THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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whether monopoly capitalists or producers will be the subject doing the organizing. In the first case state capitalism arises or the mere functional change of private
ownership of the means of production, in the second case socialism arrives or the transfer of this private property to the real, namely producing collective. Both
structures have the common element so to speak that they rise on the ruins of free competition, of the liberal market mechanism. But both structures display beyond this
all too formal similarity the vast difference, hushed up by social democracy, that socialism presupposes that revolution w hose very absence alone makes state
capitalism possible. The latter received its form through the two world wars, in which output was regulated from above for the first time since the manufacturing period.
It receives its content through the growing state­development of monopoly capital, through the transition of the previously subjective firm into the state as the now quite
officially and totally executive committee of the ruling class. State capitalism here combines full, indeed sharpened exploitation with the most drastic changes in previous
private industry; all this with an illusion of collectivism. This illusion can even mean that the capitalist economy controlled from above claims to be socialist; it did this in
the various fascist coups d'état, but it also does so, often well­meaning but always wrong, in reformist terms. As in the old shortsighted delusion of the ‘peaceful
growing of capitalism into socialism’, this Bernsteinism which has already been dreadfully refuted twice, in 1914 and 1933. In a period of prosperity and a laboriously
maintained peace, capitalism (which constantly has within it the opposite of prosperity and peace) may pose as liberal again, after it has nevertheless shown its
grotesque fascist face; but an intensification of the state is always immanent in the controlled profit economy of monopolism. And in the socialist economy this
intensification, contrary to all popular opinion, does not appear because this economy is controlled in socialist terms but because it touches on state capitalism or —
with a view to a supposed short cut — makes instrumental use of it and incorporates it. It is of detective­utopian importance to sketch on the horizon the changes of
which state capitalism could be capable if it is allowed time and space. And in fact everything stays as it was in the main point, in exploitation, and the crises immanent in
capitalism are simply wrapped up in gun­cotton. The first change would concern the market, which would cease to be a free, open one. Human beings no longer face
one another as agents of barter, but the total state contains exclusively those who give the orders and those who are dominated. Into its hands passes the control over
price fixing and the quality of goods which had