Editing Oligarchy (section)

===[[File:CollectiveLeadership.png]]  ''Collective Leadership''===
A term denoting the joint management of the state/decision-making in communist parties with the help of a limited circle of influential figures

[[File:Schumpeter.png]] '''Schumpeterism'''

'''Joseph Alois Schumpeter''' was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.

Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized creative destruction, a term coined by Werner Sombart. His magnum opus is considered to be ''Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.''


Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably ''Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy''. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to [[File:SocialistCorporatism.png]]corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.

"Intellectuals" are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook on capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent, and protests.

Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into "liberal capitalism". Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of "laborism". This will exacerbate "creative destruction" (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.