The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism PDF
Preview The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
NEW STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY This series, prepared under the auspices of the British Sociological Association, has now been revised to present larger, more substantial works. The overall purpose of the series remains the same: to provide scholarly yet argumentative treatments of key problems in sociology. The books are neither textbooks nor research monographs. Rather they present an original viewpoint upon subjects where an orthodoxy does not exist, whether because of undue neglect or because recent research has overturned previous orthodoxies. The series is designed to provide empirically informed theory about society, relating a diversity of empirical areas to central problems of sociological theory. MICHAEL MANN NEW STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY Published in conjunction with the British Sociological Association Editor: Michael Mann Published State, Bureaucracy and Civil Society Victor M. Perez-Diaz The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism John D. Stephens Forthcoming illness and Sociology Uta Gerhardt The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism John D. Stephens M ©John D. Stephens 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published 1979 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore and Tokyo Filmset by Vantage Photosetting Co. Ltd., Southampton and London British Library Cataloguing In PubUcation Data Stephens, John D The transition from capitalism to socialism. (New studies in sociology). 1. Communism 2. Socialism 3. Capitalism I. Title II. Series 335 HX56 ISBN 978-0-333-23407-5 ISBN 978-1-349-16171-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16171-3 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement. The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Contents Preface viii 1 Marx's Theory of the Transition from Capitalism to SodaHsm 1 Domination and distribution in the capitalist mode of production 3 The transition to socialism 5 Concentration and centralisation of capital 8 Polarisation of classes 9 Labour organisation 9 Contradictions of capitalism 11 Marx on revolution and reform 11 2 Contemporary Capitalism and the Transition to SodaHsm 15 The class structure of capitalism: control relations 16 The class structure of capitalism: consumption relations 26 The class structure of capitalism: class formation 33 The transition to socialism: underlying causes 38 Concentration and centralisation 39 Organisation and class consciousness 40 The contradictions of capitalism 46 The role of the state 47 The transition to socialism: processes 48 Changes in the distribution of productive capacities 48 vi Contents Industrial unionisation 49 Socialisation of income and control rights 51 The objective interests of different classes in capitalism 53 3 Revoludon and Reform 56 The early debate 56 The contemporary controversy 69 4 Labour Organisadon and the WeHare State: a Cross-nadonal Analysis 89 Sample and measurement 89 Results 98 The welfare state 99 Income distribution 105 The welfare state and equalisation 106 Social mobility 108 Labour organisation 109 The international and historical context 112 The development of the labour movement 112 Patterns of welfare state development 117 5 Labour Organisadon and the WeHare State: a Comparadve Historical Perspecdve 129 Sweden 129 Britain 140 The United States 149 France 156 The welfare state and redistribution 163 6 Beyond the WeHare State: the Swedish Case 177 The pension struggle 177 Industrial democracy 182 Leadership ideology: 1972 186 Employee investment funds 188 Contents vii 7 Condusion 195 List of Abbreviations 211 Notes 213 Bibliography 221 Index 227 Preface This is a short book with a long personal history. The central theoretical idea was developed in a seminar I took with R. Stephen Warner in 1971, my first year of graduate work at Yale, and tested in a paper I wrote for a statistics course the same semester. The empirical research on the ideology of Swedish Social Democratic leaders cited in Chapter 6 of this book was carried out in the summer of 1972 as part of a pre-dissertation research project in the Comparative Sociology Program at Yale which was directed by Wendell Bell and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The rest of the material on Sweden as well as most of the theoretical ideas on the transition to socialism contained herein were developed in my dissertation, the research for which was funded by the Foreign Area Program of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation. I would like to thank all those who helped me on that project for their indirect contribution to this book. Juan Linz, Hans Zetterberg, John Low-Beer, Sten Johansson all contributed comments on the final draft of the dissertation which proved useful in writing this manuscript, as did comments by Erik Olin Wright on a revised version of the theoretical chapter of the dissertation. I am deeply indebted to Michael Mann for his encour agement to turn away from the Swedish focus of the dissertation and write a more general comparative book. His comments on the entirety of this manuscript were extremely valuable. I am also very grateful to Andrew Martin, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, G0sta Esping-Andersen, John Low-Beer and Walter Korpi for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this book. No doubt many of these people will disagree with some of the ideas contained in it and I take full responsibility for the opinions and conclusions expressed in the following pages. 1 Marx's Theory of the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism Karl Marx's analysis of the internal dynamics of capitalist society led him to conclude that this order would be replaced by socialism. Since Marx laid down his pen, academics and political activists alike have hotly debated the accuracy of his predictions and the adequacy of his theory. Though this discussion is by now almost one hundred years old, a few basic lines of argument have been repeatedly advanced by the various antagonists in the debate. Conservatives and liberals have generally argued that various structural develop ments in capitalist society - such as the growth of the middle class, increasing affluence and the separation of ownership and control have made Marx's theory, and socialism, irrelevant. Moderates in the right wing of labour and social democratic movements have contended that Marx erred in underestimating the flexibility of capitalism and the independence of the state in capitalist society. In their view, through the extension of universal suffrage and the expansion of the welfare state, the working class in the West has been politically and economically integrated to play a major role in capitalist society. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, have con tended that the changes in capitalist society in the past hundred years have been merely cosmetic. The basic exploitative structure of advanced capitalist society is unaffected by the welfare state or affluence. They argue that Marx was largely correct and that his predictions await realisation. Though other theories of the structure of advanced societies have been proposed, virtually all of them share one of two presumptions with the three broad positions mentioned here. Either they claim that capitalism has changed little or they claim that it has changed in a direction entirely unantici pated by Marx owing to the fundamental flaws in his system. In this book we will advance a distinctly different position from those mentioned. We will argue that capitalist society has been
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