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Capitalism and Socialism: How Can they be Compared?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Peter Rutland
Peter Rutland
Affiliation:
Political Science, Wesleyan University
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Extract

How is one to set about the task of comparing capitalism and socialism in a systematic fashion? The contest between capitalism and socialism has many facets. It is both an intellectual debate about the relative merits of models of hypothetical social systems and a real and substantive historical struggle between two groups of states seen as representing capitalism and socialism. Perhaps the intellectual challenge to capitalism thrown down by Marxist thinkers and the “cold war” contest between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. are such diverse phenomena that it is pointless and even misleading to try to treat them as part of a single problem. However, I believe that the dieoretical and historical aspects of the capitalism/socialism issue are directly related. I would argue that a full understanding of, say, the cold war is not possible without understanding the socialist critique of capitalism – and that a purely abstract comparison of capitalist and socialist models would fail to do justice to the historical and empirical essence of these two grand conceptual schemas.

In Section I, I expand upon these arguments, seeking to convince Utopian socialists that they should not continue to rely upon invocations of a hypothetical future, but must come up with some empirical examples of what socialism is and how it works. After all, it is more than a hundred years since Marx and Engels railed against Utopian socialists in favor of socialist arguments based on empirical reality. This is not to say that Marx and Engels were crude empiricists, accepting “facts” at face value.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1988 , pp. 197 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1998

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References

* I would like to thank my former colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, the participants in the Key Biscayne, Florida conference on “Capitalism and Socialism,” November 1987, and in particular Ellen Frankel Paul, for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

1 A recent interesting collection on the debate broadly understood is Machan, T.R., ed., The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1986).Google Scholar

2 One of the few works coming out of the Left over the past 15 years which directly addresses the question of Soviet socialism adopts such an approach, treating the U.S.S.R. as indistinguishable from “other” capitalist nations is; Buick, A. and Crump, J., State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management (London: St. Martins, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 On this, see Evans, A., “The Decline of Developed Socialism?,” Soviet Studies, vol. 38, no. 1 (January 1986), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sochor, L., The Ideology of Real Socialism (Munich: Research Project on the Crisis in Soviet-Type Systems, 1984).Google Scholar

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21 As in, for example, George, V. and Manning, N., Socialism, Social Welfare and the Soviet Union (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar

22 Glasnost has partially opened the door to public discussion of homelessness – in Czechoslovakia, at least. For example, one news magazine carried a story on a couple with two children who were living in a van in a Prague parking lot; Vondracek, D., “Ale maji se radi,” Mlady svet, no. 2, 1988, p. 15.Google Scholar

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29 Hollander, P., Soviet and American Society: A Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

30 See, for example, G.W., Lapidus, ed., Women, Work and Family in the Soviet Union (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1981).Google Scholar

31 To my knowledge, no Soviet writers have directly addressed the question of how their society would measure up against the Rawlsian criteria of social justice. A Soviet philosopher, Mal'tsev, G.V., gave an accurate summary of Rawls's ideas in the book Problemy gosudarstva i prava v sovremennoi ideologicheskoi bor'be (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literature, 1983), p. 145.Google Scholar He is surprisingly uncritical of the content of Rawls's ideas (surprising because the book's title refers to the “ideological struggle” with the West), and merely reproaches Rawls for a lack of realism and a naive faith in the independence of the law.

32 For a summary view of the state of Soviet philosophy, see Scanlan, J.P., Marxism in the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

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34 Macfarlane, A., The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).Google Scholar

35 Of course, phenomena such as geographic mobility or living with parents do not reflect the free choices of individuals within the U.S.S.R.: they are largely a product of state policies, the housing shortage, and other forces beyond the power of the individual citizen. However, they nevertheless produce a more collectivist culture, even if they are not caused by such a culture.

36 This is the thrust of the widely discussed work by Bellah, R.et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).Google Scholar

37 Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar See also Howard, R.E. and Donnelly, J., “Human Dignity, Human Rights and Political Regimes,” American Political Science Review, vol. 80, no. 3 (September 1986), p. 801CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lane, D., “Human Rights Under State Socialism,” Political Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (September 1984), p. 349CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Kadarsky, A., Human Rights in American and Russian Political Thought (New York: University Press of America, 1982).Google Scholar

38 B. Silver, “Political Beliefs.”

39 It is clearly a standard Soviet tactic to respond to Western criticism by turning the Western arguments around against the West itself. For example, one Soviet author keen to disprove the Totalitarian model did so by, among other arguments, accusing bourgeois society itself of developing a “totalitarian character”; Shikin, Yu.M., Sotsial'noe edinstvo i totalitamoe obshchestvo (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1982), p. 33.Google Scholar

40 Marrus, M.R., The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

41 see Dowry, A., Closed Borders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, for a survey of the migration issue.