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Beyond Capitalism and Socialism in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Richard L. Sklar
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Extract

Ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism is more than 150 years old in the industrial countries of Europe and North America. Its gradual extension to other parts of the world during the twentieth century has entailed a basic alteration of the terms of debate. Within the leading industrial countries, partisans have debated both the economic merits of privately-owned productive capital, and the justice of profit-taking as a right of such ownership. In socialist thought, ‘social justice’ has meant that the whole product of labour belongs to those who actually produce it; hence its value should be realised by the producers themselves, either individually, or collectively through public institutions. On that basis, socialists have promised to construct an efficient, humane, and just social order. With equal conviction, proponents of capitalism hold that no alternative economic system produces as large a volume of goods, jobs, and other material benefits for as high a percentage of the population; that social inequality is inevitable, regardless of the property system in effect or the organisation of economic production; and that justice, in any case, is always individual, never ‘social’.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

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Page 14 note 3 For the idea of ‘developmental merits’ in relation to the choice between capitalism and socialism, see Schatz, Sayre P., ‘Postimperialism and the Great Competition’, in Becker, David G., Frieden, Jeff, Schatz, , and Sklar, Richard L., Postimperialism: international capitalism and development in the late twentieth century (Boulder and London, 1987), pp. 197–8.Google Scholar

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Page 18 note 1 Okun, Arthur M., Equality and Efficiency: the big tradeoff (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 117 and 120.Google Scholar

Page 18 note 2 I am indebted to Jeff Frieden for this formulation. ‘Equity’ – defined here to conote social and economic justice – is a more realistic goal/value for social reformers in the Third World than Okun's ‘equality’.

Page 18 note 3 Sayre P. Schatz, whose thesis – ‘the character of the contemporary era depends upon the superiority of either capitalism or socialism’ for ‘development tasks’ in the Third World – has stimulated the argument of this section, does not, by any means, construe the ‘great competition’ narrowly. Yet his thesis does diverge, avowedly so, from that of David G. Becker and the present writer, who reject the proposition that competition between capitalism and socialism is a fundamental issue for development in the Third World. See Schatz, ‘Postimperialism and the Great Competition’, pp. 193 and 197, and Becker, ‘Postimperialism: a first quarterly report’, in Becker, Frieden, Schatz, and Sklar, op. cit. pp. 215–17. See also the historical investigation of this issue in another context by Martin klar, op. cit., whose encouragement of the transcendence thesis in this section is indistinguishable from its origin.

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Page 19 note 2 Personal communication.

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