"The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question"
About this Quote
Clark opens with a provocation that sounds almost juridical: before we argue about reforms, we must decide whether socialism even deserves a seat at the table. The phrasing is strategic. “Has a right to exist” doesn’t ask whether socialism is useful or popular; it frames it as a claimant whose legitimacy must be granted (or denied) by a higher authority. That authority, in Clark’s telling, is “recent economic theory” - not parliaments, strikes, or moral outrage, but a supposedly neutral science.
The subtext is defensive and disciplinary. Clark is writing in an era when industrial capitalism was visibly unstable: mass labor conflict, rising inequality, and the growing credibility of socialist movements. By translating socialism’s moral indictment into a technical question - “Are its allegations…true?” - he tries to drag the debate from the street into the seminar room, where the terms of proof are narrower and the burden shifts. “Fraud” is the loaded word: it concedes what workers and socialists felt (that something was rigged) while implying that the feeling may be an error correctable by proper analysis.
His intent isn’t just to refute socialism; it’s to immunize capitalism by recasting exploitation as a matter of misunderstood pricing and distribution. The promise to give an “exact answer” signals the late-19th-century confidence that economics could function like physics: clean models, clear verdicts, minimal politics. That confidence is also the tell. Clark’s question performs objectivity while smuggling in a premise: if theory can vindicate the system, dissent becomes not a competing ethics but a factual mistake.
The subtext is defensive and disciplinary. Clark is writing in an era when industrial capitalism was visibly unstable: mass labor conflict, rising inequality, and the growing credibility of socialist movements. By translating socialism’s moral indictment into a technical question - “Are its allegations…true?” - he tries to drag the debate from the street into the seminar room, where the terms of proof are narrower and the burden shifts. “Fraud” is the loaded word: it concedes what workers and socialists felt (that something was rigged) while implying that the feeling may be an error correctable by proper analysis.
His intent isn’t just to refute socialism; it’s to immunize capitalism by recasting exploitation as a matter of misunderstood pricing and distribution. The promise to give an “exact answer” signals the late-19th-century confidence that economics could function like physics: clean models, clear verdicts, minimal politics. That confidence is also the tell. Clark’s question performs objectivity while smuggling in a premise: if theory can vindicate the system, dissent becomes not a competing ethics but a factual mistake.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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