This is a nice, neat account of the foundations of economic well-being in the United States; and it would be a pity to deface it with critical cornmentary. He returns to the same subject at a later point (pp. 153-54) at greater length but to the same purpose.
Strachey proceeds to an analysis of contemporary democracy which he ultimately defines as "the diffusion of power throughout the community" (p. 179). This definition carries over from the political to the economic field, and ends up in the Utopian state of "perfect cooperation in perfect liberty" (p. 179). Since capitalism is by definition "strongly inequalitarian" and "potentially anti-democratic," clearly the end of the democratic process is socialism. Given this outcome an economic question arises, whether the process of accumulation necessary to economic improvement will be adequately cared for. Strachey enters an optimistic prophecy. The death knell of capitalism, he finds, is the fact that it is not self-regulating. The accumulative process makes it fundamentally unstable, so that the state is necessarily called in as a counterweight. Without this, it grows increasingly unstable. "What the democratic mechanism is forcing governments, more or less unconsciously, to attempt is, in a word, the socialisation of investment" (p. 211).
Strachey concedes the argument of Keynes that a sufficiently close and intelligent control of the central monetary mechanism can minimize the instability of the system. "But what Keynes never came to realize was that this growing loss of equilibrium was itself the result of that mutation of the system, which the growth in size, and the decrease in number, of its units, with the consequent atrophy of competition, had produced" (p.
219). So we are back at the concentration of economic power, the point from which Strachey set out. Even if relative stability is achieved, the consequences under private control will still be intolerable—in distributive terms and in terms of the democratic status and dignity of the working members of the system. The final verdict on Keynes, is "What he actually accomplished was something which he did not intend . . . to help the democratic, and, on this side of the Atlantic, the democratic socialist, forces to find a way of continuously modifying. the system" (p. 253).
Strachey ends his book on a highly dramatic note.
The general tendencies of last stage capitalism and democracy conflict because it is the purpose of the former to concentrate, and of the latter to diffuse power. . . . Their co-existence constitutes a state of antagonistic balance. . . . In the end the power of contemporary democracy must en
croach upon capitalism until its last stage also has been completed; or, alternatively, capitalism must encroach upon democracy until this young, vulnerable and experimental method of government has been destroyed (p. 255).
The two great antagonists are locked in a struggle to the death. Having set up this posture of embattled giants, Strachey falls back into a series of interesting, intelligent and realistic observations upon political processes in Great Britain and the United States and upon the political and economic prospects of countries outside the limited realm of the Western democracies. But, in the end, the slow, shifting, indeterminate processes of institutional change are forced back into the dialectical mould. The framework of class war (a phrase Strachey does not use) is still there, a Marxist residue in his thinking; though he presents it more as a latter-day version of the legend of St. George and the dragon.
Strachey's analysis—for all his intelligence, thoughtfulness and worldly experience—will not give anyone a much deeper insight into the multiple intertwined influences which are shaping our destinies. Try as he will, he is not a creative thinker. His own private mythology makes a dramatic story, but it is not a very good guide to the intricate processes of social change or to possible lines of approach to "a better world." On the programmatic front, his expectations appear to be modest: "decade by decade" the party of the left must "show a certain minimum of social change" (p. 272).
"The road to socialism" used to imply a destination. The road itself was subversion. As Professor Gray says in The Socialist Tradition, socialists of all breeds could be described generically as people who "seek a better world, not by way of reform, but by way of subversion (using the word in its liberal and neutral sense)—or, if it be preferred, by a fundamental change in the nature and structure of society." There were different views of the process of subversion. In Great Britain the democratic process of gradualism has been the preferred method, although Laski used to toy with the idea of violence as the necessary way of removing the beleaguered forces of capitalism from their final strongholds. In any case, there was a destination. In the minds of many British socialists, the idea of such a destination appears to be dissolving. So I interpret, for example, the thinking of Crosland and Gaitskill.