CLEARING DECKS

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.

Before I attempt to prove it, I should like to clear some obstacles from our way. We have so far been rather careless about certain definitions and we must make up for it now. We shall simply envisage two types of society and mention others only incidentally. These types we will call Commercial and Socialist. Commercial society is defined by an institutional pattern of which we need only mention two elements: private property in means of production and regulation of the productive process by private contract (or management or initiative). Such a type of society is not as a rule purely bourgeois, however. For as we have seen in Part II an industrial and commercial bourgeoisie will in general not be able to exist except in symbiosis with a non-bourgeois stratum. Nor is commercial society identical with capitalist society. The latter, a special case of the former, is defined by the additional phenomenon of credit creation—by the practice, responsible for so many outstanding features of modern economic life, of financing enterprise by bank credit, i.e., by money (notes or deposits) manufactured for that purpose. But since commercial society, as an alternative to socialism, in practice always appears in the particular form of capitalism, it will make no great difference if the reader prefers to keep to the traditional contrast between capitalism and socialism.

By socialist society we shall designate an institutional pattern in which the control over means of production and over production itself is vested with a central authority—or, as we may say, in which, as a matter of principle, the economic affairs of society belong to the public and not to the private sphere. Socialism has been called an intellectual Proteus.

There are many ways of defining it—many acceptable ways, that is, besides the silly ones such as that socialism means bread for all—and ours is not necessarily the best. But there are some points about it which it may be well for us to notice, braving the danger of an indictment on the score of pedantry.

Our definition excludes guild socialism, syndicalism and other types. This is because what may be termed Centralist Socialism seems to me to hold the field so clearly that it would be waste of space to consider other forms. But if we adopt this term in order to indicate the only kind of socialism we shall consider, we must be careful to avoid a misunderstanding. The term centralist socialism is only intended to exclude the existence of a plurality of units of control such that each of them would on principle stand for a distinct interest of its own, in particular the existence of a plurality of autonomous territorial sectors that would go far toward reproducing the antagonisms of capitalist society. This exclusion of sectional interests may well be thought unrealistic. Nonetheless it is essential.

But our term is not intended to suggest centralism either in the sense that the central authority, which we shall alternatively call Central Board or Ministry of Production, is necessarily absolute or in the sense that all the initiative that pertains to the executive proceeds from it alone. As regards the first point, the board or ministry may have to submit its plan to a congress or parliament. There may also be a supervising and checking authority—a kind of cour des comptes that could conceivably even have the right to veto particular decisions. As regards the second point, some freedom of action must be left, and almost any amount of freedom might be left, to the “men on the spot,” say, the managers of the individual industries or plants. For the moment, I will make the bold assumption that the rational amount of freedom is experimentally found and actually granted so that efficiency suffers neither from the unbridled ambitions of subordinates nor from the piling up on the desk of the minister of reports and unanswered questions—nor from orders of the latter suggestive of Mark Twain’s rules about the harvesting of potatoes. I have not separately defined collectivism or communism. The former term I shall not use at all and the latter only incidentally with reference to groups that call themselves so. But if I had to use them I should make them synonymous with socialism. Analyzing historical usage, most writers have tried to give them distinct meanings. It is true that the term communist has fairly consistently been chosen to denote ideas more thoroughgoing or radical than others. But then, one of the classic documents of socialism is entitled the “Communist” Manifesto. And the difference of principle has never been fundamental—what there is of it is no less pronounced within the socialist camp than it is as between it and the communist one. Bolsheviks call themselves communists and at the same time the true and only socialist.’ Whether or not the true and only ones, they are certainly socialists

I have avoided the terms state ownership of, or property in, natural resources, plant and equipment. This point is of some importance in the methodology of the social sciences. There are no doubt concepts that bear no relation to any particular epoch or social world, such as want or choice or economic good. There are others which, while in their everyday meaning they do bear such a relation, have been refined by the analyst to the point of losing it. Price or cost may serve as examples.1 But there are still others which by virtue of their nature cannot stand transplantation and always carry the flavor of a particular institutional framework. It is extremely dangerous, in fact it amounts to a distortion of historical description, to use them beyond the social world or culture whose denizens they are. Now ownership or property—also, so I believe, taxation—are such denizens of the world of commercial society, exactly as knights and fiefs are denizens of the feudal world.

But so is the state. We might of course define it by the criterion of sovereignty and then speak of a socialist state. But if there is to be meat in the concept and not merely legal or philosophic gas, the state should not be allowed to intrude into discussions of either feudal or socialist society, neither of which did or would display that dividing line between the private and the public sphere from which the better part of its meaning flows. To conserve that meaning with all its wealth of functions, methods and attitudes, it seems best to say that the state, the product of the clashes and compromises between feudal lords and bourgeoisie, will form part of the ashes from which the socialist phoenix is to rise. Therefore, I did not use it in my definition of socialism. Of course socialism may come about by an act of the state. But there is no inconvenience that I can see in saying that the state dies in this act—as has been pointed out by Marx and repeated by Lenin.