In the face of the scale of the crisis, it is tempting to revisit the great authors to understand its roots. Marx’s return to grace, after 30 years of disqualification due to the collapse of Soviet socialism, cannot be otherwise explained. But rather than hunting for ideas in the middle of the 19th century, we could do well to concentrate on two more recent, and in many respects far more illuminating, works. <\/p>\n
The two authors, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi, followed parallel paths, as they both came from central Europe before emigrating to the United States. Their major works came out at the same time: "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" in 1942, "The Great Transformation," two years later.<\/p>\n
People are very familiar with Schumpeter’s thesis that capitalism’s dynamic is due more to the entrepreneurial spirit than to the mechanical effects of the accumulation of capital as described by classic theory. One often omits to recall that he had a pessimistic vision of that dynamic, predicting that it would be progressively paralyzed by the organizational constraints of the system, notably by bureaucracy. <\/p>\n
At first sight, this analysis proves more apt to explain the failure of socialism than the present crisis. However, if one replaces "bureaucracy" with "financial system" in the Schumpeterian thesis, one rediscovers how fragile any creative process is and how it may be threatened by an external cell that cancerizes it.<\/p>\n
One is also faced with a cancerization of the initial system in Polanyi, but this one is of a different sort. The sociologist explains that the irresistible tendency in capitalism is for the economy to colonize society to turn it into a market society. Progressively, nothing at all escapes the monetary evaluation of human activity. The economy rises from its bed to swamp all spheres of human life. <\/p>\n
In an original synthesis of social democracy and self-managing utopianism, he deduced from this observation that civil society must organize itself to return the economy to its bed and thus preserve large sectors from any influence of monetary speculation.<\/p>\n
In these two cases, the angle of the attack against capitalism is sociological, not economic. Schumpeter wants to preserve the spirit of creativity, and Polanyi, the spirit of conviviality. In other words, the fundamental problem would be more cultural than economic. And what if they were right?<\/p>\n
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher. <\/em><\/p>\n GO TO ORIGINAL:<\/p>\n