Beyond Capitalism and Socialism in Africa

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Abstract
Ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism is more than 150 years old in the industrial countries of Europe and North America. Its gradual extension to other parts of the world during the twentieth century has entailed a basic alteration of the terms of debate. Within the leading industrial countries, partisans have debated both the economic merits of privately-owned productive capital, and the justice of profit-taking as a right of such ownership. In socialist thought, ‘social justice’ has meant that the whole product of labour belongs to those who actually produce it; hence its value should be realised by the producers themselves, either individually, or collectively through public institutions. On that basis, socialists have promised to construct an efficient, humane, and just social order. With equal conviction, proponents of capitalism hold that no alternative economic system produces as large a volume of goods, jobs, and other material benefits for as high a percentage of the population; that social inequality is inevitable, regardless of the property system in effect or the organisation of economic production; and that justice, in any case, is always individual, never ‘social’.

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