[This is Chapter
Nineteen of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement.]
Chapter
Nineteen
SOCIALISM'S
ERSTWHILE DEMISE
Several forces have come together: a
consensus in favor of deregulation; another in support of privatization; the
crumbling of the USSR's eastern European empire as symbolized most by the
tearing down of the Berlin Wall; the dissolution even of the Soviet Union and
the repudiation of Communist ideology; the consequent withering away of
Communist revolutionary efforts all over the world; the marketization of China
despite the continuing political hold by the old Maoist clique; the rapid
development of the global marketplace; and the prevalence in the most
influential circles of Free Trade ideology, extended by international and
regional pacts.
All this and more has made the last
few years an "age of capitalism" and of "the demise of
socialism." Although imperfect and
as yet incomplete, it satisfies the fondest hopes of those who see individual
liberty as the fount of progress and have detested the abuses of modern
totalitarianism. At the same time,
socialists themselves in large numbers now see the competitive market not as an
enemy but as an engine to be kept in
place so that the means can be created with which to serve the egalitarian
purposes they value.
It is ironic, at such a time, that
the very processes of innovation and of market competition are bringing on a
crisis of work, distribution and polarization.
At the moment of its clearest triumph, the market system starts to
become clouded and it becomes apparent that that system, to survive, will
itself have to undergo major revision – in the direction of what has been
considered socialism! That is why I have
named this chapter "Socialism's Erstwhile Demise." As loath as I am as a classical liberal to
express it, the future will have to be informed by much that socialists have
been saying. Their day is by no means
over. Political entities will have to
step in to address the basic needs of peoples as work becomes marginalized; and
a society that is not based primarily on work will be a different place than
classical liberalism has envisioned as its model. The life within such a society will be much
closer to the non-competitive life that socialists have long favored.
Why devote a chapter to this when it
will amount to "rubbing salt into the wounds" of my closest
friends? The answer is that I do not
want to restrict this intellectual odyssey to my friends among conservatives,
libertarians and classical liberals. It
is essential that everyone take part.
And that includes socialists, who have made up a major part of the
world's intellectual culture and of the intellectual component of modern
American liberalism.
What is needed is for science, a
capitalistic market and egalitarian distribution to come together into a
workable whole in light of the onrushing realities – and, what is of the utmost
importance, for a consensus to emerge (among the diverse believers in all of
the earlier ideologies) that the State's power must not be allowed to grow into
an abusive force because of this mix. If
the State must become the engine of distribution, as it will, the potential for
abuse of power will be central – a problem to which I will give considerable
attention in later chapters. A consensus
about limiting the State requires that those who have wanted an active
egalitarianism be very much part of the dialogue. For those who have been ideological enemies
to talk is galling, but vital.
When I speak of
"socialism," I don't restrict it to government ownership of the means
of production. If I did, I couldn't
speak of socialist thought's having a significant place in a society centered
around what I call "a shared market economy." I envision competitive capitalism's
continuing!
This will be perplexing in light of
the definition of "socialism" so often given by people who ought to
know better. It is common to define it
as "government control and ownership of the means of production," as
Leonard Read, the founder and long-time president of the Foundation for
Economic Education, did in a recently reprinted article.[1]
The problem is that this overlooks a
vast amount of thinking in the history of socialism, especially in the
nineteenth century and since World War II.
The world Left's central perspective has been that the have-nots need
help in a struggle with the haves. Driven
primarily by the predominant intellectual subculture's rivalry with and antagonism
toward the acting man of commerce and industry, the Left came into being in the
nineteenth century in a variety of forms.
Its members shared the common worldview that capitalism traps and
exploits millions of people, and that the historic task is to liberate those
millions. They differed among
themselves, however, about the institutional form this liberation should take,
the methods to be used in effecting the change, and the theoretical framework
for understanding the forces at work.
Many of the forms of nineteenth century socialist thought either opposed
calling a large central State into play or saw such a State as a temporary
instrument. These formulations were, of
course, overshadowed when the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 brought the Soviet
system into existence. Under the Soviet
system, at least before the ideologically called-for "withering away of
the state," the central State was the essence of socialism. But after World War II the socialist parties
of western Europe moved sharply away from this model, even affirming the
principle of private property (as the German socialists did in their Bad
Godesberg program in 1959) and the idea of a "social market economy"
in which the State would occupy "the commanding heights" but would
otherwise encourage a competitive market.
So we see that "government
ownership and control" has not been the defining characteristic of
socialism, even though it has been one of the forms of socialism.
It is not hard to see why virtually all the
literature so far on "downsizing," the "end of work," and
the displacement from jobs has come from authors within the socialist
milieu. Socialists have been criticizing
the market economy for two hundred years, seeing (as Marx did)
"contradictions" within it and forces that will bring it to
crisis. Classical liberals, in contrast,
have been on the defensive, manning the barricades in support of the
market. Given those orientations, who
would be the first to notice new grounds for a crisis of the market? Socialists, of course; certainly not
classical liberals.
It is important that supporters of a
market economy not allow this to block their comprehension of what is happening
in the world. Friends have said to me,
"Oh, Rifkin; you can't count on what he says." They are surprised when I tell them that
Rifkin's The End of Work is the best I read of the many books and
writings I studied in my own preparation.
The fact that Rifkin draws (mildly, for his part) from a socialist
perspective, quoting from Marx, Engels, Theobald, Heilbroner, Oppenheimer,
Marcuse, Sismondi and Bellamy (but also Milton Friedman, definitely not a
socialist), does not mean that his insights in The End of Work aren't
right. And even though I count myself
among the more severe critics of socialism, I am not prepared to say that
everything in its thinking has been wrong.
Marx was off by almost two centuries when he predicted that automation
would eventually eliminate workers altogether,[2]
but he saw the long-term secular tendency accurately. Does recognizing this amount to an acceptance
of Marx's overall views, and of everything that has been done in pursuit of
them? The question pretty much answers
itself.
The authors I have read who have talked about
the coming displacement have, consistently with their socialist orientation,
called for various measures of "social democratic" State
intervention. My own proposals won't be
identical to theirs, but will contain echoes from social democracy, classical
liberalism and cultural conservatism.
[1]. See Leonard E.
Read, "Economics for the Teachable,"
The Freeman, January 1960, reprinted in The Morality of
Capitalism, Mark W. Hendrickson, ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation
for Economic Education, Inc., 1996), p. 37.
[2]. Marx's position
is spoken of by Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1995), p. 16.