5. Marxism as a movement became unfaithful to
Marxism as a theory because of the success of capital-
ism in sustaining a relative prosperity—even if uncer-
tain and discontinuous in times of acute crisis. Over
the years, the numbers of the unemployed and poverty-
stricken decreased instead of increasing. Real wages
increased. Nonetheless, in order to achieve and sustain
this relative affluence the state or government had to
intervene in the economy with controls and plans
foreign to the spirit and structure of a free market
economy. The result has been a type of mixed econ-
omy—a private and public (often hidden) sector, un-
anticipated by the theorists both of capitalism and
socialism. It turns out that the free enterprise economy
of capitalism and the fully planned and planning col-
lectivist economy of socialism are neither exclusive nor
exhaustive possible social alternatives, and that in the
political struggles of democracy the issue was rarely
posed as a stark choice between
either a free economy
or a planned economy,
either capitalism
or socialism,
but rather as a choice between
“more or less.”
