POLITICAL NOTES
481
personality of the worker without distinguishing between labor and
leisure.") Even granting this definition, it would seem that "calculability"
and "predictability" are not very opposite terms for working-class life
under Hitler, and that the German worker has his life pretty well organ–
ized for him
outside
the factory, in fact that the tendency of the Nazi
(as of the Soviet) system is precisely to obliterate the distinction between
work and leisure. Propaganda speeches, parades, mass rallies, Strength
Through Joy activities, Winter-Aid collections-these bombard him in
his off-duty hours; nor does he escape a factory-like discipline when he
quits work for his "private" life. But in any case, Neumann's definition
seems much too narrow. Labor in Germany is simply forced labor, the
wages, hours and working conditions of which are determined by the
State and not by any employer-employee relationship. That labor market
which Marx saw as the heart of capitalist labor relations has not existed
since 1936, and the worker is as firmly attached to his job as the feudal
serf was to his lord's estate.* Indeed, Neumann himself, after describing
the various State controls over labor, concludes, most confusingly: "We
may thus say, briefly, that the worker does not enjoy any freedom."
Why Mills and Stanwell are so triumphant on the basis of these two
books I cannot understand. Miss Sweezy's book has no theoretical pre–
tensions, and Dr. Neumann's is confused and contradictory on the theoreti–
cal level. Nor do the reviewers shed much light, for all their polemical
heat. Stanwell thinks that to say the State in Germany can solve its
capitalist
economic problems quite easily, is to say that "economic laws
have been suspended by political edict"-but obviously bureaucratic col–
lectivism has its own economic laws and contradictions which do not
yield so easily to political treatment. Mills is under the impression that
the proponents of the non-capitalist theory are not aware that free com–
petition has been displaced by monopoly; this is not true, as he can find
out by reading pp. 208-212 of my article
in
P.
R.
for May-June, 1941.
Nor do they illuminate the basic question: what is capitalism?
Stanwell offers no definition at all. Mills sees "private property in the
means of production" as the "major institution" of capitalism. But
private property was also the basis of the Roman slave economy, and so
cannot be the distinguishing mark of the capitalist system. I should say
the best brief definition occurs on p. 385 of the last volume of Marx's
Capital:
"The capitalist mode of production is conditioned on production
for exchange, commerce on a large scale." I also follow Marx in his
view that capitalism is distinguished from all other forms of class societies
• Cf. L. Hamburl!'er's excellent pamphlet,
How Nazi Gemuzny Has Mobilized and
Controlled Labor
(Brookings Institution, 1940). "The
colonus
of the later Roman
empire," writes Hamburger, "the
serf
of the Middle Ages, was considered part of
the estate of his squire or lord. He was attached to, fixed on, the estate; he had no
ri~~:ht
to move away. He was, in the language of feudal law,
glebae adscriptus.
Similarly the German worker was now becoming attached to, fixed on, his job–
!llebae adseriptus,
if
it happened to be an agricultural one, or
factoriae adscriptus
(if one may say so) if it happened to be an industrial one."
