Functional socialism

132 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

over a bankrupt society and calling it an inevitable social revolution. He pictured a highly organized capitalist society, finally controlled by concentrated capital in a few hands, ripe for expropriation by an organized proletariat. Outside of Russia, however, it is now generally recognized that the ‘‘class war” has become a “‘class struggle’. Not of two classes, but many. Whether, some day, some electric spark will suddenly resolve all these struggling classes into their basic affinities remains to be seen. It would be foolish to prophesy. If the broad conception of a functional society, with its new vision and wider sweep, captures our imaginations and loyalties, we may, in this life-time, at last realize Bastiat’s dream of the economic harmonies: ‘““The general laws of the social world are in harmony with one another, and in every way tend to the perfection of humanity”’.

Labriola remarked that “Das Kapital, instead of being the prologue to the communal critique, is simply the epilogue of dourgeois economics”. Sorel says much the same thing: “Marxism is really much more akin to the Manchester doctrine than to the Utopian. We must never forget this”. I think the more we dissociate Marx from his economic doctrine, every syllable of it being well within the classical ambit, the more do we realize his magnitude. A bourgeois to his finger-tips, a scholar, a master of style, he was profoundly moved by the horrors and miseries of the industrial system. He devoted all his intellectual power and moral indignation to hasten the end. What more could man do? Nor must we