E-mail and links on Problems of Capitalism and Socialism, Index Page
Between Karl Marx and Adam Smith: the legacy of Friedrich List
The Irish Famine, a Victorian "ethnic cleansing"
The Industrial Revolutionaries (how capitalism goes on subverting itself)
The benefits of unfree Markets
Balfour - A Fragment On Progress
Goldsmith on Europe and Shareholder power
The New World Order and Irrational rationalism
The journal started in the 1970s under the name “Problems of Communism”. No connection with the fancy CIA journal of the same name. The founders of this magazine were then Communists intent on salvaging a damaged but still powerful Leninist system. Over the years we concluded the system was in fact past saving, we mistrusted Gorbachev and regarded the sudden collapse of 1989 to 1991 as an unexpected bonus.
Increasingly we have come to see both Leninism and Fascism as entirely rational and predictable reactions to the “liberal” world order that chose to bring about the pointless carnage of the Great War. It was mainstream politicians who decided that politics should henceforth be conducted on the basis of power and mass slaughter.
Politicians of the left and right merely followed the logic of this change.
A humanist rejection of the “age of extremes” would be fair enough, if it recognised that these extremes in part began within the Anglo-American free-market tradition and in part were a reaction to its aggressive infiltration of all other cultures. The United States was founded by genocide and the theft of lands from relatively defenceless native tribes. The same was true of Canada, Australia & New Zealand (where Charles Darwin was blandly expecting the native Maori to go the way of the native rat - he really did put it that bluntly.) Concentration camps are also a British invention.
Though the political structures of European Leninism have collapsed, the modern world is much closer to what the Bolsheviks wanted in 1917 than what any other government wanted in 1917. Sexual equality, freedom of sexual choice, the abolition of colonial empires, the breaking down of rigid barriers between the middle class and working class, governments to take responsibility for the welfare of their citizens, these were not standard ideas back then.
The Great War began because of rivalries between France, Russia and Germany. Its formal cause was German and Austria rejection of the Serbian claim to Bosnia-Hergetzovenia. But it became a war of outstanding horror, because Britain’s ruling class chose to see it as a chance to smash Germany, when Germany showed every sign of winning a competition based on trade and fair competition.
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E-mail and links
Contact us by E-mail, BevinSoc@aol.com. Just a thank-you if you found anything useful would be gratifying.
Click on underlined text to get back to The Ernest Bevin Society
Or try Labour and Trade Union Review (some articles from back issues available)
Or find out about our Irish friends at Athol Books, Web address http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~athol-st/
Or religion analysed at The Heresiarch, http://www.keenan91.freeserve.co.uk/
Articles from previous issues of Problems of Capitalism and Socialism
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