78
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
world avoids thermonuclear war, the processes of modernization,
contrary to Marxist prophecy, will vindicate the mixed society and
render Communism obsolete.
The Marxist contention has been (a) that capitalism will be an
inevitable casualty of the modernization process, and (b) that Com–
munism will be its inevitable fulfillment. In these terms Communism
has claimed the certification of history. But history quite clearly
refutes the Communist case.
It
shows (a) that the mixed society, as
it modernizes itself, can overcome the internal contradictions which
in Marx's view doomed it to destruction; and (b ) that Communism
is historically relevant to the preliminary rather than to the concluding
stages of the modernization process.
Marx rested his case for the inevitable Communist triumph on
the theory that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.
He argued that the capitalist economy generated inexorable inner
tendencies-'contradictions'- which would infallibly bring about its
downfall. One inexorable tendency was the increasing wealth of the
rich and the increasing poverty of the poor. Another was the in–
creasing frequency and magnitude of economic crisis. Together
these tendencies would carry society to a point of revolutionary
'ripeness' when the proletariat would rise in its wrath, overthrow the
possessing classes and install a classless society. Marx saw no way
of arresting this process, because the capitalist state could never be
anything but the 'executive committee' of the capitalist class.
This was Marx's fatal error. The capitalist state in developed
societies, far from being the helpless instrument of the possessing
class, has been the means by which other classes of society have
redressed the balance of social power against those whom Hamilton
called the 'rich and well-born.' This has been true in the United
States, for example, since the age of Jackson. The liberal democratic
state has accomplished two things in particular. It has brought about
a redistribution of wealth which has defeated Marx's prediction of
progressive immiseration; and it has brought about an economic
stabilization which has defeated Marx's prediction of ever-intensifying
economic crisis. What the democratic parties of the developed nations
have done, in short, has been to use the state to force capitalism
to do what both the classical capitalists and the Marxists had said
was impossible: to control the business cycle and to reapportion in-
