Freedom and Economics

The world has always been divided into haves and have-nots, but the particular form which that division takes today is, speaking historically, a relatively recent development. Beginning with the great geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mercantile empires of Western Europe reached out to the four corners of the globe. They conquered whole continents, massacred or enslaved the inhabitants, and established a global system of exploitation dividing the world into a few developing metropolises and many underdeveloping colonies and semicolonies. (Within both metropolises and colonies, the basic development/underdevelopment pattern repeats itself, a fact of crucial importance to an understanding of the dynamics of the system.) Throughout the whole period, the most powerful metropolises have fought each other for the position of top dog. At first, the struggle was among the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English; then between the English and the French; and during the last century the chief contenders have been the English, the French, the Germans, the Americans, and the Japanese. From the two World Wars generated by these intense imperialist rivalries, the United States finally emerged on top of the heap.

Meanwhile, the colonial victims of this system never ceased struggling against the oppression, the exploitation, the increasing poverty and misery that it visits upon them. For a long time, these struggles were unsuccessful: the superior wealth and arms of the imperialists enabled them to practice successfully a policy of divide-and-rule, backed up by the liberal use of naked force. But when the masters fell out, the hour of opportunity for the slaves arrived. Following the First World War, Russia, oppressed and exploited by both foreign imperialists and a rapacious native oligarchy, escaped from the system and formed the nucleus of an altogether different socioeconomic order. Since the Second World War, a dozen additional countries have taken the same road, with the result that this new socioeconomic order is now an international system in its own right, developing rapidly despite all obstacles and handicaps and without the historic curse of exploiting classes and nations. Under these circumstances, the desire to escape from the old order, and the consciousness of the possibility of doing so, are naturally growing among the victimized groups and countries still remaining in the old order. The goals of release from oppression and exploitation, of being able to stand up as a human being, of working for oneself rather than for others—these are now widely seen to be realistically within reach. Around them a historic tidal wave of unprecedented dimensions and power is steadily building up.

We can now understand why the U.S. ship of state is headed for disaster. As the leading nation of the old order and its chief economic beneficiary, the United States has set itself the task of holding back this wave, of maintaining in existence the system that has by now become thoroughly abhorrent to the vast majority of humankind.

It cannot be done. If the attempt is persisted in, there are only two possible outcomes: either the world will be blown up in a nuclear holocaust, or the United States will be literally ground down into total exhaustion in a worldwide revolutionary war. This has already begun, most spectacularly in Indo-China but also in many other places around the globe; it will certainly spread in the months and years ahead, even inside the United States itself, which, by a historic irony, has a large colonized population of color within its own borders.

Is there no alternative?

Yes. The United States could also take the road of escape from the old order of exploitation and privilege and join the rest of the world in building the new international system based on socialized property, economic planning, and production for use. In that way we would get out of the deadly trap in which we are now caught and at the same time gain the freedom to determine our own fate. This is necessarily a collective freedom, and I do not see how anyone with a sense of history can avoid the conclusion that it is by far the most important freedom the American people can seek today.

But that would not be the only benefit to be derived from abandoning the old order. For, while it has been able to provide most Americans with a relatively high material standard of living, it has created in the United States a society that most thoughtful people recognize as being full of irrationalities and evils. At a time when it would be technologically feasible to produce all the country needs, plus a vast amount to assist others to break out of the vicious circle of poverty and low productivity, our economy limps along with at least 10 percent of its labor force and a much higher percentage of its productive equipment unemployed. While many people wallow in senseless luxury, some two-fifths of the population live in a state of poverty that is more galling and humiliating because it is unnecessary. Even such modest “successes” as the U.S. economy has scored in the last twenty-five years have been largely caused by huge government outlays on wars and preparation for wars—the only purpose of which is now to defend a system which, as we argued above, the people of the world are in the process of repudiating. And the remaining credit for these “successes” must go to the creation—directly and indirectly by the huge corporations that control the economy—of a gigantic apparatus of waste that at once deforms and debases our values and tastes and forces a growing proportion of the labor force to work at jobs that lack all honor, dignity, and usefulness. The system as it has developed in the United States, to quote the eloquent indictment of Paul Goodman:

is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worth-while goals that could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man’s [real] work. It is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity. It corrupts ingenuous patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation. It has no Honor. It has no Community.¹

It seems to me that it makes little sense to talk about freedom in such a system. Everyone living in it is in the grip of the dark irrational forces that have brought us to the present lamentable state, and freedom in any but the most trivial meaning of the world can result only from a truly radical change that will make possible, in Norbert Wiener’s phrase, “the human use of human beings.”² Reason, which in a system of every man for himself is forced to serve the purposes of unreason, must become the guide in shaping a society in which people can lead reasonable lives. And that will be possible only when the conflicting sovereignties of private property—acting in response to what Karl Marx called “the most violent, mean, and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest”—have been abolished and replaced by collective ownership and planning for the common good.

As to freedom in a collectivist society, the most important thing to be said is already implicit in the case against a private-ownership society. Freed of the irrationalities bred by private ownership of the means of production, society should be able to tackle its real problems: automation and unemployment, poverty and slums, the elimination of salesmanship and waste, education and the use of leisure, and many more.

This is of course not meant to imply that there are no problems of freedom in a socialist society. They are of two kinds: those connected with the transition, and those inherent in the social organization itself.

There is not too much that can be said in general about the problems of freedom that arise out of the transition to a collectivist society. The history of revolutions teaches us that radical change is always resisted and that the resistance evokes repression, and no doubt this will continue to be true in the future. But how much resistance and how much (and what kinds of) repression vary widely according to the specific circumstances of time and place, and it does not seem that there is much to be gained from speculating about what a hypothetical transition in the United States might involve in these respects.

As to the problems of freedom inherent in a collectivist economy, they appear to me to be mostly of a familiar type. How much freedom of consumer’s choice? How much freedom to choose a career? How much freedom to change jobs? How much freedom on the job? In general, we should try to study and answer these questions taking account of both the actual experiences of Soviet and other collectivist societies and of possibilities that may become realizable as the result of future economic development. And we are of course interested in formulating the answers, as far as possible, in such a way as to facilitate comparisons with private-ownership societies. Here I shall confine myself to a few suggestions under each heading.

Consumer’s Choice. I assume that distribution of most individually consumed goods will continue for the foreseeable future to be effected by the spending of money incomes on goods with fixed prices. Within the restraints imposed by the income and price structures, there is no reason why complete freedom of consumer’s choice should not prevail. This is the situation that exists in both the Soviet Union and the United States at the present time. The big difference between the two situations is usually held to exist at the level of the decisions that determine the actual variety of goods offered to consumers. It is said that in the United States these decisions by producers are mere reflections of the preferences of the consumers (the doctrine of consumer’s sovereignty), while in the Soviet Union they reflect the preferences of the planners. There is, of course, much to be said about both of these contentions, as well as about novel arrangements which might be tried in the future in a collectivist society. These will therefore presumably be fruitful topics for discussion and exchange of views.

Choice of a Career. In an unplanned private-ownership economy, real freedom to choose a career is pretty much limited to those with money or exceptional ability, and the unpredictability of the future may make even those choices irrational. A collectivist economy, by making superior educational opportunities available to all, should be able to enlarge the proportion of young people having a real choice of careers; while the development of long-range planning, to the extent that it really becomes operational, should go some way toward reducing the element of chance in any career choice.

Freedom to Change Jobs. One of the biggest bogeys of the anticollectivist has always been the allegation that the socialization of the means of production will reduce the number of employers to one and hence will in effect make every worker the slave of the state. This is nothing but verbal juggling. There are, in fact, thousands of employing units in a collectivist society and no reason in general why they should coordinate their policies about hiring particular workers. One of the big unsolved problems in the Soviet economy is the high rate of labor turnover, which would seem to indicate that despite all efforts to the contrary Soviet workers retain a high degree of freedom to change jobs. (We do not speak here of the political blacklisting of “subversives,” a phenomenon that exists in both systems but which is certainly not necessarily inherent in either.)

Freedom on the Job. This is a large and important topic about which I can claim only limited knowledge. It appears that in the United States during the heyday of the CIO in the later 1930s and to a large extent during the war as well the workers in basic industry succeeded in winning a very significant degree of freedom on the job. Subsequently, this has been gravely reduced as a result of the decline in power of the unions and their bureaucratization. I do not know what the trends have been in the Soviet Union. For the future, I will only say that it seems to me that the whole purpose and ethos of collectivism is such that this problem is sure to loom larger and larger as the material possibilities of solving it in different ways increase. But evidently it is closely related to automation, education, the uses of leisure, etc., as well as the problems of bureaucracy, democracy, and other forms of relation between leaders and rank and file.

I would like to see the United States wake up and lead the procession [to a world of collective freedom] rather than follow along in an increasingly isolated and discredited position. But honesty compels me to say that I see little likelihood of such a development. World leadership, for better or worse, is on the point of passing out of the hands of Western white civilization and into those of a new Eastern and predominantly nonwhite civilization. One can regret it, but I do not think I do. I only hope that the new civilization that is coming succeeds better than ours has in realizing what I still hold to be the great potentialities of the human race.³

Notes

1. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1960), 12.
2. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
3. Editor’s Note: This final paragraph, intended to round out Sweezy’s analysis, is taken from his 1958 presentation at Cornell University: “Marxism: A Talk to Students,” Monthly Review 10, no. 6 (October 1958), 223. It has been slightly edited.