Mortimer Adler: On
Capitalism and Socialism
The words "capitalism" and "socialism" are of
recent origin in everyday speech -- as recent as
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The words
are generally misused by most individuals. One
flagrant misuse occurs when no distinction is made
between socialism and communism. Then the latter is
used to designate state capitalism as contrasted
with private-property capitalism.
The Soviet Union and the countries controlled by
it (what was then East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary) were all
capitalist countries in the descriptive sense. That
is, they were all capital-intensive economies in
the same way that the Western constitutional
democracies are.
The difference between these two kinds of
capital economies was that in the eastern bloc,
state capitalism prevailed. As prescribed by the
Marxists-Leninist doctrine, the private ownership
of capital was abolished. All capital, agricultural
as well as industrial, was owned by the state and
was administered by the Communist Party. The
political result was a totalitarian state -- no
private economy and no private institutions. The
economic aspect of the Western democracies involved
the private ownership of capital and market
economy.
Let us consider constitutional democracy as an
ideal that the various countries in the West, as
well as India and Japan in the Far East,
approximate in different degrees. The ideal
approximated can be stated as a society in which
all adult human beings are political haves; all who
have reached the age of consent are citizens with
suffrage and have political liberty. They are
governed with their own consent and have a voice in
their own government. Citizens in public office
have more political responsibilities to discharge
and so have more power than ordinary citizens, but
are equal as citizens.
The economic counter part of this political
ideal is socialism. Socialism is an ideal, as
democracy is, and it is approximated in varying
degrees. As an ideal it is the economic face of
political democracy. The ideal is approximated in a
society in which all mature citizens are economic
as well as political haves. It is a society with no
economic have-nots -- no one deprived of a decent
livelihood, to which every human being has a
natural right.
In the same way that all citizens are political
haves, they are all economic haves. That is why
democracy and socialism are two faces of the same
coin. Among the economic haves, some will have more
and some less in terms of the contribution they
make to the economy. But all are equal at the
baseline in which all have enough to live a decent
human life.
The mistake made by Marx and Lenin was thinking
that abolishing the private ownership of capital
was an indispensable step in the direction of the
socialism ideal. On the contrary, private ownership
of capital and a market economy are indispensable
means to the socialism ideal. They are required for
the production of enough wealth to distribute so
that everyone's rights to a decent livelihood can
be realized.
Though Marx and Lenin had the socialist ideal in
mind, they took the wrong steps to realize it. They
ended up with a totalitarian state in a failing,
nonprosperous economy. [Also see Adler on
Communism and
Socialism]
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