Socialism: Past and Future by Michael Harrington
Harrington, Michael. 1992 (1989). Socialism: Past and Future. New York: Mentor.
32 - IT IS, MARTIN BUBER wrote, "the goal of Utopian socialism. . .to substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, moreover a society that is 'genuine' and not a State in disguise." That is as good a definition as you will find--even though it is more complex than it might at first seem. For though utopia exalted society as against the state, it led to technocracy as well as anarchism, to Stalinism as well as the Israeli kibbutz.
97 - There are few generalizations that can be made about the capitalist revolution since it happened in very specific ways in different countries. But it is true that Britain and France went through a similar process, which was quite different from that of Germany and Japan. In the earliest variants of the new economy, there were tremendous upheavals from below as the old society was challenged--the revolutions of 1640 and 1688 in Britain, 1789 in France--and capitalism evolved spontaneously from that beginning. In Germany and Japan, as Barrington Moore has pointed out, there were "revolutions from above" in which the bureaucracies of the agrarian ruling class made an alliance with weak commercial classes (the "coalition of iron and rye" as it has been called in the German case). Capitalist development in these instances was statist, authoritarian, and was
98 - eventually to take a completely right-wing form of Naziism or military dictatorship. [. . .]
As Alexander Gerschenkron outlined the progression, in the countries where capitalism started from relatively high levels of development, the factory was the source of capital; in areas of moderate backwardness, funds came from the banks and then the factories; in situations of extreme backwardness, first the state intervened, then the banks, and finally the factories came on line as a source of capital.
234 - Tax policy should be used to direct wealth into jobs and production. That can be done in a variety of ways: by giving preferential treatment to capital actually invested in people and work and discriminating against the speculative uses of money; by a levy on passive and parasitic wealth; by inheritance laws that limit the right of passing control over economic decisions from one generation to the next (by distinguishing, as some of the French socialists have proposed, between the transmission of cash and the transfer of voting rights in enterprises); and more generally by "limiting the rewards of success and the punishments of failure" in society. On this last case, we know that the most dynamic capitalist economy of the recent past, Japan, has less of a differential between the top and bottom quintiles of income recipients than any Western society.
All of these policies canbe justified in terms of maximizing investments, environmental quality, productivity, efficiency, and growth and minimizing the scandalous capitalist wastefulness that became so marked in the seventies and eighties. But at the very same time, such measures move in a direction the social-democratic welfare state, even in its heyday, never followed: toward making the distribution of income and wealth more equal.
244 - The fact is, we cannot evaluate or deven describe the workings of markets independent of the social structure in which they operate. The "free choice" of goods, jobs, or investments is one thing in a laissez-faire economt of extreme inequality; another in a monopoly or oligopoly system; still another in a democratic welfare state; and quite different in a Communist dictatorship. And, under conditions that must be carefully specified, free choice--without quotation marks--would have a completely new, and potentially positive, significance in any forseeable
245 - transition to a socialist society. In other words, generalizations about the meanings of markets in the abstract are all suspect. [. . .]
Let me put my point most paradoxically: only under socialism and democratic planning will it be possible for markets to serve the common good as Adam Smith thought they did under capitalism.
247 - In the calculated oversimplification of his [Marx's] basic analysis--which generations have mistaken for a flawed description of the real world--it was assumed that raw materials, machines, and finance were all exchanged according to their value, and that sellers charged buyers a fair price. Where, then, was the source of profit? In the labor market. The workers sold their labor power like any other commodity. In theory, the resulting wage was the outcome of a bargain between equals, each of which was "free" to deal with the other. In reality, this was a deal between unequals: between a wealthy buyer and a precarious seller trying to keep body and soul together. The content of the market agreement was, therefore, determined not by markets per se but by the social conditions under which markets operated.
254 - It is possible to make the intial physical investments in modernization in a brutal way. The slave laborers of the gulag could be, and were, drvien to dig canals because the productivity of a person with a pick or a shovel is not of great moment. That is what the Soviets now refer to as "extensive" growth, and it corresponds to
255 - the period of "absolute surplus value" when capitalism thrived by working people to the edge of death. But the basis of a truly modern system, particularly in the age of automation and the computer, is "intensive" growth, an exponential increase in productivity that rests upon the facility of both human beings and machines. That requires a concern for the quality of work that slaves, or driven workers, will never exhibit.
274 - Jacques Attali suggests that there must then be room for failure in a socialist society. An incompetent cooperative or an ineffective managemnt in a socialized industry wates human skills and materials that could be put to a better social use, and, as the Swedish socialists have understood within the context of capitalism, there must be socially acceptable ways of putting an end to such activities. The resulting "discipline" of markets must not be vicious, as it is in the present, where entire industries were sacrificed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher in order to make industry "lean" and competitive.
32 - IT IS, MARTIN BUBER wrote, "the goal of Utopian socialism. . .to substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, moreover a society that is 'genuine' and not a State in disguise." That is as good a definition as you will find--even though it is more complex than it might at first seem. For though utopia exalted society as against the state, it led to technocracy as well as anarchism, to Stalinism as well as the Israeli kibbutz.
97 - There are few generalizations that can be made about the capitalist revolution since it happened in very specific ways in different countries. But it is true that Britain and France went through a similar process, which was quite different from that of Germany and Japan. In the earliest variants of the new economy, there were tremendous upheavals from below as the old society was challenged--the revolutions of 1640 and 1688 in Britain, 1789 in France--and capitalism evolved spontaneously from that beginning. In Germany and Japan, as Barrington Moore has pointed out, there were "revolutions from above" in which the bureaucracies of the agrarian ruling class made an alliance with weak commercial classes (the "coalition of iron and rye" as it has been called in the German case). Capitalist development in these instances was statist, authoritarian, and was
98 - eventually to take a completely right-wing form of Naziism or military dictatorship. [. . .]
As Alexander Gerschenkron outlined the progression, in the countries where capitalism started from relatively high levels of development, the factory was the source of capital; in areas of moderate backwardness, funds came from the banks and then the factories; in situations of extreme backwardness, first the state intervened, then the banks, and finally the factories came on line as a source of capital.
234 - Tax policy should be used to direct wealth into jobs and production. That can be done in a variety of ways: by giving preferential treatment to capital actually invested in people and work and discriminating against the speculative uses of money; by a levy on passive and parasitic wealth; by inheritance laws that limit the right of passing control over economic decisions from one generation to the next (by distinguishing, as some of the French socialists have proposed, between the transmission of cash and the transfer of voting rights in enterprises); and more generally by "limiting the rewards of success and the punishments of failure" in society. On this last case, we know that the most dynamic capitalist economy of the recent past, Japan, has less of a differential between the top and bottom quintiles of income recipients than any Western society.
All of these policies canbe justified in terms of maximizing investments, environmental quality, productivity, efficiency, and growth and minimizing the scandalous capitalist wastefulness that became so marked in the seventies and eighties. But at the very same time, such measures move in a direction the social-democratic welfare state, even in its heyday, never followed: toward making the distribution of income and wealth more equal.
244 - The fact is, we cannot evaluate or deven describe the workings of markets independent of the social structure in which they operate. The "free choice" of goods, jobs, or investments is one thing in a laissez-faire economt of extreme inequality; another in a monopoly or oligopoly system; still another in a democratic welfare state; and quite different in a Communist dictatorship. And, under conditions that must be carefully specified, free choice--without quotation marks--would have a completely new, and potentially positive, significance in any forseeable
245 - transition to a socialist society. In other words, generalizations about the meanings of markets in the abstract are all suspect. [. . .]
Let me put my point most paradoxically: only under socialism and democratic planning will it be possible for markets to serve the common good as Adam Smith thought they did under capitalism.
247 - In the calculated oversimplification of his [Marx's] basic analysis--which generations have mistaken for a flawed description of the real world--it was assumed that raw materials, machines, and finance were all exchanged according to their value, and that sellers charged buyers a fair price. Where, then, was the source of profit? In the labor market. The workers sold their labor power like any other commodity. In theory, the resulting wage was the outcome of a bargain between equals, each of which was "free" to deal with the other. In reality, this was a deal between unequals: between a wealthy buyer and a precarious seller trying to keep body and soul together. The content of the market agreement was, therefore, determined not by markets per se but by the social conditions under which markets operated.
254 - It is possible to make the intial physical investments in modernization in a brutal way. The slave laborers of the gulag could be, and were, drvien to dig canals because the productivity of a person with a pick or a shovel is not of great moment. That is what the Soviets now refer to as "extensive" growth, and it corresponds to
255 - the period of "absolute surplus value" when capitalism thrived by working people to the edge of death. But the basis of a truly modern system, particularly in the age of automation and the computer, is "intensive" growth, an exponential increase in productivity that rests upon the facility of both human beings and machines. That requires a concern for the quality of work that slaves, or driven workers, will never exhibit.
274 - Jacques Attali suggests that there must then be room for failure in a socialist society. An incompetent cooperative or an ineffective managemnt in a socialized industry wates human skills and materials that could be put to a better social use, and, as the Swedish socialists have understood within the context of capitalism, there must be socially acceptable ways of putting an end to such activities. The resulting "discipline" of markets must not be vicious, as it is in the present, where entire industries were sacrificed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher in order to make industry "lean" and competitive.
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