MUTUAL AID. By Peter Kropotkin, with Foreword by Ashley Montague, and including “The Struggle for Existence” by T. H. Huxley. Extending Horizons Press, Boston, 1955, pp. 362, $3.00. This new issue of Kropotkin’s work on Mutual Aid, first published at the turn of the century, not only satisfies the need for its continued availability but — in some measure — also helps to combat the current neo-Malthusianism and the renewed, though futile, attempts to present capitalist competition as a “law of nature.” Provoked by Huxley’s belief that in nature and society the struggle for existence is one of all...
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Monopoly in America: the Government As Promoter. By Walter Adams and Horace M. Gray. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1955, 221 pp. $3.50. This latest addition of the enormous literature on monopoly and competition brings the story up to date without adding anything essential to the problem and its “solution” save the warning that monopoly will lead to totalitarianism unless stopped by government intervention. Like most authors in this field, Adams and Gray see nothing wrong with capitalism but condemn alleged violations of “proper” capitalist practices. In their view, monopoly is bad because with competition it destroys our democratic...
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Classical economy, whose beginning is usually traced to Adam Smith, found its best expression and also its end in David Ricardo. Ricardo, as Marx wrote, “made the antagonism of class-interest, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigation, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of nature. But by this start the science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass,” for a further critical development could lead only to the recognition of the contradictions and limitations of the capitalist system of production. By doing what could no...
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The Present As History. By Paul M. Sweezy. Monthly Review Press (376pp., $5.00); Mr. Sweezy, an editor of Monthly Review and author of a highly regarded but quite muddled Theory of Capitalist Development, presents in this book a collection of book reviews and essays written firing the last fifteen years. Aside from three short and insignificant papers, all the reprinted material is still available in its original publication in various magazines. Its reappearance in book form is difficult to understand, particularly because the review, the editorial, and even the space-restricted essay are not the best media for the consideration...
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Stalin’s Frame-Up System and the Moscow Trials. By Leon Trotsky. With a Foreword by Joseph Hansen. Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1950. (144 pp.) This booklet, published on the tenth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination, contains Trotsky’s closing speech at the Hearing of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry first printed by Harper & Brothers in 1937. In his foreword, Joseph Hansen finds this reminder of the Moscow Trials particularly apt because of the series of trials of prominent Communists, such as Rajk and Kostov, since the end of the second world war. “Without knowing the truth about the Moscow trials,”...
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Review of Stalin and German Communism. A Study in the Origins of the State Party. By Ruth Fischer, Harvard University Press, 1948, 687 pp., $80; The post-war situation with the new imperialist rivalries brought forth an American boom in anti-bolshevik literature. The latest of several big volumes, starting with Trotsky’s Stalin biography is Ruth Fischer’s work on the relationship between Stalin and the German Communist Party. To deal with Stalinism in this manner us particularly apt, as the competition between America and Russia concerns control over other countries. The “rape” of smaller nations by greater powers is a modern...
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The Story of the German Working-Class Movement (Review) Hammer or Anvil. The Story of the German Working-Class Movement. By Evelyn Anderson (207pp.; V. Gollancz, London). This short history of the German labor movement from the time of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws to its extinction under the Hitler regime deals with both the political and trade-union aspects of the movement and is written from the same point of view that prevailed in those organizations. There is little criticism and what there is is directed only to the late phases of the movement. Some errors of fact appear here and there with...
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The Road to Serfdom. By Friedrich A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press, 1944 (250 pp.; $2.75). Full Employment in a Free Society. By William H. Beveridge. W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1945. (429pp; $3,75). Both these books are dedicated to the “socialists of all parties.” Hayek wants to discourage them, Beveridge tries to offer encouragement. Both writers speak in the name of science and deal with the reality of, and the need for, capitalistic planning. But what appears to Hayek as the road to serfdom seems to Beveridge the highway to a free society. Russia and Germany...
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The Economics of Control. Principles of Welfare Economics. By Abba P. Lerner. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1944 (428 pp.; $3.75); It is difficult to review Professor Lerner’s study, not because it is intricate, but because it seems so superfluous. As trying as it is to read this work it is almost inconceivable that Lerner could spent twelve years on its preparation and writing; particularly these last twelve years of crisis, depression, fascism and war. And yet it is quite understandable from the academic point of view, that is, from the position which with regard to economics and politics,...
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The Growth of American Thought. By Merle Curti. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1943. (848pp., $5.00) Well written, interestingly constructed and partly original in its researches, Curti’s book is nevertheless a dull affair. This is not the writer’s fault, but results from the fact that American thought has not grown in depth but has been a mere accumulation of detailed knowledge incapable of changing the general climate of opinion. Save in technology, the whole intellectual development from colonial times to the present war has not been very impressive. However unwillingly, Curti’s book demonstrates the intellectual poverty which accompanied the...
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