ONE¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter establishes that socialism is defined not merely by equitable distribution but by planned, co-operative production on a large scale, which becomes economically viable only when productive forces have developed to the point where large enterprises decisively outstrip small ones in productivity. This technical precondition, the author argues, has existed for centuries—since the emergence of manufacture and, even more so, with the advent of factory machine production. The transfer of large-scale means of production into the hands of the whole population would raise material living standards, whereas the common ownership of small handicraft workshops would yield no such benefit.
To substantiate this, the chapter draws on historical examples from socialist literature. The English MP John Bellers, in 1696, proposed co-operative societies of two to three hundred persons to supply their own needs, demonstrating that collective economy was already regarded as advantageous from a production standpoint at the end of the seventeenth century. A century later, Fourier’s phalansteries of two to three thousand persons reflected the expanded scale of manufacture. The author argues that both schemes are closer in character to the free economic communes of anarchist dreams, but their utopianism lies not in impossibility—American communist communes proved their feasibility—but in having lagged one to two hundred years behind actual economic development.
The subsequent development of the social division of labour and machine production has rendered the state the only co-operative body capable of utilising collective production on a wide scale, and socialist production could not, for economic and political reasons, be confined within individual states. The chapter cites Atlanticus, a non-Marxist German socialist who calculated that applying socialist economy in Germany with the technical resources of the mid-1890s could double or treble workers’ income and halve the working day. The author notes that Atlanticus’s service was merely to express in approximate figures what was already more convincingly demonstrated by the greater productivity of large undertakings and the necessity of planning revealed by economic crises.
The chapter concludes that sufficient technical pre-requisites for collective production have existed for one to two hundred years, and socialism is now technically advantageous on a national and world scale. Yet these technical advantages alone were insufficient for socialism’s realisation; during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large-scale production developed in capitalist, not socialist, form. The schemes of Bellers and Fourier were not carried out because no social forces existed ready and able to implement them. The polemic is directed implicitly against anarchist conceptions of small-scale communes as viable alternatives, and against the notion that technical feasibility alone can bring about socialism without the requisite social agency.