Capitalism and Its Milieu

...In the last century, at least four or five such destructive institutions and movements were engendered or promoted by nascent and dynamic capitalism...

...In South America, for example, foreign and local companies since the 1950s have practically driven the revolutionists into despair with their investment, expansion, and industrial diversification programs...

...It encouraged the peasants to settle in amorphous, impersonal cities, to be recruited by amorphous, impersonal political parties, and to be mentally shaped by an increasingly radical press...

...and second, of utopian utterings by politicians, public figures, and Churchmen...

...To my surprise, the question in the title, "Will Capitalism Survive...

...In Germany, the cultural climate (I use this as a comprehensive term) compels them to take various, but increasingly favorable positions with regard to such issues as Mitbestimmung, the joint decision-making of stockholders, managers, and union members...

...This too, is the fruit of capitalism and its grudging but nevertheless positive coexistence with more or less populist governments...

...What about the free entrepreneurs themselves...

...only the above-mentioned forms are new...

...but which is regularly drained into a petty-bourgeoisie in the towns themselves...

...One might say that the only firms still managing their own affairs are medium-size enterprises—large enough to compete with reasonable means but not so large as to be drawn into the sphere of the State, and generally so dimensioned that the unions do not wish to squeeze them out of business and see their members out of work...

...Even if the entrepreneurs themselves wish to take a firm stand against these developments, the political parties representing them tend towards the more "socialist" solution...

...Yet, the intellectuals are still as restless, radical, and prone to abstractions as before...

...The Picture Today What is the picture today...

...he assumed that the marketplace, including the cultural marketplace, is neutral, that ideas may clash under the same fair conditions as merchandise does...

...Like Schumpeter's other categories, the intelligentsia and the masses, they are much less monolithic than their fathers were in 1942 when Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy appeared...

...Society trails off towards utopia, and if we follow the pertinent literature, we indeed find a tremendous increase, first, of utopian literature itself (Marcuse, Charles Reich, Dennis Gabor, Edgar Morin, Enzensberger, etc...

...on the contrary, they reward those parties which have come out of the cold of radical ideology...

...But the union leaders oppose this idea, obviously worried that it might cancel their own function as representatives of the workers and wage-earners...

...In Peru, the cultural climate brings on comunidad industrial, a kind of cooperative at present half-owned by the workers, "but to pass under their ownership completely in a number of years...

...But that the future will be socialist, nobody who is anybody dares question...

...In the West and in Japan full-employment policies benefit the intellectuals even before the blue-collar workers...

...Capit4ism at least helped create the mushrooming urban existence and the ever-expanding democracy which was not limited to the vote but penetrated the managerial categories, the workshops, and the various cultural institutions...

...It is thus assumed that Western society has the longer and more arduous path ahead of it, while communist society must merely backtrack a bit from its extreme "Stalinist" position...

...Third, a loose public morality contrary to the entrepreneurial ethos prevails: an ever-larger segment of the potential and actual workforce takes it easy...

...In other words, in the eyes of Western intellectuals the communist society is in an advanced stage compared with Western liberal-capitalist society: the latter is bound to pass through communism if it is to evolve, whereas the former ought...

...Capitalism has adapted to conditions there by absorbing with diversified city jobs the rural masses whose pressure on a fragile economy would normally have exploded in a gigantic revolution...

...In South America the free market is still surrounded with an aura of pioneering...

...They are impressed from all sides, not least from within the company, by a largely false communitarian spirit, by the idea of participation, public relations, image-making, cultural service, and so on...

...However, these new forms may reflect not so much capitalism's demise as its adaptability to all sorts of conditions...

...These arguments have the merit, as I said, of studying the phenomenon in a political framework...

...First, it is hard today to find young men entering business with a "laissez-faire" mentality, even in the United States...

...The government's fiscal policy, union pressure, and the cultural climate have divided them according to magnitude, degree of symbiosis with the State, the nature of their relationship with labor.and the imperatives of public relations...

...However, we should not be surprised if one day it will be called "socialist market economy...

...What we witness today may be only one of the last phases of the offspring's turn against their genitor, in a cultural revolution that capitalists neither comprehend nor combat...

...In France, common decision-making is further radicalized, at least in theory (for the time being), under the label autogestion, with actual management of companies by the workers, which of course may mean the unions...

...But as precisely the South American situation shows, the problem of capitalismis not the efficiency of private business, but its political-cultural Schumpeter's analysis, far as it goes, does not go far enough, for it is limited to a phenomenological study of social categories...

...received an ambiguous answer: after an analysis largely indebted to Schumpeter, the lecturer concluded that the attacks on capitalism have become more vehement since Schumpeter wrote his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy more than thirty years ago, so that today "we all must join forces" in order to prolong its life, even if we cannot make it immortal...

...to issue forth at all, to change and improve, it must become socialist first, and then when it catches up with the present state of Marxist societies, the two together will evolve toward "socialism with a human face...

...In the United States these medium enterprises (500-800 employees) are still the backbone of the economy, although those who own or run them have few illusions about the future catching up with them: bigness, racial difficulties, government intervention, inflation, increasingly problematic capitalization, and so on...

...In answering Schumpeter's question today, a generation and several revolutions later, we should widen this framework still further to include more political and cultural considerations...

...The Western intelligentsia, endlessly impressed by communist societies, yetdisturbed by their brutality, do not draw the obvious conclusion that Marxism secretes oppression as some glands secrete hormones...

...Consequently, they see the future not outside the utopian-communist society but transcending that society towards freedom, imagination, poetic values, re-shaped human relationships, and what have you...

...This is what is called the condition of political stability...

...The merit of Schumpeter's classic work is that in answering no to his question, "Will capitalism survive...

...and the misinformed masses who do not understand that in capitalism they are the king, the businessman their servant...

...Capitalism has changed enormously since Schumpeter's time, but the change is far more drastic when we look at the political-cultural milieu surrounding it...

...A similar situation exists in southeast Asia, mainly in Singapore and Taiwan...

...Mind you, a certain amount of market economy will remain foreseeably embedded in the structure of Western society...

...Today they constitute the core of the "silent majority": they do not vote for radical parties...

...Second, the spirit of competition in application to one's work is on the wane: after all, jobs can always be had, social mobility is regarded as a good thing in itself, recyclage or return to school for a year or two may open new careers...

...For example, Schumpeter- still labored under the impact that unemployed university graduates made on Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s...

...This built-in advantage and superiority of communist societies over Western societies—in the perspective of West-em intelligentsia—forces Western society into an imaginary bottleneck...

...This break-up of capitalism is not new...

...And the capitalist entrepreneur indiscriminately poured funds into organs of the hostile media, press, television, foundations, literary juries, and universities, either in the form of advertisement or as the cultural snob's tribute to culture...

...It promoted the universities in the hope that the professor would be an ally of the entrepreneur...

...The masses are no longer "misinformed," as they were perhaps in Schumpeter's time...

...the university's steadily increasing production of abstraction-loving intellectuals who remain jobless...

...Today, with the tremendous growth of the so-called tertiary sector of the economy, one finds jobless university graduates in the Third World only—in India, Africa, and South America...

...he did not base his thesis exclusively on economic, that is, rationalistic, analyses, but also took into account the political environment, which is never entirely rational...

...The result is a proletariat on the fringes of cities (in favellas, villas miserias, etc...

...Lately, France's "young executives" [jeunes patrons] have been suggesting the distribution of the totality of economic power and decision-making among all wage-earners of the enterprise...

...merely to generate more freedom and to loosen its structures a little on the way to the ideal society...

...The Austrian scholar saw three sources of danger to the capitalistic system: the businessman's concentration on efficiency...

...The workers' preference goes at times to center-Left, at other times to center-Right...

...An Ota Sik or a Francois Mitterrand include this much in their calculations...

...this is mirrored in public arguments for a negative income tax and a guaranteed annual wage, and solemn calls upon society to allow half the population to live in communes, work when they feel like it, and contribute to making life more "inventive," "imaginative," and what have you...

...As Marx jubilantly pointed out, capitalism destroyed the land-owning class and thus the rural base of nations...

...We ought not only to update but also to complete his analysis by showing that capitalism, at every stage of its development, has created or contributed to the expansion of institutions and social movements destined in the end to turn against capitalism...

...The fourth and most concentrated force transforming Western societies and threatening capitalism originates from leftist political criticism, which draws strength by building on the previously listed phenomena...