PROSPEROUS UNDER CAPITALISM.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 5

PROSPEROUS UNDER CAPITALISM.

(To The Editor.) Sir, —The present case for Socialism is founded on the claim that Capitalism has failed. All the ills of the present time are ascribed to this cause, and we are told that the only -way of escape is through Socialism. After having this argument impressed upon us it comes as a startling surprise to be told by a leading Socialist economist that Socialism makes such slow progress because Capitalism has been too successful. That admission is made by Mr G. D. H. Cole, in a recent pamphlet, “'Some Essentials of Socialist Propaganda.” He agrees that the usual case made for the Capitalist system—the astonishing

increase in the world’s wealth and productive power, the rise in the standard of living, and the progress that has been made towards a more equitable distribution of wealth—is “a formidable defence in which is embodied much indisputable truth.”

It is the more formidable, ho says, because it plays upon the fear that Socialism would undo all these achievements and deprive those who had been able to acquire little property, of their belongings. Then comes this remarkable confession: ‘‘For, in an advanced country like Great Britain we have at least reached under Capitalism a point at which most people feel they have something to lose. Despite the submerged tenth and the chronically unempoyed, it is true that in nresent-day Great Britain the majority of people have something to lose.” Mr Cole concludes, therefore, that it is hopeless for Socialists to talk to the large masses of the working class who are comfortably placed, and particularly the best paid and most securely employed sections of that class, of the impending collapse of Capitalism and to tell them that they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Such claptrap, he declares, appeals only to the ‘‘intellectuals” and to the hopelessly ‘‘down and out.” There is no room in modern Britain for a policy which depends on its appeal to the desperate and the destitute. “We must build (Socialism),” he said, “on the men and women who are definitely better, fed, better housed, better clothed, better educated and far more conscious that they have something to lose as well as something to gain than their fathers and grandfathers were.”— Yours, etc., N.Z. WELFARE LEAGUE. Wellington, 29/7/32.