A society that emphasizes marketplace will tend not to see the socialism that makes marketplace possible. A socialist society will tend not to see the adaptive potential of marketplace. I believe what I see: we can have neither a socialist nor a capitalist world.
We cannot survive without socialism; it evolved with our species. It is at the center of everything living. Theoretically, we could have a world without marketplace; it is a relatively new product of evolution.
There are alternatives to marketplace in edge economics. To organize the exchange of wealth at their edges, groups can compete through war, thievery, conquest, or isolation; they can cooperate through peace, contracts, treaties, compatible but independent traditions, or through intergroup (international) law. Contracts, treaties, traditions, and intergroup law can control interchange. Thievery can also bring in wealth (such as when an immigrant smuggled the secrets of England's looms to the American continent, or when a Native American stole from another group the first horses for his own group). Conquest can bring in all the wealth of another group. Isolation can put up real or de facto walls that prohibit interchange. However, humankind's accelerating introduction of new forms of wealth makes marketplaces almost inevitable, even if illegal in an avowed communal state. We can foster the marketplace, as we do in avowed capitalist nations, but let us remember that fostering is a communal activity.
We can neither totally delegate to individuals nor totally socialize to a group the means to produce and maintain humankind's wealth. If the Soviet Union had believed that the state should own the means of production, it should not have gone into the international marketplace to buy computers and wheat. It should have bought Nebraska and IBM -people included. If U.S. America believes that people should individually own the means of production, it should eliminate the state of Nebraska and the IBM corporation because these are strictly communal structures.
I make these absurd proposals only to point out the absurdity of labeling political and economic rivalries as a dichotomy of capitalism versus socialism. The wealth production potential of the USA suffers when it ignores the fundamental dependence of marketplace on communal control over the policies of wealth distribution. Because in the last twenty years of the twentieth century marketplace was in political ascendance, so was our ignorance of our communal center. Socialism was descendent. During these twenty years, socialist leaders tended to confess that their nations suffer when they ignore the vitality, flexibility, and healthy complexity that marketplace can bring to an economy. As times change so will the loci of ignorance and confession.
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