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Every body's political:What is What.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London; onstable.; 1944Description: 380 PSubject(s): DDC classification:
  • 320 Sha
Summary: If it is reading this book will be a waste of time, and it should be exchanged at once for a detective story or some pleasant classic, according to your taste. For though the book is in a sense a detective story inasmuch as it is an attempt to track down some of the mistakes that have landed us in a gross misdistribution of domestic income and in two world wars in twentyfive years, yet if we have neither the political capacity nor the goodwill to remedy them, we had better not torment ourselves uselessly by making ourselves conscious of them. Better cling to our delusions and keep our hope and elfrespect, making the most of our vices and follies before they destroy us. I grant that the case against us seems strongly fortified by the fact that just now the nations are engaged in a horrible reciprocity of slaughter and destruction. You have only to read Gulliver's Travels to learn from the king of Brobdingnag how English history may on its bare facts lead to the conclusion that mankind is incorrigibly villainous. When Swift threw off the mask of the king, he described a Utopia ruled by horses, in which men were vermin and were not called men but Yahoos. Yet Swift did not know the whole truth of the condition of mankind, nor did Goldsmith, though his Deserted Village shews how he concluded that "honor sinks where commerce long prevails." Not until the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx tore the reports of our factory inspectors from our unread bluebooks and revealed Capitalism in all its atrocity, did Pessimism and Cynicism reach their blackest depth. He proved up to the hilt that capital in its pursuit of what he called Mehrwerth, which we translate as Surplus Value (it includes rent, interest, and commercial profit), is ruthless, and will stop at nothing, not even at mutilation and massacre, white and black slavery, drugging and drinking, if they promise a shilling per cent more than the dividends of philanthropy. Before Marx there had been plenty of Pessimism. The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is full of it. Shakespear in King Lear, in Timon of Athens, in Coriolanus, got to it and stuck there. So did Swift and Goldsmith.
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If it is reading this book will be a waste of time, and it should be exchanged at once for a detective story or some pleasant classic, according to your taste. For though the book is in a sense a detective story inasmuch as it is an attempt to track down some of the mistakes that have landed us in a gross misdistribution of domestic income and in two world wars in twentyfive years, yet if we have neither the political capacity nor the goodwill to remedy them, we had better not torment ourselves uselessly by making ourselves conscious of them. Better cling to our delusions and keep our hope and elfrespect, making the most of our vices and follies before they destroy us.
I grant that the case against us seems strongly fortified by the fact that just now the nations are engaged in a horrible reciprocity of slaughter and destruction. You have only to read Gulliver's Travels to learn from the king of Brobdingnag how English history may on its bare facts lead to the conclusion that mankind is incorrigibly villainous. When Swift threw off the mask of the king, he described a Utopia ruled by horses, in which men were vermin and were not called men but Yahoos. Yet Swift did not know the whole truth of the condition of mankind, nor did Goldsmith, though his Deserted Village shews how he concluded that "honor sinks where commerce long prevails."
Not until the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx tore the reports of our factory inspectors from our unread bluebooks and revealed Capitalism in all its atrocity, did Pessimism and Cynicism reach their blackest depth. He proved up to the hilt that capital in its pursuit of what he called Mehrwerth, which we translate as Surplus Value (it includes rent, interest, and commercial profit), is ruthless, and will stop at nothing, not even at mutilation and massacre, white and black slavery, drugging and drinking, if they promise a shilling per cent more than the dividends of philanthropy. Before Marx there had been plenty of Pessimism. The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is full of it. Shakespear in King Lear, in Timon of Athens, in Coriolanus, got to it and stuck there. So did Swift and Goldsmith.

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