Why something like socialism is necessary for the transition to something like communism

Abstract

The basic conclusion of the analysis of this article is that for a combination of economic and political reasons, a capitalist road to communism is implausible, and for political reasons a socialist road is more likely to succeed than the mixed road. The pure capitalist road is impossible because capital flight would immediately undermine the economic base of the communism-inducing universal grant proposal, and because even if this problem were solved, the political use of disinvestment would make the system unreproducible. The mixed road, combining elements of capitalist and socialist property relations, is economically feasible, but would be politically precarious. Only in a socialist society would the political conditions for a stable growth of the universal grants be secure enough to make movement along the road to communism likely. This general conclusion is based on what is a largely unargued assumption present thoughout this article, namely that socialism itself is unambiguously compatible with the emergence and development of communism- that collective ownership of the means of production by workers is compatible with a gradual growth in the “realm of freedom,” in the predominance of distribution according to need. Following VP, I acted as if the only issue were the extent to which capitalism might also be so compatible, and if not, the extent to which certain aspects of capitalism might be compatible in what I have called the mixed road. The assumption that socialism is compatible with the growth of communism rests on two more basic claims: first, that eliminating capitalist property relations does not necessarily produce authoritarian-bureaucratic forms of the state and politics, and, second, that in democratic socialism productivity will continue to increase (for without increasing productivity, expanding the sphere of distribution according to need becomes very problematic). While I will not attempt to defend them here, I believe both of these claims to be true. If either of these assumptions is false, however, then the only feasible road to communism, no matter how precarious it might be politically, may be the quasicapitalist/quasi-socialist mixed road described above, a road that combines elements of substantial state control over investments with capitalist economic rationality.