On a fairly
regular basis we get called capitalists by the socialists and socialists by the
capitalists, which suggests there might be a little confusion around. Not on our part, but on the part of
others. Last week, for example, we
received the following email after someone here rejected the use of the word “capitalism”:
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| Louis O. Kelso: neither capitalist not socialist |
Consider this:
The Just Third Way is democratic as its entire rationale, because its purpose
is to democratize ownership of capital through institutional reform of money,
credit, and banking. Isn’t this the “just third way” of “democratic capitalism”?
A serious problem
with the word “capitalism” is that it is of extremely vague import. That was one of the reasons Louis O. Kelso,
despite the titles of the first two books he wrote with Mortimer J. Adler (The Capitalist Manifesto,
1958, and The New Capitalists,
1961), eventually stopped using it.
Efforts to use
the term to describe any system based on private property ultimately only
create an oxymoron. As G.K. Chesterton
commented, “If the use of capital is capitalism, then everything is capitalism”
— a slight overstatement, perhaps, but only slight.
The current furor
over the rise of “democratic socialism” illustrates the difficulties, even (in
a sense) the dangers of trying to change an inherently flawed system simply by
slapping an adjective in front of it.
This is, in fact, more egregious with socialism than with capitalism, as
the original term for socialism was “the democratic religion,” and all
socialism was originally “democratic socialism” as well as religious socialism
(which annoyed Marx), to say nothing of what particularly outraged Orestes
Brownson, “Christian socialism”:
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| Orestes A. Brownson: down on socialism. |
[Socialism] is as artful as it is bold. It wears a pious aspect, it
has divine words on its lips, and almost unction in its speech. It is not easy
for the unlearned to detect its fallacy, and the great body of the people are
prepared to receive it as Christian truth. We cannot deny it without seeming to
them to be warring against the true interests of society, and also against the
Gospel of our Lord. . . . Surely Satan has here, in Socialism, done his best,
almost outdone himself, and would, if it were possible, deceive the very elect,
so that no flesh should be saved. (O.A. Brownson, Essays and Reviews, Chiefly on Theology, Politics, and Socialism. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.,
1852, 502.)
Calling socialism
democratic and attempting to distinguish it from Marxist “scientific socialism”
— communism — is an exercise in self-deception, to say nothing of its utter
futility. As Alexis de Tocqueville
commented of the “Bloodless Revolution” that overthrew the French “July Monarchy”
(and which quickly became very bloody indeed),
From the 25th of February [1848] onwards, a thousand
strange systems came issuing pell-mell from the minds of innovators, and spread
among the troubled minds of the crowd. . . . These theories were of very varied
natures, often opposed and sometimes hostile to one another; but all of them,
aiming lower than the government and striving to reach society itself, on which
government rests, adopted the common name of Socialism.
To go the same
route with capitalism is to try and correct the mistakes of a flawed system
with the bigger mistakes of an even more flawed system. Ultimately, as in Hilaire Belloc’s Servile
State, there ends up being nothing to distinguish capitalism from socialism, or
vice versa.
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| G.K. Chesterton: both capitalist and socialist? |
Ironically, this
point is best illustrated by the comments regarding Chesterton’s and Belloc’s “distributism”
by a capitalist and a socialist, both of whom missed the main point of
distributism, which is broadly owned capital.
Michael Novak declared in a foreword he wrote to a collection of
Chesterton’s writings published by Ignatius Press that what Chesterton meant by
distributism is what he, Novak meant by “democratic capitalism.” (Michael
Novak, “Saving Distributism,” Introduction to G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume V, 31.)
At the same time,
in a foreword he wrote for another Chesterton collection, Four Faultless Felons, Martin Gardner stated that what Chesterton meant
by distributism is what he, Gardner, meant by “democratic socialism.” (Martin
Gardner, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” G. K. Chesterton, Four Faultless Felons. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989, x.)
Obviously, if
distributism is at one and the same time both democratic socialism and
democratic capitalism, then logically there is no difference between capitalism
and socialism, Nor can distributism be
distinguished in any way from anything else.
If “democratic capitalism” is the Just Third Way, then there is nothing
to distinguish it from either capitalism or socialism.
It would
therefore be better, in our opinion, simply to jettison the use of the terms capitalism
or socialism, democratic or otherwise, in an effort to describe what Kelso and CESJ
are talking about. We should restrict
our term to “the Just Third Way,” and define the Just Third Way as “A free market system that
economically empowers all individuals and families through the democratization
of money and credit for new production, with universal access to direct
ownership of income-producing capital.”
#30#
