Adler, Mortimer
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about fifty minutes; YouTube auto-captions in English, generally accurate, with some noise from a faulty microphone and garbled names)
Core ideas
Misused words. Adler says his Aspen seminar of 1989 (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) taught him that his own title was wrong: capitalism and communism are not opposites; the conflict is between private-property capitalism (market economy, free enterprise) and state capitalism (state ownership and operation of all means of production). Socialism is not communism: socialism, like democracy, is an ideal, and there are different means to it, communism being only the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, which he thinks Marx chose wrongly. Socialism and democracy are in his view twin faces of one ideal: political "haves" (universal franchise) and economic "haves" (a decent livelihood for all), with no "have-nots". He insists both are very recent (universal suffrage in the US only with the 24th Amendment in 1964; Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 progressive platform already contained most of the later New Deal measures), and that "haves" need not be equal: some have more power or wealth because they contribute more.
Decent livelihood, Locke, Tocqueville. A decent livelihood (subsistence, health, medical care, education, leisure) is a natural right implied by the "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration; only an effective market economy can provide enough goods. Between pluralist society with competing parties, private property and free enterprise on one hand, and one-party rule with centralized state capitalism on the other, "There is no middle ground between these alternatives." Marx's error is the labor theory of value: had he read Locke (the labor theory of property), he would see that a non-working owner who puts capital to work earns the return, and that capital is not "unearned increment" (a gift is). Tocqueville, in contrast, foresaw that the drive to equality of conditions could produce a new kind of tyranny (totalitarianism) and proposed pluralism (private associations, secondary agencies) as the remedy, which requires private ownership of capital.
Debts to Marx, class, replies. Adler acknowledges two debts to Marx: he drew attention to the misery of the working class under early capitalism (12-hour days, seven days a week) and to class conflict (already in Plato and Toynbee), which has marked all societies of a small privileged minority and a large oppressed majority; today, for the first time, there is a privileged majority, and the next century should end oppressed minorities and class conflict. In the Q&A he says justice means "treating equals equally and unequals unequally" and regulates both liberty and equality, so they need not conflict; nationalism is a form of tribalism, the enemy of progress; the government should do for the people only what they cannot do for themselves (health care); unions are less and less needed; Gorbachev's problem is both replacing totalitarian communism and holding the union together; education reform is for the next century; television has ruined American politics.
Excerpts
“« socialism and democracy are inseparable »”
“« There is no middle ground between these alternatives. »”
“« justice consists in treating equals equally and unequals unequally »”