šta čitate?

The one fundamental socialist dogma without which belief in the order of
Marxism is impossible, is that capitalism in its trend toward larger and larger
producing units must by necessity develop a social structure in which all are equal as proletarians except a few expropriators. The expropriation of those few
would then usher in the classless society. In other words, while the producing
unit will become necessarily larger, the number of privileged unequals will
become necessarily smaller, and finally the conversion of the whole productive
machinery into one unit, owned and operated by and for the community of
workers, will be inevitable and will eliminate inequality and privilege altogether.

Actually, however, the number of privileged unequals increases in almost
geometrical proportion to the size of the producing unit. The number of
independent "bosses" decreases, of course, especially if the individual small
stockholder in a large company is not regarded as independent, since he has no
control. But the larger the unit becomes, the larger is the number of intermediate
privileged positions, the holders of which are not independent entrepreneurs but
even less unequal members of the proletariat. Between the overpaid president of
a large company and the worst-paid ledger clerk, from the chief designer to the
semiskilled foreman on an assembly line, there has come into existence a
veritable army of dependent bourgeois classes. None of them has that interest in
the "expropriated profit" which characterizes the "bourgeois" in Marxism. But
all have a vested interest in the maintenance of unequal society. With the
complete socialization of productive capacity, the number, size, and rigidity of
these privileged though employed intermediate layers and classes would increase
so tremendously as to crowd out the unskilled laborer at the bottom, in whose
name and for whose nominal benefit the rapidly multiplying bureaucracy would
be planning, designing, directing, and administrating the social and economic
fabric. Economically the system might perform miracles of efficiency and
productivity. But, far from being classless, it would be a society with the most
rigid and most complicated pattern of naturally antagonistic classes which the
world has ever seen.

Instead of establishing the true freedom, the socialist state
would produce a genuinely feudal society, though the serf would be proclaimed
the beneficiary. In the heyday of feudalism in the twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries the social pyramid was rationalized by the creed on which society was
based. But social stratification in the socialist state cannot be justified. It cannot
even be explained. It is as senseless as a hierarchy without God. That such a
society is the inevitable consequence of the realization of socialism invalidated,
therefore, all basis of belief in the Marxist creed as the harbinger of the future
order.

This failure to establish equality by economic freedom has destroyed the
belief in capitalism as a social system in spite of material blessings, not only for
the proletariat but among the very middle classes who have benefited most
economically and socially. This shows in the tenacity with which the lower
middle classes and the upper working classes—the layers hardest hit by
inequality—cling to the fallacy that "free competition" among many small units
is the most efficient method of industrial production, in spite of the quite obvious
fact that integrated mass production is the most efficient and cheapest method,
though the most unequal one. Mass production on a large scale might still retain
all economic elements of competition; but socially it means complete
monopolization. Yet it is only through this belief in "free competition," which
implies that any increase in efficiency will increase equality of opportunity and
of social status, that the belief in capitalism itself can be maintained.

As soon as it is exploded these lower middle classes turn away from capitalism as they did
in central Europe. The paramount importance of the promise of equality explains
the pathetic struggle of the lower middle classes to send their children to college
and university. They see in the professions—supposedly outside the sphere of
capitalist economy—the channel through which that equality can be reached
which is denied to them and their children in business life. When the European
college graduates realized that this too had been an illusion, they turned away
from capitalism.

But the most important, most conclusive proof both of the
importance of the social promise and of the degree to which the faith in it has
been destroyed, lies in the acceptance by the European working class of the
Marxist thesis of the "impoverishment of the masses" as gospel truth. That this
thesis is wrong—both as to the absolute economic status of the worker and as to
the discrepancy between his status and that of the propertied classes—has not
shaken belief in it at all and is really quite irrelevant. For the thesis intends
nothing but that the worker should feel that he is becoming more and more unequal and that he has less and less chance to rise out of the ranks of the
proletariat. It is highly significant that he formulates this correct impression in a
statement which pronounces capitalism a failure.

To state exactly when the belief in capitalism was finally disproved is, of
course, impossible. But it was reduced to absurdity on the day when Henry Ford
showed the world that mass production is the cheapest and most efficient form
of production. Since then economic progress necessarily has involved greater
inequality. The European belief in capitalism as a social order would, however,
have collapsed much earlier but for two factors. One—probably a minor one—
was the economic imperialism of the nineteenth century which provided oversea
outlets and pickings for the middle classes. The other and decisive factor was the
existence of the United States.

The main problem of a "managed consumption" economy lies not in the
economic but in the social and political field. As long as the masses are willing
to accept a reduction of consumption and as long as they accept as socially more
desirable the goods which are produced in the place of former nonessential
consumption goods, the system can work.

"Guns instead of butter" is not an economic alternative; it is a moral and social choice. Contrary to general
opinion, the reduction of consumption is not a weakness of the totalitarian
society but one of its main sources of strength. It is the means by which the
noneconomic society is balanced. The fact that the standard of living and of
consumption of each class is reduced proportionately less than that of the class
immediately above, lends economic substance to the substitution of
noneconomic for economic rewards.

This negative economic compensation is
the greatest and the most potent social satisfaction in the noneconomic society of
totalitarianism. And it will continue to satisfy the masses until and unless they
cease to believe in the ideology of the noneconomic society altogether. The
collapse, if it comes, will be a moral and not an economic collapse.

Ideologija interpelira individue kao subjekte

Летећи Полип wrote:

Ideologija interpelira individue kao subjekte

He himself and his followers daily
call out to themselves, like the Italian Carthusian monk in the legend
does to the miser, who displayfully counted the goods on which he
could live for many years to come: “Tu fai conto sopra i beni,
bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.“[10]

 In order not to make amistake in the years, they count by minutes. A crowd of fellows, of
the best among whom all that can be said is that one knows not
whence he comes—a noisy, restless “Boheme,“ greedy after plunder,
that crawls about in gallooned frocks with the same grotesque
dignity as Soulonque‘s[11] Imperial dignitaries—, thronged the court
crowded the ministries, and pressed upon the head of the
Government and of the Army.

 One can picture to himself this upper
crust of the “Society of December 10“ by considering that Veron
Crevel[12] is their preacher of morality, and Granier de Cassagnac
their thinker. When Guizot, at the time he was Minister, employed
this Granier on an obscure sheet against the dynastic opposition, he
used to praise him with the term: “C‘est le roi des droles.“[13] It
were a mistake to recall the days of the Regency or of Louis XV. by
the court and the kit of Louis Bonaparte‘s: “Often did France have a
mistress-administration, but never yet an administration of kept
men.“[14]

Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and
compelled, like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of
constant surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the
substitute of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, everyday to
accomplish a sort of “coup“ on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the
whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he broaches everything
that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he makes one
set people patient under the revolution and another anxious for it; he
produces anarchy itself in the name of order by rubbing off from the
whole machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by profaning
it, by rendering it at once nauseating and laughable.

 He rehearses in
Paris the cult of the sacred coat of Trier with the cult of the
Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But when the Imperial Mantle shall
have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, then will
also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of the
Vendome column