THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION
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longer is, from a scientific point of view, hardly worth the bother
of refuting. Capitalism, considered on a world scale, is already
half gone, and completing its disappearance before our eyes. In
Russia, with a sixth of the earth's land surface and about a twelfth
of its population, nearly everyone grants that capitalism is already
pretty well eliminated. And in all other nations, even those which
we can still justifiably call capitalist, new institutional structures
are well on their way toward the replacement of the institutions of
capitalism. Mass unemployment, an impasse in agriculture, idle
capital funds, the inability to exploit subject territories profitably,
the inability to use the productive plant and new inventions and
technological improvements, the disorganization of the financial
system, the loss of confidence by the capitalists themselves, and the
loss of mass appeal by the capitalist ideologies, all signalize the
end of the capitalist organization of society in a manner similar to
that in which analogous symptoms have signalized the end of other
social orders in other times.
The theory that socialism is going to replace capitalism, in
spite of its being widely believed, has seldom had much evidence
presented in its favor. Belief in the theory has been based ordi–
narily on reasoning that could be put as the following syllogism:
Capitalism is going to end soon (which we may grant); capitalism
and socialism are "the sole alternatives"; therefore socialism is
going to come. Formally, this syllogism is valid. The trouble with
it is the second premise, which is once more our assumption.
Rejecting the assumption, as assumption, the syllogism has no
relevance to the actual problem: whether, on the evidence, it is
probable that socialism is coming.
Most of those who believe that socialism is coming, including
most Marxists with the exception, perhaps, of Marx, have tended
to accept another assumption, with the help of which their case has
been given a coating of strength. This is the assumption that the
elimination of private property rights in the instruments of pro–
duction is a guarantee, a sufficient condition, of socialism. Since it
is manifest that private property rights in the instruments of
production are being rapidly eliminated, and since there is no
reason to expect any reversal of this world trend, these facts,
together with the new assumption, are enough to prove that social·
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