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Updated: June 24, 2025
The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of their existence.
The 'late Marxist' sees them all ... not as subjects for disinterested intellectual inquiry but as forms of social control." Many in Europe feel that the above paragraph might as well have been written about Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Reduced to bare-bones materialism, it is amoral, if not immoral.
William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons"; but in the eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same motive because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.
It imagines that from a theoretical discussion there will arise such ameliorations that its vassalage will be gradually abolished." The belief here appears that a steady, continuous, and marked improvement in the position of the working class would necessarily lead to its overtaking automatically the rapidly increasing power of capitalism.
Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed to use them; and there the matter would have ended.
They assert that this class war is already upon us and can only be ended when capitalism is entirely destroyed and all the machines, mills, mines, railroads and other private property used in production are confiscated, expropriated or taken over by the workers.
Even now both friends and opponents see in the growth of State socialism the gradual formation of that transitional stage that leads from capitalism to socialism. The syndicalist and anarchist alone fail to see here any drift toward socialism; they see only a growing tyranny creating a class of favored civil servants, who are divorced from the actual working class.
And the attitude of the Radicals of the present British government is the same as that of capitalist collectivists elsewhere. However certain vested interests may suffer, there is nowhere any tendency to weaken capitalism as a whole. Capitalism is to be the chief beneficiary of the new movement. There are many differences of opinion, however, as to the ultimate effect of the collectivist program.
When the nation finally took possession absolutely in perpetuity of all the lands, machinery, and capital after the final collapse of private capitalism, there must have been doubtless some sort of final settling and balancing of accounts between the people and the capitalists whose former properties had been nationalized. How was that managed? What was the basis of final settlement?"
By maintaining or creating small farms then, or providing for a system of long leases and small-sized allotments of governmentally owned land, guaranteed against any raise in rents during the term of the lease, capitalist governments may gradually succeed in firmly attaching the larger part of the struggling small farmers and farm tenants to capitalism.
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