonage

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PROLOGUE

A vast amount of research has still to be done before a history of modern socialism in action can be written that will meet the requirements of scholarship.

Democracy In The Socialist Order

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The judgment passed by orthodox socialism on the men of the nonage must be revised for the following reasons:

If the socialist schemes of those centuries were dreams, most of them were rationalized dreams.

What individual thinkers more or less perfectly succeeded in rationalizing were not simply their individual dreams but the dreams of the non-ruling classes. Thus, those thinkers were not living completely in the clouds; they also helped to bring to the surface what slumbered below but was getting ready to wake up. In this respect even the anarchists, back to their medieval predecessors who nourished in many a convent and still more in the tertiary groups of the Franciscan Order, acquire a significance which Marxists usually do not accord to them. However contemptible their beliefs may seem to the orthodox socialist, much of the propelling force of socialism comes, even today, from those irrational longings of the hungry soul—not belly—which they voiced. 2

Socialist Groups In The United States

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In the United States a totally different social pattern proved as unfavorable as was the Russian to the growth of a genuinely socialist mass movement. Thus the two cases present similarities that are no less interesting than the differences.

Socialist Groups In The United States

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What syndicalism really is we shall see best in the French picture. 16 Before attempting to do so we shall briefly note a few things about French socialism in general.

The Situation That Marx Faced

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According to Engels, Marx in 1847 adopted the term “communist” over “socialist” because socialism had by that time acquired a flavor of bourgeois respectability.

But Marx and Engels themselves were bourgeois intellectuals.

FROM 1875 TO 1914

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I. ENGLISH DEVELOPMENTS and the SPIRIT Of fABIANISM

THERE is some symbolic significance in these two dates.

1875 saw the birth of the first purely socialist party that was powerful enough to count as a factor in politics.

Sweden On The One Hand And Russia On The Other

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Every country has its own socialism. But things did not differ greatly from the English paradigma in those continental countries whose contributions to humanity’s fund of cultural values is so strikingly out of proportion to their size—the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries in particular. Take Sweden for an instance. Like her art, her science, her politics, her social institutions and much besides, her socialism and her socialists owe their distinction not to any peculiar features of principle or intention, but to the stuff the Swedish nation is made of and to its exceptionally well-balanced social structure. That is why it is so absurd for other nations to try to copy Swedish examples; the only effective way of doing so would be to import the Swedes and to put them in charge.

Russian Imperialism And Communism

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The other factor that is relevant to our diagnosis is Russia’s victory over her allies. Unlike the economic success of the United States, this victory is not a possibility only, but, for the time being, an accomplished fact. Starting from a position that was none too strong—a position in which Russia according to all ordinary rules of the political game might have had to accept whatever her allies thought fit to impose and to take a back seat in the new international order—she raised herself to a position of power far beyond any she ever held under the tsars, in spite of everything that England and the United States can possibly be assumed to have wished or to have fought for. And—supreme achievement!—methods peculiar to her system of government have enabled her to extend her actual power beyond her official conquests and at the same time to make it appear much smaller than it is—so that those sham concessions at danger points that satisfy escapists and appeasers never involve any real sacrifice even if they do not, as is sometimes the case, spell actual gain. 30 If the reader recalls the aims

Communism And The Russian Element

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Socialist parties had always had trouble with hyper-radical wings. 10

Until the bolsheviks seized power in 1917, there was nothing Russian about the development of the communist groups except that the strongest man was a Russian with Mongol despotism

At the outbreak of the war:

Conditions For The Success Of The Democratic Method

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II. THE EFFECTS of the First WORLD War on THE CHANCES Of THE SOCIALIST PARTIES OF EUROPE

Any major war that ends in defeat will shake the social fabric and threaten the position of the ruling group; the loss of prestige resulting from military defeat is one of the hardest things for a regime to survive. I do not know of any exception to this rule. But the converse proposition is not so certain. Unless success be quick or, at all events, striking and clearly associated with the performance of the ruling stratum—as was, for instance, Germany’s success in 1870—exhaustion, economic, physical and psychological may well produce, even in the case of victory, effects on the relative position of classes, groups and parties that do not differ essentially from those of defeat.

The First World War illustrates this. In the United States the effort had not been sufficiently prolonged and exhausting to show it. Even here the administration responsible for the war suffered a crushing defeat at the polls. But in all other victorious countries the prestige of the ruling strata and their hold on their people were impaired and not enhanced. For the fortunes of the German and English socialist parties, this meant the advent of power or, at all events, office. In Germany control of the central organs of society was thrust upon the party: though in order to save doctrinal face some of them as well as some anti-socialists insisted on speaking of a revolution, the fact was that they undertook government by request—and a humble request it was. In England the labor vote that had been at little over half a million in January 1910 and not quite two millions and a quarter in 1918, 7 went to 4,236,733 in 1922 and to 5,487,620 in 1924 (8,362,594 in 1929). MacDonald reconquered the leadership and in 1924 the party came into office if not really into power. In France the structure of the political world prevented any such clear-cut consummation, but the general contours were the same: there was a syndicalist revival immediately after the war, but the Confédération Générale du Travail, leaving the newly founded Confédération Générale du Travail Syndicaliste and the communist Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire to absorb inadaptable elements, discouraged revolutionary courses and slowly prepared itself for a dominant political role.

Conditions For The Success Of The Democratic Method

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5. The Present War And The Future Of Socialist Parties

How the present war will affect the fortunes of existing socialist groups of course depends on its duration and outcome.

Conditions For The Success Of The Democratic Method

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If a physicist observes that the same mechanism works differently at different times and places, he concludes that its functioning depends on extraneous conditions.

These conditions are as it was to see what the conditions were under which the classical doctrine of democracy might be expected to fit reality to an acceptable degree.

Democracy In The Socialist Order

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In setting forth our conclusions we had better begin with the relation between democracy and the capitalist order of things.

The ideology of democracy as reflected by the classical doctrine rests on a rationalist scheme of human action and of the values of life. By virtue of a previous argument (Chapter XI) this fact would in itself suffice to suggest that it is of bourgeois origin.

From The First To The Second World War

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1. The “Gran Rifiuto”

During the war, the German Marxists hesitated even less than the English laborites. 1

THE CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD WAR 2

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A LITTLE more can now (July, 1946) be added to what was said in the last section about the effects of the war on the social structure of our epoch and on the position and prospects of orthodox (i.e. non-Communist) socialist groups. It was obvious in July, 1942, that, whatever the fate of particular socialist groups, there would be another great stride toward the socialist order, and that this time the stride would be taken also in the United States. It was also clear that the fortunes of existing socialist groups would depend on the duration and outcome of the war. It was finally suggested that, in the event of a complete victory (implying unconditional surrender for the enemy) of the Anglo-American-Russian alliance, the results for orthodox socialism would differ according to whether Stalin emerged as the true victor or whether all the honors were held by England and the United States. In the latter eventuality orthodox socialism of the German Social Democratic type or laborism of the English type would stand a good chance to improve their position on the continent of Europe.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In any case however, Marx and Engels, circumstanced as they were and being the types they were, could never have thought of going forth in order to organize the industrial proletariat, or any particular group of it, according to ideas of their own. All they could hope for was contact with leaders and with the union bureaucracy. Beholding, on the one hand, that attitude of the “respectable” workman and, on the other hand, the attitude of the (then) unorganizable mob of the big cities with which they hardly wished to act, 4 they faced a disagreeable dilemma. They could not fail to recognize the importance of the trade-union movement that was about to accomplish, step by step, the gigantic task of organizing the masses into something like an articulate class, that is to say, to solve the problem which they themselves felt to be the most important of all. But, being completely out of it and realizing the danger that this class might acquire bourgeois standing and adopt a bourgeois attitude, they were bound to dislike and to distrust the trade unions as much as they were disliked and distrusted—as far as they were noticed at all—by them. They were thus driven back upon the position that has become characteristic of classical socialism and that, though much reduced in importance, to this day expresses the fundamental antagonism between the socialist intellectuals and labor (which may in important cases be roughly equated to the antagonism between socialist parties and trade unions). For them, the trade-union movement was something to be converted to the doctrine of class war; as a means of such conversion, occasional cooperation with it was proper for the faithful whenever labor troubles radicalized the masses and sufficiently worried or excited trade-union officials to induce them to listen to the gospel. But so long as conversion was not complete and in particular so long as trade-union opinion remained on principle averse to revolutionary or simply to political action, the movement was not in a state of grace but on the contrary in error, misconceiving its own true ends, deluding itself with trivialities that were worse than futile; hence, except for the purpose of boring from within, the faithful had to keep aloof.

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V. T HE G ERMAN P ARTY A ND R EVISIONISM ; T HE A USTRIAN S OCIALISTS

But why was it that the English methods and tactics did not prevail in Germany? Why that Marxist success which accentuated antagonisms and split the nation into two hostile camps? This would be easy to understand if there had been no extra-socialist groups to work for social reconstruction or if the ruling stratum had turned a deaf ear to their proposals. It becomes a riddle as soon as we realize that German public authority was not less but more alive to the social exigencies of the time than was English political society and that the work of the Fabians was being done not less but more effectively by a very similar group.

Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy on Superphysics

Introduction By Richard Swedberg

Introduction By Richard Swedberg

Marx The Prophet

PART I The Marxian Doctrine

Marx The Sociologist

Marx' Theory

Marx The Sociologist

Marx The Economist

Marx The Economist

Marx The Economist

Marx The Teacher

Marx The Economist

Marx The Teacher

Marx The Teacher

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

The Marxist theory of Imperialism

Marx The Teacher

Marx The Teacher

Marx The Teacher

Plausible Capitalism

Plausible Capitalism

Plausible Capitalism

The Process Of Creative Destruction

Monopolistic Practices

Monopolistic Practices

Monopolistic Practices

Capitalism is Anti-Progress

Monopolistic Practices

Monopolistic Practices

Monopolistic Practices

Closed Season

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

Want and effective demand are not the same thing

The Opening Up Of New Lands

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

The Civilization Of Capitalism

The Vanishing Of Investment Opportunity

The Civilization Of Capitalism

The Obsolescence Of The Entrepreneurial Function

The Destruction Of The Protecting Strata

The Destruction Of The Institutional Framework Of Capitalist Society

Growing Hostility

I. The Social Atmosphere Of Capitalism

The Civilization Of Capitalism

2. The Sociology Of The Intellectual

The Civilization Of Capitalism

The Civilization Of Capitalism

Decomposition

Decomposition

CLEARING DECKS

CLEARING DECKS

The Socialist Blueprint

The Socialist Blueprint

The Socialist Blueprint

The Socialist Blueprint

The Socialist Blueprint

Comparison Of Blueprints

Comparison Of Blueprints

The Case for the SUPERIORITY Of the SOCIALIST BLUEPRINT

The Case for the SUPERIORITY Of the SOCIALIST BLUEPRINT

The Human Element

A WARNING

Demigods and Archangels

The Record Of Socialist Parties

A Mental Experiment

IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

The Setting Of The Problem

The Common Good and the Will of the People

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE and INDIVIDUAL VOLITION

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

Another Theory Of Democracy

1. Competition For Political Leadership

The Principle Applied

The Inference

The Inference

The Nonage