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class, the increasing polarization of society into two active pro–
ponents, bourgeoisie and working class, the increasing intensity of
the economic crises of capitalism, and others.
The rather classic arguments against Marxism as science play
little role in Peter Berger's book. Some Marxist predictions already
seemed falsified by the turn of the century (as Eduard Bernstein
argued), just about all by the 1950s. Berger is not much concerned
about the theory of Marxism or socialism - or for that matter the
theory of capitalism. He is concerned here rather with living, actual,
present capitalist and socialist societies . This strategy is indeed
refreshing.
It
makes irrelevant most current Marxist and neo–
Marxist writing, which rarely analyzes
real
socialist societies - Soviet
Russia, the countries of Eastern Europe, China - and busies itself
rather with the critique of capitalist societies, set against some ideal
standard called socialist, but of which as yet no examples exist on the
earth . Berger's strategy of eschewing a competition between ideal,
theoretical models of capitalism and socialism, in favor of the empir–
ical analysis of actual societies, requires some test we use to decide
which are capitalist and which socialist.
It
would scarcely do to
accept self-advertisement - for then we have to consider whether
Sweden, with its economy almost entirely in private hands, but its
government in the hands of Social Democrats for most of the last
fifty years, is "socialist," or whether the host of African states which
call themselves so are really "socialist."
An empirical test is then necessary, and one which dot;s not do
violence to what we ordinarily conceive of as the capitalist world and
the socialist world. For Berger, capitalism is "production for a
market by enterprising individuals or combines with the purpose of
making a profit." This makes sense, and, as he writes, this is exactly
what Marx was talking about. Its alternative is production orga–
nized by the state: "Under modern conditions (that is, conditions
brought about by industrial technology - conditions that of course
include the astronomically large populations made possible by the
technological transformation) ... the basic option is whether
economic processes are to be governed by market mechanisms or by
mechanisms of political allocation.
In
social science parlance, this is
the option between market economies and command economies."
There will undoubtedly be discomfort, perhaps outrage, in the
fact that Berger uses the term "socialist" for what we ordinarily call
"communist" societies, but his definition makes clear that we are
talking about market economies and command economies, and that
