As I explained in "The Future of Socialism," the
elements of economic planning grow "within the womb of capitalism"
because as firms expand and diversify, the market ceases to give unambiguous
signals by which capitalist managers may guide their decisions concerning
capital allocation, their estimations of profitability, and their choices of
such central factors as the proper rate of savings. It is also true, of course, that such signals
as the market does give do not serve to guide the decisions of capitalist firms
toward the fulfillment of pressing human needs, but that is no concern of the
managers, and it therefore has no effect on their corporate policy. If money can be made building McMansions
while hard-working men and women are unable to find affordable housing, nothing
in the logic of capitalism will incline builders toward the production of
well-designed low-cost housing. But of
course managers are not averse to satisfying human needs along the way, as it
were. Well-designed mass produced
clothing is profitable, at least as long as cheap labor is available in Asia or
Africa, so even the poor in America can be stylishly dressed.
Capitalists learned how to manage the periodic crises of
overproduction and underconsumption, thanks in part to Lord Keynes, but the explosion
of the world-wide financial sector has created new kinds of crises that
capitalism has not yet subdued. It would
be a mistake, I think, to expect that failure to lead us toward the replacement
of capitalist by socialist relations of production and distribution. Rather, we can anticipate that capitalism
will develop more effective institutions for managing the financial components
of capitalism, which is simply another way of saying that the new will continue
to grow in the womb of the old.
How, then, if at all, can a transition to a humane socialist
economic order come about? Only through
mass mobilization, bottom-up organization, and the use of the collected
political power of the great majority to take control of the thoroughly
socialized means of production. This
effort, if it is to succeed, must be grounded in the simple ideas set forth in
my Credo
-- that the vast wealth of modern society is the product of the collective
efforts of the all men and women, built on the efforts of past generations, and
-- in the evocative words of Edmund Burke -- passed on to generations yet
unborn.
After this great transformation, Scott, if ever it should
come about, there will still be a role for markets and room for individual
entrepreneurs. Not to worry.
“This effort, if it is to succeed, must be grounded in the simple ideas set forth in my Credo….” You probably mean more than “ground in ideas,” but it is “ideas” -as abstractions - that get all the credit. This sole emphasis on ideas generally troubles me.
ReplyDeleteOne of the nice thing about your analyses is that you regularly make reference to non-ideas as having revolutionary import. Let’s call these non-ideas “simple pleasures;” simple, much like the ideas in your Credo, in that they are available to everyone and fundamental to the living of a just life in a just society.
For example, I loved the distinction you made between “hearing a sound” and “making a sound.” The latter issues in a “special pleasure,” you say – and here I infer that that special pleasure cannot be available to the listener in the same way.
You have shown to us the Marcusean argument “that the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential and unexpectedly subversive role….these works keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds,” and which awakens “the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.” And then there’s the story of Archimedes whose chief concern is that the Roman soldiers do not disturb “his circles.”
Can we say, then, that “this effort” will spring not just from the ideas of your Credo but also, and necessarily, from the simple pleasures that each of us come to cherish all the while living within the womb of capitalism?