BOOKS
625
Sweden, or whatever other country has been shaped by long rule by
a socialist or social democratic party, is overwhelmingly - compared
with any communist country-a market economy: that is, domi–
nated by investment and production for the market at home, and
abroad, by private firms in competition with others at home and
abroad. One can understand the squirming of a long-time socialist
at the cool appropriation of the term "capitalism" for a country in
which sixty percent of Gross National Product is collected in taxes
for government purposes and social redistribution, and the appro–
priation of the term "socialist" for those countries in which decisions
on investment and production are made by the state, and one may
well charge that these terms are used for polemical purposes, less to
analyze the consequences that flow from market and command
economies, than, for example, to undermine public schemes of in–
come redistribution for purposes of greater equality. But while the
argument can be made, the fact is that the two labels are used in the
book without any such visible intention: there is little on social policy
generally in the book, and Berger is skeptical of the Hayekian view
that increased proportions of government spending, at least to the
levels we have seen in market economies to date, put a society on the
road to socialism - in his terms, that is, to becoming a command
economy.
If
one substitutes "market economy" and "command
economy" wherever Berger uses "capitalism" and "socialism," his
argument is unchanged. Berger can be challenged over his ap–
propriation of the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" for the two
forms. His best defense is that these are the terms Marx used, and he
meant by them more or less what Berger means.
Of course there are no pure market economies, no pure com–
mand economies. The market is heavily regulated and affected by
political decisions even in the countries where markets are freest,
and the market may be seen to operate, to some extent, even in
Soviet Russia. We must deal with societies as they exist. The dif–
ferences among them however are still so substantial that we have no
difficulty in drawing a line through the advanced industrial societies,
dividing capitalist from socialist. (What to do about developing
societies may be more complicated.) What Berger resolutely refuses
to do is attach to the key definitional difference any
other
element of
social life: For the problem is, just what
does
this difference imply for
society, politics, culture? We can make an
argument-this
is the argu–
ment so regularly made in the 1930s in books on Soviet Russia - that
socialism leads to more material goods and prosperity, or that it is
