Homo Erectus evolved from Australopithicus. Homo sapiens evolved from Homo Erectus. If you just take these boxes as given, black and white, finite definitions then you would have to conclude that, somewhere in the evolutionary timeline, a pair of Homo Erectus parents gave birth to the first Homo sapiens child. I guarantee that child had as much in common with his parents as you have with yours. Perhaps you too are the first of a new species?
Or, more plausibly, these classifications aren’t black and white. We can clearly identify an example of a Homo Erectus and a Homo sapiens but between those two births, there is a grey area that encompasses thousands of generations of parents giving birth to children who were very much like themselves.
Likewise, we have created these black and white boxes and called them Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, and Socialism. When the truth is, at any given time, the real life economic system in operation in any given country is in the process of evolution from one to another.
There was no moment when the mercantilist socioeconomic system was overturned in favor of a capitalist one. Priorities changed. Philosophy changed. Technology changed. The economy evolved.
Certainly it can be said that the economy that Marx criticized and the one currently operating in the United States today are very different. The bourgeoisie owned all the property and capital and the proletariat had no way of purchasing them. Factory workers in the year that Marx published Das Kapital worked 16 hours a day 7 days a week and made barely enough for a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. Children as young as 7 or 8 were working dangerous jobs, losing limbs, inhaling toxic fumes and dying at a rate to boggle the mind. The world that Marx lived in was more miserable than we could imagine. People were choosing between sending their children to a job that might kill them and not having enough food to keep their children alive. Whatever you might think about the nature of poverty in the United States today, there is a significant difference between hungry and starving.
Should the economy of 1867 London and the economy of 2022 New York City have different names? All of Marx’s most ardent criticisms of what he called capitalism have been, one by one, addressed, improved, and in many cases completely solved.
In the US, today, there is no starvation, no child labor, a 40 hour standard work week, everyone has a cell phone, everyone has a car, property and capital and the bank loans with which to purchase them are available to every single adult human. Should it be said that the US is a socialist country, not a capitalist one? If your argument is that socialism is what evolves out of capitalism as the economy becomes more equal, more fair, more livable, then I would say that is the case.
The problem is that no one calls it “socialism”.
Everyone, critics and supporters alike, calls what we have in the United States today a capitalist economy. At the end of the day, that is why I would never identify myself as a socialist. Because what we have is good and ought to be made even better.
In his 1975 book Systemantics, John Gall wrote a statement that came to be known as Gall’s Law:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
The social ideals of both socialism and capitalism are slowly being better realized in the real world economy, no matter what we call it. And every time the status quo is overturned in the name of socialism, the results are further from the ideals of socialism than the status quo.
