At the outset of this exercise, I had mentioned that Marx, a pure democrat, would have been happiest today in studying the experience of Switzerland. Here is a society as close to being classless as one can find on earth. Its people have the highest incomes, and lowest incidence of poverty and crime. Four separate ethnic groups speaking four separate languages live harmoniously within the same governmental structure. There are social problems, of course, but virtually no palpable hostility between social groups. They do so by living under the most democratic constitution on earth, one that guarantees the kind of active democracy Marx argued would be necessary to produce a classless society. All important decisions are made by national initiative and referendum. There is no republican intermediation, no Swiss Beltway. All the lawyers, accountants and lobbyists in the world are helpless in trying to complicate life for the Swiss, who have direct control over policy. There is no Swiss "head of state," except for a rotating figurehead whose name never gets into newspapers outside Switzerland. Marx would take one look at Switzerland today and say, "See, I told you. The state has withered away."

Would the Swiss system work elsewhere? Why wouldn't it? Why isn't it tried elsewhere? Because everywhere else in the world there are vested interests which do not wish to give up their control over policy to ordinary people. In early 1992, Ross Perot seemed to be promising that he would subject all important domestic decisions to a national referendum, via electronic town halls, and that he would reduce the federal tax code to a single sheet of paper. His popularity soared in a spontaneous combustion of ordinary people. At the time, I told him the Establishment would do anything it had to do to stop him from winning the presidency -- first character assassination, then real bullets. After being driven from the race, he retooled, came back into the race with totally conventional ideas, adding new layers of complexity to the tax code, for example, and the character assassination stopped. His public support plunged and has not recovered since.

Will the world become more democratic in the years ahead? Because it is so obviously good when it is tried, it is bound to happen. It would require a constitutional amendment here, but that should not be an insurmountable problem. The Establishment would be horrified by the idea, but if given a say in the matter, the broad electorate would prefer the idea of having a more active democracy at the federal level. It would get around the problem of having political parties promise the voters sunshine before the elections, delivering moonshine afterward. Democracy cannot work if politicians do not keep most of their promises.

In the immediate future, the Republican Party is in a better position than the Democratic Party to offer an entirely new deal to the American people -- a party realignment that casts the GOP as the party of opportunity, with the Democrats cast as the party of security. The GOP, after all, is out of power and has been as a national party for 40 years, which is the last time it controlled the White House and the Congress. To accomplish this the GOP has to be willing to put aside smaller government as its primary philosophical objective, aiming instead for the loftier goal of a fluid society (which Marx correctly saw would lead to the withering of the state). The GOP, which has not courted the black vote in national politics for 40 years or more, would have to do so if there is to be any meaning to making the United States a classless society -- which because of the legacy of slavery, it has never been. The Republican Party has for generations conceded the black vote to the Democrats, who have thereby had 12% of the population on which to practice their social experiments. As Representative Charles Rangel puts it: "In the banquet of the Democratic Party, the black folks get to sit next to the kitchen. In the banquet of the Republican Party, black folks sit in the kitchen."

These are the people who benefit most by having tax rates and regulations which stand as barriers to new enterprise pushed aside.²¹ Professor Reuven Brenner of McGill University in Montreal made this point in a paper on taxation prepared early this month for the new government in Ottawa, "Taxation in General, of Capital Gains In Particular." Brenner argues that a high capital gains tax produces "a static, frozen, stratified society," whereas a "lowered capital gains tax could facilitate increased movement within the distribution."

A tax that prevents or slows down such movement is a far more progressive tax than one which would impose, let us say, a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the rich, and a 10 percent marginal tax on the poor. For when the revenues from the 50 percent tax on the small number or richer people is redistributed among the large number of the poorer, that will not allow any of the poorer to become rich. They become somewhat less poor, but still stay at the bottom of the ladder. In contrast, when there are more chances of obtaining credit with a lowered capital gains tax, the talented poor have greater hopes of moving up, something that progressive taxation, no matter how generous can never give.²²

A political effort aimed at producing a fluid society cannot be half-hearted, as it faces the entrenched power of the established order. It must be a Lincolnesque labor of love. The gravest problem facing American society today is not the federal budget deficit, health care, unemployment, education nor crime. It is the underclass, which exists because it has been left behind in the competition between the two great political parties. As long as its problems are not solved, its poison spreads throughout all of society, producing the secondary problems that confound the ruling establishment -- budget deficits, health care, unemployment, education, crime. It has long ago ceased to be a "black problem," as the hopelessness of the black underclass has extended far into the developing white underclass. The moral authority of the ruling class has degenerated as well, submerged in a tide of cultural decadence. The people know what to do, of course. It is their political leaders who need guidance. For all his faults, Karl Marx figured this out a long time ago, seeing that the internal contradictions of capitalism could only be resolved, if at all, by greater applications of popular democracy. He wasn't a religious man, as we all know,²³ but he wasn't simply driven by a desire for fame or fortune. Nor did he believe mankind in general was driven by acquisitiveness: "Man's nature," he wrote as a young man, "makes it possible for him to reach his fulfillment only by working for the perfection and welfare of his society."²⁴

There is clearly room for improvement in ours. We should not be too quick to congratulate ourselves on the defeat of Marx, along with Marxism. Our world society is much more fluid than it was in his day, but the process of renewal is not guaranteed. The forces of reaction that he correctly identified have to be conquered by each succeeding generation, a monumental task that now faces ours.

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