Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Wolff Richard D

Author:Wolff, Richard D. [Wolff, Richard D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics
ISBN: 9781608462575
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2012-10-01T22:00:00+00:00

* See the ample documentation of this point in Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

The Major Problems of State Capitalism

Since its inception, capitalism has had both celebrants and critics. Criticisms of capitalism, while diverse, have largely coalesced into a major global tradition of anticapitalist theories and practices that have mostly taken the names “socialism” or “communism” over the last 150 years. While there have been important differences among and between socialist and communist theories and practices, they are secondary to the points and purposes of this chapter. I will therefore refer generally to socialism and take it to include its varieties and communism, unless otherwise indicated.

Socialist theory has historically included both critiques of capitalism and constructions of hypothetical alternative economic and social systems. As socialist ideas spread and came to be held by large groups of people, they took the form of statements, platforms, and programs advocated by social movements, organizations such as labor unions, and political parties. People and organizations committed to socialism were sometimes able to construct small socialist communities within larger nonsocialist societies. These were religious or secular, rural or urban, market- or non-market oriented, short-lived or longer lasting, and diverse in other ways. In the latter half of the nineteenth century in Europe, socialist movements became strong enough to take power in major cities and even whole nations via general strikes, insurrections, revolutions, or parliamentary elections. The Paris Commune of 1870–71 marks one major milestone of socialist development; the Russian Revolution of 1917 marks another. There have been many other milestones over the last century.

As socialism spread after the 1860s—especially via the powerfully influential writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—it entered into the debates and social movements of many different countries at quite different levels of economic development and with quite different mixtures of capitalist and noncapitalist economic systems. These countries also had very different political traditions and cultures. Correspondingly different understandings of socialism and interpretations of Marx’s and Engels’s works contributed to a rich and diverse tradition. However, for many reasons, two key differences became almost universally accepted as defining and differentiating capitalism and socialism. Those key differences then shaped the intellectual struggles between devotees of the two systems, the political struggles between social movements and parties committed to different systems, and the changes brought about by successful revolutions.

5.1 Key Differences between Capitalism and Socialism

The first key difference between capitalism and socialism deals with who owns the means of production: land, machines, factories, offices, and so on. Capitalism is the system in which private property predominates. The means of production are privately owned and are contributed to production only if in return the private owners obtain a share of the production’s output (the surplus or profit). In contrast, socialism is defined as a system in which productive property is socialized—becoming the property of the people as a whole—and is then administered by the state for the people as a whole (not for the surplus or profit of private owners).

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