Three Essays on the Social
Question
Frank Thomas Smith
I. Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
Juancito is nine years old but looks six. He lives on
the streets of a Latin American city and lives by the laws of the streets. He
is already a criminal of sorts because begging is illegal and he is a beggar.
In a year or two he will graduate to petty thievery and then on to violent
crime. More than likely he will become a drug addict, thereby making his own
violent end at the hands of the police or disease inevitable. Members of the
middle and upper classes will shake their heads at the depravity of the poor or
in commiseration, consciously or not will wish him good riddance and carry on
as before. Juancito's name is legion; he can be found in virtually all regions
of the world. He is a victim of social injustice -- a euphemism for greed.
Society is at a point in history where it must
decide upon the path it wishes to follow. A crossroads is usually thought of as
an either-or decision. One road goes in one direction, the other in a different
direction. Modern history has, in fact, drawn two apparently different paths:
socialism or capitalism. One part of the world chose one of these paths and
came upon a dead-end, hurled itself forward and crashed into a wall, aptly symbolized
in Berlin, drenched in blood and misery. The other part kept to its chosen path
of Capitalism, only slightly modified, and fought to defeat or at least contain
the hegemonistic ambitions of the Soviets. The Communists lost and logic seems
to conclude that the other path was the correct one all along, and on which the
whole world must now tread. The danger of this conclusion lies in the
possibility that socialist criticism of Capitalism was and is basically correct
and that the insistence on following this road will only lead to a repetition
of the communistic - or some other ideological - experiment, with similar and
foreseeable disastrous consequences. The fact that Communism has been found, in
practice, to be worse than the evil it wished to supplant, does not necessarily
mean that its criticisms of capitalism are not, at least to a large extent,
correct and that the Juancitos of the world's suffering is indeed the result of
capitalist indifference.
Capitalist theory is based on the belief in the
goodness of greed. This is no secret. The father of capitalist theory, Adam
Smith, said so in so many words. If capitalist man is allowed to exert to the
full his egoistic yearnings to accumulate money and goods production will
increase, society will be enriched and all will benefit. Stated in this way,
the axiom sounds so simplistic and erroneous that one is astonished that
virtually the whole world passionately believes it and tries to practice it.
Another great Briton, Charles Darwin, had much
to do with humanity's capitulation to the theory of greed as goodness.
Originally Darwinism applied only to the biological world: the origin of
species and the survival of the fittest. However, what he observed in the plant
and animal kingdoms was soon carried over, by others, into the human social
realm and became "Social Darwinism". Both Smith and Darwin were
religious men and believed that the hand of God was behind the observable
phenomena in nature and in society. Adam Smith literally described the "invisible
hand" guiding free market activities, a concept which was necessary to
soothe his nineteenth century conscience. It was also necessary to cushion the
jolt to common sense, for how else is it possible to accept the premise that
such a complex activity as the economic one can simply run by itself like a
perpetual motion timepiece when given the label "free market". The
invisible hand image has been dropped in modern economic thinking, but the
concept is the same when vague "market forces" are alluded to.
Karl Marx and his followers agreed that man is
egoistic (or anti-social, as it were), but believed that this was the result of
economic forces preying upon him from without. Given the opportunities inherent
in the "free" capitalist system, one class - the propertied - would
inevitably exploit the non-owners, the workers. Although production would
indeed increase, its fruits would not accrue to all, but only to the owners. In
fact, the workers would become even poorer than they already were at the time
he wrote - which was poor indeed - until their condition became so intolerable
that they would revolt, in a necessarily bloody fashion, and take over society
in the name of the proletariat. But here Marx joins Smith and Darwin as a
mystic: the dictatorship of the proletariat (the state) will cure humanity of
its egotism and will itself eventually wither away, urged on, apparently, by
some other-worldly, invisible force. Reality has proved this to be nonsense.
Marx also predicted that economic power would be concentrated in few hands as
the stronger capitalists absorbed the weaker ones. When one considers that
70-80% of world industrial output is accomplished by a dozen TNCs
(transnational companies) it is hardly possible to assert that the prediction
is far off the mark.
Essentially, both points of view are right and
wrong at the same time, as all ideologies tend to be. Most will agree that man
is egoistic, but when this is carried over into social science and called
anti-social, the cries of outrage are immediately heard. "Man is a social
animal, needs love and warmth, etc". I am inclined to agree with Smith in
respect to the origin of this trait: that it is innate and not wholly negative.
Individual human
behavior is purely social only when the one strives exclusively for the well
being of the other. This,
however, is virtually impossible. Even Mother Teresa had to eat, and every time
she did so she consumed what another could not. This is of course an extreme
example, but deliberately so. What I wish to point out is that the satisfaction
of one's own needs deprives another, if only to a minuscule extent, of that
satisfaction. Yet we are obliged by the nature of things to provide for our own
needs and for those of our children or we and they will no longer exist. In doing
so we must ignore the needs of others, of those who are hungry. No moral
criticism is implied; no moral question is involved because the alternative is
meaningless suicide. It is only when the satisfaction of one's own needs
becomes the satisfaction of one's own desires does this behavior become
effectively anti-social, for it is then often necessary to exploit others in
order to satisfy superfluous desires.
Another type of commonly observed behavior can
be called asocial. This is usually deemed to be negative, and is indeed so when
someone just doesn't give a damn and refuses to get involved. However, the
desire to improve oneself through study or the need to get away for the weekend
now and then, or even meditation, are essentially asocial behavior because they
are done alone. They don't do any harm, nor do they help anyone except oneself.
To recapitulate, the three forces are:
* Social - acting for the benefit of others.
Christ's message, Love thy neighbor as thyself, loses its meaning if it is
understood to mean a passive feeling towards others, even if that feeling is
called love and assuming that the lover knows what love is. Love must rather be
demonstrated through acts, or it is abstract.
* Asocial - acting for self-benefit, without
affecting others.
* Anti-social - consciously or unconsciously
acting against the interests of others. The place where anti-social activity is
most likely to have grave negative effects is in the economic sphere, for it is
here that exploitation of the many by the few in fact takes place and is the
main cause of social unrest.
The central question is whether the egoistic
forces in society can be harnessed and their energy redirected towards social
instead of anti-social actions. If it is possible to demonstrate this, it would
indicate that the choices available are not only Capitalism or Socialism, but
that another alternative may exist. If such a third way exists it must be found
and acted upon.
This third way has, in fact, been described by
Rudolf Steiner in his book �Basic Issues of the Social Question�1
(Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage � 1919), in which he urges a
"threefold" or tripartite social structure. There is no question that
the book is dated. The essential concept is, however, valid.
1. May be obtained free of charge at the SCR: Ebook Library
Essay II: Is Slavery Really Dead?