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-slavery, feudalism, and, I should now add, the bureaucratic collectivisms
of Russia and Germany----JJy the existence of "free" labor, and the produc–
tion of commodities, those "queer things" compounded of use-value and
exchange-value. (A good non-Marxist definition of capitalism is Charles
A. Beard's: "a system of production, involving social relationships, in
which the primary object is the gain of profit through exchange.") Pro–
duction for the market, in a word, seems generally agreed upon as the
distinguishing characteristic of capitalism. Perhaps Mills or Stanwell
can suggest a better definition.
It is true that at present England and America do not conform to this
definition of capitalism (though the distance between them and Germany
is still great). The State now controls, formally at least, wages, prices,
profits, working conditions; the needs of war and not the demands of
the market primarily determine production. The real question, however,
is whether the old social classes and institution.s which are based on the
capitalist market are surviving intact enough to push the economy back
on the capitalist track after the war. In both England and America, as
I have noted above, conservative governments are in power which base
themselves primarily on the trade unions (job market) and big business
(commodity market), and which preserve as much as possible the old
social structure. In Germany, however, the Nazis have smashed the old
bourgeois institutions and have atomized the old social classes. The very
completeness of the victory German big business scored over the rest of
society when the Nazis took power has led, historically, to its defeat
by the Frankenstein monster it called to its aid. By 1936 German big
business stood triumphant over the wreckage of the middle class and the
proletariat, and yet in the .fall of that year it was itself pushed aside by
Goering and the Nazi-Army creators of the Second Four Rear Plan.
The capitalist market survived through the period of monopoly
capitalism because simultaneously with the rise of monopolies there rose
also reformist trade· unions and a growing middle class as a counter–
balance. This balance has been so completely destroyed in Germany
that what-as yet-in this country is simply a temporary "war economy,"
in Germany is a permanent change so long as the Nazis retain power.
