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Many of Dr. Adler's books are available through The Radical Academy Bookstore. Books
by Mortimer J.
Adler
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Preface to
The Capitalist Manifesto by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. While signing my name to The Capitalist
Manifesto as co-author with Louis Kelso, I wish
to disclaim any credit for the original and basic
theory of capitalism on which this Manifesto is
based. That theory is entirely Mr. Kelso's. It is
the product of many years of inquiry and thought on
his part. The full statement of it will soon be
published in Capitalism, of which Mr. Kelso
is sole author. I would also like to explain how I came to
appreciate the critical importance of the theory of
capitalism; and why I felt that its revolutionary
insights and program should be briefly summarized
in the form of a manifesto addressed to all
Americans who are concerned with the future of a
democratic society, with the achievement of the
fullest freedom and justice for all men, and, above
all, with a twentieth century reinterpretation of
everyone's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. In the twenty years or more in which I have been
developing a theory of democracy as the only
perfectly just form of government, I slowly came to
realize that political democracy cannot flourish
under all economic conditions. Democracy requires
an economic system which supports the political
ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot
exercise freedom in the political sphere when they
are deprived of it in the economic sphere. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton observed that
a man who is dependent for his subsistence on the
arbitrary will of another man is not economically
free and so should not be admitted to citizenship
because he cannot use the political liberty which
belongs to that status. If they had stated this
point as a prediction, it would have been confirmed
by later historic facts. The progressive political
enfranchisement of the working classes has followed
their progressive economic emancipation from
slavery and serfdom, or from abject dependence on
their employers. As I first saw the problem, it came to this:
What is the economic counterpart of political
democracy? What type of economic organization is
needed to support the institutions of a politically
free society? The answer suggests itself at once,
at least verbally: "economic democracy." But we do
not really have an answer unless we can give
concrete meaning to those words. We begin to form some notion of the economic
counterpart of political democracy, or of the
economic substructure needed to support free
political institutions, when we recognize that it
must involve two things: (1) economic liberty,
i.e., the abolition of all economic slavery,
servitude, or dependence; and (2) economic
equality, i.e., the enjoyment by all men of the
same economic status and, therewith, of the same
opportunities to live well. But what do we mean by the abolition of all
forms of economic servitude or dependence?
Certainly, that no man should work as a slave. But
that by itself would hardly seem to be enough. In
the whole of the pre-industrial past, economic
freedom was thought to depend on the possession of
sufficient property to enable a man to obtain
subsistence for himself and his family without
recourse to grinding toil. This book is out of print. The
Capitalist
Manifesto, This book and its companion, These works are in PDF Download
The Capitalist If you don't have Adobe In the oligarchical republics or feudal
aristocracies of the past, the few who enjoyed the
political freedom of citizenship or noble rank were
always men of relatively independent means. The
principle of universal suffrage in our democratic
republic now confers the political freedom of
citizenship on all. If that is effective only when
it is accompanied by economic freedom, are we
called on to envisage a society in which all men
will have the same kind of economic independence
and security that only the few enjoyed in the
past? The question of what is meant by economic
equality is even more difficult. We can be sure of
only one thing. Economic equality cannot mean
equality of possessions any more than political
equality means equality of functions. Yet if we
proceed by analogy with the ideal of political
democracy, which we conceive as a politically
classless society with a rotating aristocracy of
leaders, we can at least surmise that an economic
democracy must somehow be conceived as an
economically classless society, and that, too, with
a rotating aristocracy of managers. Until very recently, as I thought about these
questions, I had grave doubts that what has come to
be called "capitalism" could establish the kind of
economic democracy which political democracy
required as its counterpart. I now understand the
reasons for my doubts. They were based on an
understanding of "capitalism" which was colored by
the sound criticisms that had been leveled against
its injustices and inequities, not only by Marx and
Engels, and by socialists generally, but also by
Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and by social
philosophers or reformers as diverse as Alexis de
Tocqueville, Horace Mann, Henry George, Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques
Maritain, Amintore Fanfani, and Karl Polanyi. Of
these, only Marx, Engels and their followers
proposed communism as the remedy. What all these men were criticizing was
nineteenth-century capitalism as it existed in
England and the United States, the two countries in
the world most advanced industrially. That
nineteenth-century capitalism was unjust, no one
can question. But there is a question as to whether
nineteenth-century capitalism conforms to the idea
or ideal of capitalism; and with this goes the
question whether the historic injustices committed
by the capitalism of the nineteenth century are
historic accidents or are intrinsic to the very
idea of capitalism itself. Ten years ago, at a time when I did not
understand the idea or ideal of capitalism as
something quite different from what existed under
that name in the nineteenth century, I naturally
tended to suppose that the economic injustices
perpetrated in the nineteenth century were
intrinsic to capitalism. If that were so, then they
could not be remedied without giving up capitalism
itself, and finding some alternative to it --
socialism, a cooperative system, a corporative
order, or something else. In that state of mind, I was also bothered by
the fact that the very expression I had been forced
to use in order to give some meaning to economic
democracy -- the expression "classless society" --
was the slogan and banner of the communists. The
Communist Manifesto called for the overthrow of
the class-structured bourgeois society, divided
into owners and workers, oppressors and oppressed,
and set before men's minds the ideal of a classless
society, achieved through the dictatorship of the
proletariat, in which the state itself would be the
sole owner of the means of production, and all men
would be "equally liable to labor." I could not help agreeing with those who pointed
out the fatal flaws in the communists'
revolutionary program. If men are dependent for
their subsistence upon the arbitrary will of the
state, or on that of its bureaucrats who manage the
state-owned means of production, they are as unfree
economically as when they are dependent upon the
arbitrary will of private owners. Furthermore, "the
equal liability of all to labor," which is a basic
principle in the communist program, impedes rather
than promotes economic freedom. The communist
classless society is, therefore, hardly the
economic democracy we are looking for as the
counterpart of political democracy. But while proponents of capitalism have argued
against communism as the foe of political liberty
and equality, they have not offered a positive
program for establishing an economically classless
society. They have not countered the call for a
communist revolution by proposing a capitalist
revolution which, by carrying out the true
principles of capitalism, would produce the
economic democracy we need as the basis for
political democracy. One other fact obscured my understanding of the
problem, or at least led me to consider a wrong
solution of it. That was the extraordinary change
which had taken place in the American economy
during my lifetime. Beginning with Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and running through
all the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and
his successors, Republican as well as Democratic,
capitalism in twentieth-century America has
undergone a remarkable transformation which puzzles
many European observers who cannot understand
precisely how America has managed to remain a
capitalist country, and yet has succeeded in
avoiding the Marxist prediction that capitalism
would be destroyed by its own imbalance between
production and consumption. Or, to put it another
way, they wonder whether capitalism in
twentieth-century America is still capitalism in
essence. They suspect that it is really one of
the "many paths to socialism." This suspicion is not unfamiliar to Americans.
Many of them, especially the most outspoken
opponents of the New Deal, have voiced it
themselves. They have deplored, again and again,
the "creeping socialism" which has been eroding, if
not overthrowing, the institutions and principles
of capitalism. If the charge of creeping socialism
is correct, then it can be argued that America has
produced an economy which supports political
democracy only by gradually, and perhaps
self-deceptively, substituting socialist for
capitalist principles. What is true of America is
also true of England, with a little less self
-deception in the latter case. To understand the charge of "creeping
socialism," one need only make a checklist out of
the ten-point program which Marx and Engels
proposed in 1848 and which they described as a way
of making progressive "inroads on the rights of
property, and on the conditions of bourgeois
production." The measures they proposed for
"socializing" the economy by wresting "all capital
from the bourgeoisie" and centralizing "all
instruments of production in the hands of the
State," are as follows: 1. Abolition of property in land and application
of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income
tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants
and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the
State, by means of a national bank with State
capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication
and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of
production owned by the State; the bringing into
cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of
the soil generally in accordance with a common
plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labor.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of the distinction
between town and country, by a more equable
distribution of population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public
schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in
its present form. Combination of education with
industrial production, etc., etc. In his recent book, Contemporary
Capitalism, John Strachey, the leading English
Marxist, refers to the industrial economy of the
mid-nineteenth century as "early stage capitalism."
That was capitalism prior to political democracy,
prior to the technological advances which
accelerated capitalization, and prior to the
enactment, in whole or in part, of the
revolutionary measures proposed by Marx and
Engels. Strachey refers to contemporary capitalism --
the capitalism of England and the United States in
the middle of the twentieth century -- as "latest
stage capitalism." That is not only a
technologically advanced economy with ever
increasing accumulations of capital. It is not only
a capitalistic system that is being operated by a
democratic society . It is also, in Strachey's
judgment, a partly socialized capitalism which has
been brought into being by the legislative
enactment of much of the Marxist program and
without the violent revolution Marx thought would
be necessary. But in his view it is a revolution
nonetheless -- a revolution still in process, the
ultimate goal of which, according to his
projection, is "last stage capitalism," or the
completely socialized industrial economy in which
the State is the only capitalist. Strachey's account of what has happened in the
last hundred years is not far from the truth. The
radical differences he points out between "early
stage" and "latest stage" capitalism are
unquestionable. His description of the present
economy of England and the United States as partly
socialized capitalism is accurate. But his notion
that the process of socialization must be completed
to remove the inherent conflicts between capitalism
and democracy is as wrong as it can be. The socialization of the economy can be
completed, according to Strachey, only when the
abolition of private property in the means of
production replaces the present highly attenuated
private ownership of capital. But when that
happens, all capital property must be vested in the
State; and then, as Milovan Djilas has pointed out,
you have a new class of "owners" -- the bureaucrats
who form the managerial class in a totalitarian
State. Djilas's book, The New Class, offers
irrefutable evidence that a completely socialized
economy, far from creating a free and classless
society, creates one in which there is sharp class
division between the rulers who are, in effect, the
owners and the workers who are economically as well
as politically enslaved. In the light of it, we can
see clearly that it is socialism, not capitalism,
which is essentially incompatible with
democracy. For many years I was prone to some of the errors
and fallacies which blind socialists to the truth
about capitalism and democracy. They are shared by
many Americans, including our leading economists,
who, while they would not go as far as Strachey,
nevertheless think that the progressive
socialization of the economy during the last fifty
years has been an advance toward the ideal of the
democratic society. It was precisely these errors
in my own thinking which made me doubt that
capitalism as such (i.e., not creeping socialism
disguised as capitalism) could create the economic
democracy -- the economically free and classless
society -- which would provide the very soil and
atmosphere in which political democracy can
prosper. These errors remained with me until I became
acquainted with the thought of Louis Kelso.
According to Mr. Kelso's theory, capitalism
perfected in the line of its own principles, and
without any admixture of socialism, can create the
economically free and classless society which will
support political democracy and which, above all,
will help us to preserve the institutions of a free
society. In what we have become accustomed to call
"the world-wide struggle for men's minds," this
conception of capitalism offers the only real
alternative to communism, for our partly socialized
capitalism is an unstable mixture of conflicting
principles, a halfway house from which we must go
forward in one direction or the other. No one with any sense of justice or devotion to
democracy would wish to go back to capitalism in
its original or primitive form. No one with any
sense of the scientific-industrial revolution that
is just beginning, and which will transform our
society in the next hundred years, would regard our
present partly capitalistic and partly socialistic
arrangements as constituting a system that is
capable of maintaining itself statically in spite
of its obviously unstable equilibrium between two
opposing forces. One is the tendency toward socialization and the
attenuation of property rights in capital. The
other is the effort to retain the vestiges of
private property in capital. In one direction lies
the goal of the socialist or communist revolution.
In the other, by means of giving full strength to
the rights of private property in capital while at
the same time harmonizing those rights with the
applicable principles of economic justice, lies the
goal of the capitalist revolution. The latter is clearly the better of the two
revolutions, even if both, by virtue of
technological advances administered for the welfare
of all men, were able to achieve the same high
standard of living for all. A high standard of
living is at its best a plentiful subsistence,
consisting of the comforts and conveniences of
life. It does not by itself ensure freedom or the
good life. It is compatible with slavery to a
totalitarian State, and with subservience to the
wrong ends. There is all the difference in the world between
a good living and living well. The goal of the
capitalist revolution, as Mr. Kelso sees it, is not
economic welfare as an end in itself, but rather
the good human life for all. In achieving this end,
the capitalist revolution will not sacrifice
freedom for welfare. It will secure liberty as well
as equality for all men. It will subordinate
economic to political activity -- the management of
things to the government of men. Mr. Kelso gave me the opportunity to read the
manuscript of a book about capitalism which he
first drafted some ten years ago. In the last two
years, I have had many conversations with him while
he has been in the process of rewriting that book,
which is now completed. In the course of these
conversations, we have both come to see the broad
philosophical and historical significance of the
fundamental tenets of a sound theory of capitalism.
It was with these discoveries in mind that I
persuaded Louis Kelso to engage with me in the
writing of The Capitalist Manifesto. The first part of this Manifesto explains the
philosophical and historical ideas that are
involved in a sound understanding of the principles
of capitalism and of the revolution to which those
principles lead. The second part sets forth a practical program
which we believe is a feasible way of accomplishing
the capitalist revolution in the United States
within the next fifty years. By making our society
a pilot model of democratic capitalism we can also
make the United States the world's leader in the
march toward freedom and justice for men
everywhere.
There are usually used copies
available, however.
Check out Amazon at
by
Louis O. Kelso
and
Mortimer
Jerome Adler
The New Capitalists, are also
available for download from
The
Kelso Institute
which requires an
Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Manifesto
and/or
The
New Capitalists
Acrobat, it can be
downloaded free by
clicking on
Adobe
Acrobat Reader
The
Adler Archive Index
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