Comparison Of Blueprints

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.

In particular, we shall not compare the cultural worlds of commercial and socialist society. What I have called the cultural indeterminateness of socialism is in itself sufficient to bar the attempt. But we have also another reason for refraining. Even if socialist civilization meant just one definite pattern, comparative appraisal would still be a doubtful matter. There are idealists and monomaniacs who can see no difficulty in it and gaily adopt for a standard of comparison some feature which they value to the exclusion of everything else and which they expect their socialism to display. But if we resolved to do better than that and, so far as our vision may reach, to see all the facets of a civilization in the light that is born and dies with it, we should instantly discover that every civilization is a world unto itself, and incommensurable with every other.

There is one point however that bears upon comparison of actual and possible cultural achievement and yet comes within the scope of our type of analysis. It is often claimed that the socialist plan, by removing economic care from the shoulders of the individual, will release incalculable cultural energies that now go to waste in the struggle for daily bread. To some extent this is true—any “planned” society may do that as, for other reasons and in other respects, it also may smother cultural possibilities. It might be objected that public authorities as we know them are hardly up to the responsibility of discovering and nursing talent to the stage of fruition, and that there is no sound reason to believe that they would have appreciated Van Gogh any sooner than capitalist society did. But this objection misses the point. For public authority need not go as far as this. All that is necessary is that Van Gogh gets his “income” as everyone else does and that he is not worked too hard; this would suffice in any normal case—though, when I come to think of it, I am no longer sure whether it would have sufficed in the case of Van Gogh—to give the necessary opportunity for the assertion of creative ability. But another objection carries more weight. In this matter as in others the advocate of socialism is likely to overlook—often he is passionately resolved not to admit—the degree to which certain ideals of his are satisfied in the modern world. Capitalism provides, to a much greater extent than most of us believe, the ladders for talent to climb. There is an element of truth in the brutal slogan of the typical bourgeois which many worthy men find so irritating, viz., that those who cannot climb by these ladders are not worth troubling about.

The ladders may not be up to any standard we choose to set, but it cannot be said that they do not exist. Not only does modern capitalism systematically proffer means to shelter and nurse almost any kind of ability in the early stages of its development—so much so that in some lines the difficulty is not how to find the means for talent but how to find anything that has any claim to be called a talent for the means proffered— but by the very law of its structure it tends to send up the able individual and, much more effectively, the able family. Thus, though there may be social losses 1 particularly in the class of semi-pathological genius, it is not likely that they are very great.

II. A DISCUSSION OF COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY

Let us stay however within the economic sphere though I hope I have made it quite clear that I do not attribute to it more than secondary importance.

1. The restrictions of our scope are most obvious and hence the pitfalls least dangerous at the first step which is still concerned with nothing but blueprints. Again deferring discussion of transitional difficulties, to be dealt with separately, and provisionally assuming that they have been successfully overcome, we need only glance at the implications of our proof of the possibility and practicability of the socialist schema in order to realize that there is a strong case for believing in its superior economic efficiency.

That superiority need be proved only with respect to big-business or “monopolistic” capitalism because superiority over “competitive” capitalism then follows a fortiori. This is evident from our analysis in Chapter VIII. Many economists, on the strength of the fact that under completely unrealistic conditions all sorts of flattering propositions can be established about competitive capitalism, have acquired a habit of extolling it at the expense of its “monopolistic” successor.

I wish to repeat therefore that even if those eulogies were entirely justified—which they are not—and if the theorist’s perfect competition had ever been realized in the field of industry and transportation—which it never was— finally, if all the accusations ever leveled against big business were entirely justified—which is far from being the case—it would still be a fact that the actual efficiency of the capitalist engine of production in the era of the largest-scale units has been much greater than in the preceding era of small or mediumsized ones. This is a matter of statistical record. But if we recall the theoretical explanation of that fact, we further realize that the increasing size of units of control and all the business strategy that went with it were not only unavoidable incidents but to a considerable extent also conditions of the achievement reflected in that record; in other words, that the technological and organizational possibilities open to firms of the type which is compatible with approximately perfect competition could never have produced similar results. How modern capitalism would work under perfect competition is hence a meaningless question. Therefore, quite apart from the fact that socialism will inherit a “monopolistic” and not a competitive capitalism, we need not trouble about the competitive case except incidentally.

Economic efficiency of a system we will reduce to productive efficiency.

Even the latter is by no means easy to define. The two alternatives to be compared must of course 2 be referred to the same point of time—past, present or future.

But this is not enough. For the relevant question is not what, ex visu of a given point of time, socialist management could do with the capitalist apparatus existing at that point of time—this is for us not much more interesting than what socialist management could do with a given stock of consumers’ goods—but what productive apparatus would exist or would have existed had a socialist instead of the capitalist management presided over its construction. The mass of information about our actual and potential productive resources that has been accumulated during the last twenty years, however valuable it may be for other purposes, thus lends but little aid in the struggle with our difficulty. And all we can do is to list such differences between the mechanisms of the economic engines of socialist and of commercial society as we may nevertheless perceive, and to appraise their importance as best we can. We will postulate that the number, quality, tastes and age distribution of the population at the time of comparison be the same in both cases. Then we shall call that system relatively more efficient which we see reason to expect would in the long run produce the larger stream of consumers’ goods per equal unit of time. 3