Political Economy of Socialism

Branko Horvat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000161342
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

This book is an exploration into the uncharted territory of social reality. It explores social relations and politics, presenting a critique of contemporary socioeconomic systems and discussions on the Marxist Doctrine of Transition. The book is intended to meet Robert Heilbroner's request.

PART ONE

A Critique of Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems

I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.

MARX to Arnold Ruge (1843)

The possessing class and the proletarian class express the same human alienation. But the former is satisfied with its situation, feels itself well established in it, recognizes this self-alienation as its own power and thus has the appearance of a human existence. The latter feels itself crushed by this self-alienation, sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman situation.

MARX AND ENGELS, The Holy Family (1844)

IN THE SECOND HALF of the twentieth century, two gigantic blocs of countries are fighting for world supremacy. The two blocs are identified with two socioeconomic systems: capitalism and socialism (or communism). Capitalism is characterized by a free market and private productive property, socialism by central planning and state property. People debate whether it is possible—and necessary—for the two systems to coexist peacefully and whether the paths of development of the two systems tend to converge. The recently liberated, less developed countries can choose only between market-oriented capitalism and state-controlled socialism.

This is the popular view of the contemporary world scene—so popular, in fact, that even most social scientists adhere to it without questioning it in the least. They disagree only in their answers to the questions posed, particularly in their predictions as to the final winner in the battle.

Such a view is false, however. Even the terms used are confused. True, big powers are fighting for supremacy. Big powers have always been fighting for supremacy: now, during the two world wars, in the nineteenth century. … But this has had little to do with socialism. Neither is socialism at stake in the present battle. In fact, the only important interest that the two blocs have in common is to prevent genuine socialist development anywhere. The often mutually tolerated interventions and military aggressions in Greece, China, Vietnam, Latin America, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, together with the total blockade of Yugoslavia by the Cominform countries and of Cuba by the United States, demonstrate this externally. Numerous trials and persecutions of progressive individuals demonstrate it internally.

To many simple-minded people, that looks puzzling. Wasn’t the October Revolution in Russia a genuine socialist 1revolution? Of course it was! Since this revolution was victorious, and no counterrevolution occurred afterward, clearly the Soviet Union must be a socialist country. True, Stalin was responsible for many grave mistakes—millions of people perished in concentration camps—and for many deviations. These were the unfortunate results of the cult of personality. But mistakes can be corrected and deviations eliminated. Once this is done, we shall have a truly socialist society.

A moment of reflection shows that the same reasoning applies to capitalism. And, of course, it is being used all the time. Bourgeois revolutions were inspired by lofty ideals just as were socialist revolutions. Unfortunately, the implementation did not quite reach the desired standards. Yet, once the shortcomings of capitalism are eliminated, we shall achieve a decent society that, if one wishes, one may call “socialist” (or “free,” or whatever one likes).

The difficulty with such reasoning is that it makes little sense in the real world. In order to eliminate the basic shortcomings of capitalism, it is necessary to eliminate—occasionally to destroy by force—capitalism itself. It took some time— and the life work of a Marx—before people began to understand this simple truth. No wonder that the same truth about Stalinist systems is still not well comprehended. In a way history repeats itself. In the last century bourgeois ideology mystified the capitalist society as the incarnation of freedom and equality of opportunity for all. In our century the ideology of the ruling bureaucracies mystifies their own societies as the best of all possible ones. Now—as then—demystification is vitally needed.

Let us therefore start our inquiry by a brief critical survey of the salient features of the two contending social systems.

1

Capitalism

Capitalism has been with us for a couple of centuries by now. Thus, we may assume that its manifestations are well known and adopt a shortcut by approaching our problem somewhat schematically.

As Marx made clear, the development of productive forces and antagonistic class relationships represented basic dynamic elements in social development. When the productive forces outgrow the old system of productive relationships—social relationships among people participating in production—the conflict must be resolved by transforming the latter into a new and compatible social system. In the pioneering countries, the conflict is usually resolved by revolutions that change the class structure of the society.

I. Bourgeois Revolutions and the Process of Political Liberalization

The best-known and most important bourgeois revolution is undoubtedly the French Revolution. This revolution was not intended to bring about small improvements in the society as compared with the feudal order. The revolution had to achieve nothing less than the emancipation of the human race. It was fought under the triple banner of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Its advocates believed that all that had to be done to achieve these imposing goals was to smash feudal barriers in order to make possible the free initiative of individuals, who were equal before the law; this initiative was to be protected by a representative government.¹ As a result liberty, equality, and brotherhood would follow as a matter of course.

Based on eighteenth-century political theory, the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued by the French revolutionary assembly in 1789 and incorporated into the revolutionary constitution of 1793, stated that “men are born free and equal in respect of their natural and imprescriptible rights of liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”² Clause 4 defines liberty as “being able or empowered to do anything that is not harmful to others.” In general, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those ensuring that other members of the society enjoy the same rights. These limits can be determined only by the law, which ought to be the same for all (clause 6).³

One notes that equality is not mentioned as one of the imprescriptible rights. Men are equal only in rights and before the law. Abbé Sieyès, one of the drafters of the declaration, proposed two articles which would have made it clear that there could be no liberty if privileges persisted but that equality applied to the domain of rights and not to means.⁴ The Constituent Assembly was in complete agreement, but for some reason did not accept the proposal. It thus failed to make explicit what bourgeois equality was meant to imply from the very beginning.

It also becomes apparent that the goals of the French bourgeois revolution were negatively defined—freedom from, not freedom for—without the participants having been aware of this fact. It was somehow assumed that a formally free man would be able to make full use of his freedom to his own benefit. Such negatively defined liberalism—which was to become synonymous with bourgeois liberalism—far from automatically producing equality and brotherhood, tended to destroy them.⁵

Political freedom was to become an enormous advance compared with feudalism. Yet, it was to be used—and misused—by the powerful, not by everyone. At first it represented almost entirely a proclamation and a request, rather than a realization. The development was remarkably slow. The French republican constitution of 1893 remained unimplemented. The American Constitutional Convention of 1787 left qualifications for voting up to the states, and it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that manhood suffrage was introduced throughout the country. Women were allowed to vote after the First World War. Full voting rights without discrimination against anyone, including blacks, were established in the United States only within the last decade. Thus, in this respect, it took almost two centuries to apply the proclamation of political liberties embodied in the American Declaration of Independence.

It is both instructive and illuminating to observe how slow and gradual was the process of political democratization in England. The demand for manhood suffrage was put forward for the first time during the revolution in the 1640s, by a group of soldiers and civilians known as the Levellers. The Levellers failed. In 1832, slightly less than two centuries later, riots and demonstrations swept the country. Under the popular pressure, the middle class scored a political victory: the Reform Bill of 1832 established voting rights for property owners. At that time members of Parliament were completely subservient to the great aristocratic landowners, who, as one writer remarked, did not even have to issue instructions, so assiduously did “their” members study their every wish before each vote in Parliament. The ten-year-long Chartist agitation for the extension of voting rights was defeated in 1848. Two decades later, in 1867, most of the skilled workers in towns were enfranchised, and in 1885 voting rights were extended to rural workers. In 1911 the House of Lords lost veto power, but it retained a considerable delaying power until 1948. Women were not enfranchised until 1918, and even then only those older than 30 years of age were allowed to vote. This restriction was removed in 1928. In 1945 double votes for property holders and university graduates were abolished. The voting age was lowered to 18 only in 1966. The House of Lords and the monarchy still exist. According to investigations by Laski⁶ and Nightingale,⁷ during the time up to the end of the laissez-faire phase of capitalist development, no more than about 1,000 families ruled British society, holding the leading positions in it. Commenting on this situation, Karl Mannheim concluded: “Sociologically speaking, England has been a political democracy run by an oligarchy which has gradually expanded its basis of selection.”⁸

Although the gradualness was less elaborate, the pattern of political liberalization was similar in other countries. Throughout most of Europe, labor unions had to fight for suffrage. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than one hundred years after the French and American bourgeois revolutions and more than two hundred years after the English revolution, universal suffrage existed in no country in the world, and manhood suffrage was established in only a handful of countries. If we define conventional democracy as male suffrage, secret ballot, and responsible government, then it is hardly a century old.⁹ If we insist on female suffrage as well— as we should—it is much younger. Women acquired voting rights in some of the developed bourgeois countries only after the First World War;¹⁰ in France, Belgium, and Italy, after the Second World War; and in Switzerland in 1971. And yet, the right to vote represents just one necessary, and by no means sufficient, condition for a meaningful democracy. Even at its most successful, bourgeois democracy came to mean a political life dominated by political parties, and political parties are dominated by party machines and their bosses. The ordinary citizen has the privilege of choosing every three, four, or five years the least undesirable political bosses preselected for him by the ruling strata of the society. Bourgeois democracy is a political system that transforms the formal will of the majority into the actual will of the minority.¹¹

Equality before the law, with which bourgeois development really started, was also an enormous advance compared with the arbitrary administration of justice in feudal times. In fact, it represented an indispensable foundation on which political freedom was to be built. Yet it soon became apparent that rich and poor are not treated quite equally in the courts. The former come from the same class as the judge, share with the judge the same values and prejudices, and are able to buy high-quality legal defense. “The bourgeois society,” comments Lj. Tadic, “actually recognizes only the private owners and members with full rights though formally it proclaims general equality.”¹²

A special case of legal equality is market equality. Here employers and employees, the rich and the poor, are clearly in a very unequal position. “The law in its majestic equality,” runs the famous summary of bourgeois equality by Anatole France, “forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” Throughout the nineteenth century, the accumulation of wealth on the one side was accompanied by the accumulation of misery on the other. In England, where industrial revolution occurred first, real wages remained stagnant—and were even falling—in the first half of the nineteenth century, in spite of economic development and productivity growth. That, of course, implied a disproportionate growth of profits and private wealth. At the beginning of the century, the working day was as long as fifteen hours— twelve hours for children. The recurring unemployment was enormous: up to 33 percent for steelworkers, up to 50 percent for textile workers.¹³ Slums and ghettos, undernourishment and outright hunger, disease and high mortality, the appalling squalor and wretchedness of a large section of the population in the cities—these were the proletarian side of capitalist industrialization, so vividly described by young Engels¹⁴ around the middle of the century and by Marx in the historical chapters of Capital.

In spite of the doctrine of inalienable rights, the working class had no political parties, for workers did not enjoy even the most elementary political right, that of voting. Periodic dissatisfactions were suppressed by the police and army. Workers could not form trade unions because all forms of working class combinations were treated as criminal conspiracies in England and elsewhere. The French bourgeois revolution was in full swing when, in June 1791, the National Assembly passed the Chapelier Law, which rendered illegal workers’ organizations and gatherings “directed against the free ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Part One A Critique of Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems
• Part Two Searching for an Alternative
• Part Three The Design of Self-Governing Socialism
• Part Four The Period of Transition
• A Postscript
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects