PARTISAN REVIEW
categories-the instruments of production belonged to the Commu–
nist Party hierarchy, giving it all the traditional privileges of owner–
ship except the right to buy and sell and the right of testamentary dis–
position. Under such a setup, workers can be and have been exploited
more intensively, i.e., more surplus value sweated out of them, than
under other forms of legal ownership since the early days of the
Industrial Revolution.
Despite the semantic outrage of referring to the Soviet Union
or any other Communist economy as a "workers' state" and to the
productive plant as "state property," the facts were really not in
dispute. When Lenin brutally proclaimed to the Eleventh Congress
of the Russian Communist Party, in 1922, "We are the state," he
might as well have said: "Weare the owners of the economy." Inso–
far as Marxism is a critique of the economies of exploitation, it can
be used more legitimately and with greater devastation in present–
day Communist countries than in most of the present-day democratic
capitalistic countries of the West.
In general, modern economic developments have made the con–
trast between capitalism and socialism, as economic systems, very
difficult to draw in practice. To the extent to which it
is
an issue,
the question reduces itself to
more
or
less,
not to either/or. The ever–
increasing intervention of the welfare states of the West in economic
affairs, the planning in many sectors of the economy, progressive
taxation which reaches beyond 90 per cent at certain levels in the
U.S., the alienation of ownership from management in large industry
described in the epoch-making study of Berle and Means, the growth
and power of free trade unionism, the establishment of minimum
wages and multiple forms of social insurance, the movement toward
co-determination in industry and a guaranteed annual wage-all
these indicate the degree to which the picture of classical capitalism
as drawn by Marx has been altered. On the other hand, in the so–
called socialist economies we find large deviations from classic so–
cialist ideas-enormous differences in income, reliance upon strategic
centers for private enterprise not only in agriculture but in industry,
too (China), the influence of the international markets and some–
times the domestic market on prices, and a tendency toward economic
decentralization.
It is obvious when we look at
th~
economies which are called
socialist in countries like the U.S.S.R., China, Yugoslavia, Czecho-
