Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
2. Marxian Treatment of this Problem
For the marxian, there can be only one solution of this problem — the oecumenical solution.
Marxism, indeed, proceeds from the assumption that by an inner necessity, Capitalism has already set its mark upon the whole world. Even to-day Capitalism is not limited to a single nation or to a small group of nations. Even to-day it is international and cosmopolitan. ‘Instead of the old local and national isolation and self-sufficiency, world trade has developed and the interdependence of nations.’ The cheapness of their commodities is the ‘heavy artillery’ of the bourgeoisie. With the aid of this it compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt bourgeois methods of production. ‘It forces them to adopt so-called civilization, i.e. to become bourgeois. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.’ And this is true not only of material but also of intellectual production. ‘The intellectual productions of one nation become the common property of all. National narrowness and exclusiveness become daily more impossible, and out of the many national and local literatures a world literature arises.’1
It follows, therefore, from the logic of the materialist interpretation of history that Socialism too can be no national, but only an international phenomenon. It is a phase not merely in the history of a single nation, but in the history of the whole human race. In the logic of Marxism the question whether this or that nation is ‘ripe’ for Socialism cannot even be asked. Capitalism makes the world ripe for Socialism, not a single nation or a single industry. The expropriators, through whose expropriation the last step towards Socialism must be taken, must not be conceived save as major capitalists whose capital is invested throughout the whole world. For the marxian, therefore, the socialistic experiments of the ‘Utopians’ are just as senseless as Bismarck’s facetious proposal to introduce Socialism experimentally into one of the Polish districts of the Prussian State.2 Socialism is an historical process. It cannot be tested in a retort or anticipated in miniature. For the marxian, therefore, the problem of the autarky of a socialist community cannot even arise. The only socialist community he can conceive comprehends the entire human race and the entire surface of the globe. For him the economic administration of the world must be unitary.
Later marxians have, indeed, recognized that, at any rate for a time, the existence of many independent socialist communities side by side must be anticipated.3 But, once this is conceded one must go further and also take into account the possibility of one or more socialist communities existing within a world which, for the most part, is still capitalistic.
