Political Econ of Growth. Paul A. Baran

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СКАЧАТЬ are inherent in the capitalist system. It implicitly repudiated the zealously guarded “purity” of academic economics by revealing the paramount importance for the comprehension of the economic process of the structure of society, the relations of classes, the distribution of income, the role of the state, and other “exogenous” factors.

      Yet this unintentionally undertaken revival of the inquiry into the “nature and causes of the wealth of nations” had nothing in common with the youthful, revolutionary enthusiasm of the early crusade for laissez faire. Although contributing greatly to the understanding of the mechanics of the capitalist economy, the New Economics was unable to rise to a full theoretic grasp of the general crisis of capitalism, and remained merely a supreme effort on the part of bourgeois economic thought to discover a way of saving the capitalist system in spite of the manifest symptoms of its disintegration and decay. Thus the “Keynesian Revolution” has never become associated with a vigorous movement for the abolition of an outlived and destructive social order, for economic development and social progress. Again, not unlike the philosophy of Hegel, in its “Leftist” interpretation, it supplied intellectual ammunition to a reform movement which expected once more to solve the contradictions of capitalism by changing the prevailing distribution of income, and by having a benevolent state provide henceforth for steady economic expansion and increasing standards of living. But the logic of monopoly capitalism proved to be much stronger than ever realized by Keynes and his radical followers. It turned their theoretic accomplishments to purposes quite alien to their intentions. The “Welfare State,” guided by the canons of Keynesian economics and the precepts of “functional finance,” has remained essentially on paper. It was fascist Germany that thus far has made the most extensive use of Keynesian insights in building an economic machine that enabled it to unleash the Second World War.

      The war and the years of the postwar boom suspended all Keynesian concern with the excess accumulation of capital, with the shortage of effective demand. The requirements for the reconstruction of war damage in some countries, the satisfaction of postponed demand on the part of businesses and consumers in others, the urge to turn to productive purposes the technological innovations developed during (and frequently in connection with) the war—all combined to create a huge market for the output of capitalist enterprise.

      Economists who only unwillingly and only under irresistible pressure of incontrovertible facts had “swallowed” the anti-capitalist implications of the Keynesian doctrine returned with conspicuous alacrity to the customary panegyrics of capitalist harmony. Remaining “close to observable facts,” they cheerfully began to discuss inflation as the main threat to the continuous equilibrium of capitalist economies, and declared once more that oversaving, excess capacity, and depressions were relics of a remote and backward past. Extolling the virtues of the market mechanism, glorifying monopoly and “big business,” economics all but canceled whatever advance was reached as a result of the Keynesian Revolution, and returned to the complacency of the “merry twenties.”

      To be sure, this regression will probably be no more than shortlived; it has in fact not even affected the entire profession. Not only behind some recent writings on problems of economic growth, but even behind the more down-to-earth discussions of current business conditions and short-run economic prospects, lurks a gnawing uncertainty about the future of capitalism and a painful awareness that the impediments to economic progress that are inherent in the capitalist system are bound to reappear with renewed force and increased obstinacy as soon as the extraordinary hothouse situation of the postwar period has ceased to exist.

      II

      But if the lability of the economy of the United States (and of other highly developed capitalist countries) is giving rise to much concern and provides a stimulus to thinking about the basic problems of economic growth and development, the processes unfolding in the world at large cannot fail to lend these meditations the utmost urgency.

      For the Second World War and the events that constituted its sequel were a major earthquake that shattered the structure of the capitalist world even more violently than the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Indeed, the First World War led “merely” to the loss of Russia to the capitalist system. The Second World War, however, has been followed not only by the Chinese Revolution, but by a nearly universal awakening of the vast multitudes inhabiting the world’s dependent and colonial areas. Aroused by the staggering irrationality and oppressiveness of their social and economic order, weary of the continuous exploitation by their foreign and domestic masters, the peoples of the underdeveloped countries have begun to manifest a mounting determination to overthrow a social and political system that is perpetuating their squalor, misery, and stagnation.

      The momentous movement to do away with the entire edifice of imperialism, to put an end to the backwardness and prostration of the overwhelming majority of the human race, would by itself have created considerable consternation in the ruling class of the United States and other capitalist countries sitting on top of the imperialist pyramid. What has transformed this consternation into a state of near-panic, however, is the historic confluence of the restiveness in the underdeveloped countries with the spectacular advance and expansion of the world’s socialist camp. The military performance of the Soviet Union during the war and the rapid recovery of its war-ravaged economy provided the final proof of the strength and viability of a socialist society. There can no longer remain any doubt that a socioeconomic system based on comprehensive economic planning can function, grow, and withstand the most trying historical tests—without the benefits of private enterprise and without the institution of private property in the means of production. What is more, a large number of dependent countries went through a social revolution after the war, and thus entered the road to rapid economic and social progress. Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and even more importantly China, dropped out of the orbit of world capitalism and became sources of encouragement and inspiration to all other colonial and dependent countries.

      As a result of these developments, the issue of economic and social progress not merely returns to the center of the historical stage but relates—as two or three centuries ago—to the very essence of the widening and sharpening struggle between two antagonistic social orders. What has changed is perhaps not so much the nature and the plot of the drama as the leading dramatis personae. If in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the struggle for progress was tantamount to the struggle against the outlived institutions of the feudal age, similarly current efforts to bring about conditions indispensable for economic development in advanced and backward capitalist countries alike come continuously into conflict with the economic and political order of capitalism and imperialism. Thus to ruling opinion in the United States (but also in some other parts of the capitalist world), the world-wide drive for economic progress inevitably appears as profoundly subversive of the existing social order and of the prevailing system of international domination—as a revolutionary movement that has to be bribed, blocked, and, if possible, broken, if the capitalist system is at all to be preserved.

      It is needless to say that approaching economic development from this standpoint amounts to its repudiation. As far as advanced capitalist countries are concerned, the incompatibility of sustained economic growth with the capitalist system has been brought into sharp relief by some of the recent writings on economic growth. The mere specification of the conditions that need to be fulfilled for output to increase at rates that would be attainable with the available human and material resources—presented in different forms by Domar, Harrod, Colm, and others—shows with utmost clarity that such rates of increase are impossible under capitalism. Indeed, both consumption and private investment are rather narrowly circumscribed by the requirements of profit maximization under conditions of monopoly and oligopoly, and the nature and volume of government spending are no less rigidly determined by the social basis and function of the state in a capitalist society. Consequently neither maximum output, rationally allocated as between investment and consumption, nor some predetermined level of output combined with a lessening of the burden of work, are to be expected in the capitalist system. What appears to be more probable is the continuous re-emergence of the grim dilemma between war-induced bursts of output and depression-induced СКАЧАТЬ