ECONOMICS IN DECLINE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22414, 30 May 1938, Page 5

ECONOMICS IN DECLINE

TO TBB BDITOB OF TKB FBBBB. Sir, —The observations of your correspondent, C. F. Saunders, on your leading article, “Economics in Decline,” will be approved by all those who make an intelligent approach to those fundamental economic problems confronting society to-day. Mr Saunders’s quotation from Marx sums up tlie position admirably, and, as a member of the Workers’ Educational Association for a number of years, I express surprise that the secretary should deprecate the falling away of interest in the economics class; for what else could be expected? Many people have the idea that the function •of the Workers’ Educational Association is the furtherance of radical and progressive thought amongst the workers. Nothing, is further from the truth. Just as the press is an institution consolidating the interests of the capitalist class (which our Labour Party politicians forlornly overlook), so also is the Workers’ Educational Association an institution designed to teach bourgeois economics and retard any revolutionary movement in the ranks of the workers. So, from my experience in Workers’ Educational Association economics, Marx’s words, “that the people deserted with loud peals of irreverent laughter,” is certainly true. The antics of bourgeois economists apologising for a system and attempting to explain away the various contradictious inherent in it, has progressively reduced the discussion of economics not to a matter of serious study but to one of burlesque and finally to a state of partial liquidation. That all these institutions, created' for the purpose of discussing economics, should become deserted marks a definite progressive step as far as the people are concerned, and they are gradually turning, to the real economics of the Left.

Might I suggest that to make economics once again a real live issue the Workers’ Educational Association institute a Marxist class. —Yours, etc,, STUDENT. May 26, 1938.