The Civilization Of Capitalism

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.

50,000 years ago man confronted the dangers and opportunities of his environment in a way which some “prehistorians,” sociologists and ethnologists agree was roughly equivalent to the attitude of modern primitives.1

Two elements of this attitude are particularly important for us: the “collective” and “affective” nature of the primitive mental process and, partly overlapping, the role of what, not quite correctly, I shall here call magic. By the first I designate the fact that in small and undifferentiated or not much differentiated social groups collective ideas impose themselves much more stringently on the individual mind than they do in big and complex groups; and that conclusions and decisions are arrived at by methods which for our purpose may be characterized by a negative criterion: the disregard of what we call logic and, in particular, of the rule that excludes contradiction. By the second I designate the use of a set of beliefs which are not indeed completely divorced from experience—no magic device can survive an unbroken sequence of failures—but which insert, into the sequence of observed phenomena, entities or influences derived from non- empirical sources. 2 The similarity of this type of mental process with the

mental processes of neurotics has been pointed out by G.Dromard (1911; his term, délire d’interpretation, is particularly suggestive) and S.Freud (Totem und Tabu, 1913). But it does not follow that it is foreign to the mind of normal man of our own time. On the contrary, any discussion of political issues may convince the reader that a large and—for action—most important body of our own processes is of exactly the same nature. Rational thought or behavior and a rationalistic civilization therefore do not imply absence of the criteria mentioned but only a slow though incessant widening of the sector of social life within which individuals or groups go about dealing with a given situation, first, by trying to make the best of it more or less—never wholly—according to their own lights; second, by doing so according to those rules of consistency which we call logic; and third, by doing so on assumptions which satisfy two conditions: that their number be a minimum and that every one of them be amenable to expression in terms of potential experience. 3

All this is very inadequate of course but it suffices for our purpose. There is however one more point about the concept of rationalist civilizations that I will mention here for future reference. When the habit of rational analysis of, and rational behavior in, the daily tasks of life has gone far enough, it turns back upon the mass of collective ideas and criticizes and to some extent “rationalizes” them by way of such questions as why there should be kings and popes or subordination or tithes or property. Incidentally, it is important to notice that, while most of us would accept such an attitude as the symptom of a “higher stage” of mental development, this value judgment is not necessarily and in every sense borne out by the results. The rationalist attitude may go to work with information and technique so inadequate that actions—and especially a general surgical propensity—induced by it may, to an observer of a later period, appear to be, even from a purely intellectual standpoint, inferior to the actions and anti-surgical propensities associated with attitudes that at the time most people felt inclined to attribute to a low I.Q. A large part of the political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries illustrates this ever-forgotten truth. Not only in depth of social vision but also in logical analysis later “conservative” countercriticism was clearly superior although it would have been a mere matter of laughter for the writers of the enlightenment.

The rational attitude forced itself on the human mind primarily from economic necessity.

It is the everyday economic task to which we as a race owe our elementary training in rational thought and behavior— I have no hesitation in saying that all logic is derived from the pattern of

the economic decision or, to use a pet phrase of mine, that the economic pattern is the matrix of logic.

This seems plausible for the following reason.

Suppose that some “primitive” man uses that most elementary of all machines, already appreciated by our gorilla cousins, a stick, and that this stick breaks in his hand. If he tries to remedy the damage by reciting a magic formula—he might for instance murmur Supply and Demand or Planning and Control in the expectation that if he repeats this exactly nine times the two fragments will unite again—then he is within the precincts of pre- rational thought.

If he gropes for the best way to join the fragments or to procure another stick, he is being rational in our sense. Both attitudes are possible of course. But it stands to reason that in this and most other economic actions the failure of a magic formula to work will be much more obvious than could be any failure of a formula that was to make our man victorious in combat or lucky in love or to lift a load of guilt from his conscience.

This is due to the inexorable definiteness and, in most cases, the quantitative character that distinguish the economic from other spheres of human action, perhaps also to the unemotional drabness of the unending rhythm of economic wants and satisfactions. Once hammered in, the rational habit spreads under the pedagogic influence of favorable experiences to the other spheres and there also opens eyes for that amazing thing, the Fact. This process is independent of any particular garb, hence also of the capitalistic garb, of economic activity. So is the profit motive and self- interest.