Search

In this article the author presents his views on Communism and Socialism in the U.S. A utopia, in which wealth would be distributed for the equal benefit of all, is not for men, because they are men, no matter under whose rule they exist, moreover, there is no possible way of distributing wealth to men in equal shares. Those who advocated such a system were honest, sincere thinkers, who put it forward as an alternative to the system of an unequal distribution of wealth. It ought not to be necessary to point out that the Socialists themselves have always been the bitterest critics of those who enter the political field, who would try to bring it about increment by increment, and temporize with the catalytic principle. The student has only to read the works of Philosophical Anarchists and Socialists at the time when economist Karl Marx published his paper, to realize that the bitterest controversies raged among them for many years as to what gospel should be advocated and the means by which it could be established.

This article focuses on a paper which represents one segment of a larger inquiry into the political attitudes and propaganda susceptibilities of non-Communists countries behind the Iron Curtain. The segment was selected for presentation because, among other things, its findings illuminate an opinion area of Soviet Satellite life which has generally been neglected in the literature on the subject. They are, moreover, considerably at variance with the kind of inferences that most Americans would probably draw from the hitherto available facts about Satellite Communism. Specifically, it is perhaps safe to wager that most people who know anything about the evils and sufferings associated with Satellite Communism would almost automatically assume that the non-Communist sufferers share inimical attitudes toward all adherents of their nation's Communist Party; for it is the Party, after all, that has been the immediate indigenous instrument of so-called Popular Democracy in Eastern Europe. But this assumption is proved fallacious by the data at hand which is collected from intensive interviews with escapees from Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The article discusses the emergence of privately owned corporate collectivities that have become the agent of new economic system in the U.S. These are political and legal systems that use contracts as a legal instrument to join the nation's largest corporations to the federal government. The scientific and technological revolution leads to the union of entrepreneurship to organization and has changed the nature of government into a positive state. As an ultimate economic policymaker, the Supreme Court had established corporativism during the Depression. The establishment of the Council of Economic Advisers resulted in the active management of the economy and has been considered as one of the significant changes in the U.S. constitution.

The article presents the author's discussion about the role of communism in the American democracy. His main objective is to present a thesis showing that the fear of communism may damage the essential part of the American democracy. He mentions the forces within the framework of the American society such as the cultural, political, artistic and intellectual life and their relation to the external environment. He also discusses the effects of these forces in the political and academic community in the United States.

The article focuses on the division of labor between government and private enterprises in the U.S. In a discussion of public versus private enterprise one must be careful not to be trapped by the legal concept of property. The author is not discussing private versus public ownership; for, as many have recognized, legal ownership and economic control are different things. One can conceive, at least academically, of a system where the stock of all corporations is largely or fully government owned but where the firms nevertheless are managed by independent managers free from centralized control or interference; and such a system would be much nearer the traditional picture of a free enterprise system than an order of complete private ownership restricted by rigid controls of prices, production, and investments. The confusion created by concealing the economic structure behind a false legal facade has made some naive observers mistake the Nazi economy for a capitalistic one. Goals of the social system must be stated if the discussion is to make sense. The author lists a number of goals, which are accepted in the present-day U.S. as the guiding ones, which includes: plenty, opportunity, continuity, security, choice, and freedom, and perhaps a few more.

The article presents comments of economists Calvin B. Hooper and William Orton on research related to collectivism, price and valuation problem in the Soviet Union conducted by researchers Alexander Gourvitch and Frank H. Knight. Hooper argues that Knight says in effect, that marginalisim which is synonymous with economic theory, is not applicable in a collective economy and the collective economy would mean the end of liberty. Gourvitch, on the other hand, describes the operation of the system of cost accounting in the Soviet economy. Orton argues that current skepticism as to the possibility of a rational economic system under collectivism, whether fascist or socialist, falls into two schools which may be roughly indicated by analogy. Orton examines very briefly the marginalism in conjunction with the equilibrium of the Austrians. Gourvitch has given an illuminating and thoughtful statement of the price-making process under Soviet conditions. The question of prices is one of the most important and also one of the darkest in the entire field of communist economics.

The article suggests that the problems of collectivism are not problems of economic theory, but political problems, and that the economic theorist, as such, has little or nothing to say about them. This holds true whether one consider the problem to be the scientific one of predicting what the collectivist economy would be like in structure and activities, or whether one looks at it practically from the standpoint of the right objectives to be pursued and the right principles to be followed in realizing them. The exposition will begin with abstract principles with respect to which the propositions stated are rigorously true, and proceed to more concrete aspects of the problem, pointing out some of the broader probable differences of content to which the same principles would apply. It will thus fall naturally into three divisions, since the concrete problems facing a collectivist economy must be considered under the same two aspects recognized in all economic theory; a preliminary stage assuming stationary conditions, and a second stage including the phenomena of conditions changing cumulatively, cyclically, or erratically.

This article explores the basis and extent of collectivism in the U.S. in support of the country's involvement in the World War I in Europe. How much of the near-socialism of this war is temporary and how much, if any, will he permanent? Some of the needs that have given rise to collectivist policies have been created by the war, but others have been merely revealed. The net result is to give social policy a definiteness of objective it has not had before in America, and this effect will not quickly evaporate. The need of a more coherent social organization is probably not less great in times of nominal peace, merely less obvious and less immediate, and it tends to be met by methods which, because they are more leisurely, involve less centralization and less compulsion.

The article examines the economic origins of fascism. The complete military defeat of fascist Europe has postponed a just historical interpretation of fascism for twenty years. Italian fascism, even in the immediate aftermath of 1945, continued to be occasionally seen for what it was, a distinct system of economic and political government, either revolutionary or, at the very least, with revolutionary potential. The liberal interpretation of fascism into which the Western world relapsed after 1945 was a pleasantly undemanding one. Such an interpretation was able to flourish because it was planted only in the topsoil of diplomatic history. The only rival to the Western liberal interpretation of fascism until recently has been the orthodox Marxist interpretation. This had the immense advantage of not neglecting economic history and consequently came much nearer to a true appreciation of the nature of fascist society. The idea that fascism is the last stage of monopoly capitalism developed in the 1920's and has not subsequently been seriously modified.

This article points out some of the methodological deficiencies exhibited by the current literature on comparative economic systems to which students at present are exposed. It is obvious that the criterion of market efficiency involves a sort of egocentric myopia of which one should be wary in any serious discussion of normative economics. It is even more obvious that this approach is worse than meaningless and useless when attempting to compare and evaluate totally different social and economic systems. Such an undertaking requires not only an explicit, normative model of the Good Society and the Good Man but also entails the necessity of attempting an evaluation of any and all important social and cultural institutions and their relationships to the whole social system. In conclusion it can be said that it is hardly ever made explicit whether the basis for certain classifications of different systems is "ideal-typical" or "real-typical" or some inadmissible combination of the two. Furthermore, simply to speak of mixed systems, especially within the too narrow economic context, does not get us very far either, particularly if no "ideal-typical" polar concepts are established simultaneously to permit plausible determination of the various "mixes" possible. In this age of empirical studies and attempts at verification it is unfortunate that such lines of investigation, which also isolate the economic features of a system from the social milieu, are so dominant.

This article presents a list of recent publications in the field of economics. Some of them are "The Economic Schools and the Teaching of Political Economy in France," by C. Gide, "The Moral Factor in Economic Law," by W. Richmond, "An Introduction to Social Philosophy," by J.S. Mackenzie, "Locke's Theory of Property," by D.G. Ritchie, "Fabian Essays in Socialism," edited by G.B. Shaw, "Our Destiny: The Influence of Socialism on Morals and Religion," by L. Gronlund, "How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York," by J.A. Riis and "The Progress of Socialism in the United States," by M. Kaufmann.

The author reflects on the psychological aspects of totalitarianism. He argues that totalitarianism represents a government to keep one man in power. The author stated different ideas, principles and viewpoints on the collectivism of democracy. He believes that totalitarianism gives an exterior for a social life in which the lower instincts dominate.

After 15 years of hot and cold war it would not have been surprising if the burden of research reported in a volume on political communication dealt with sykewar and Communism. While the actual balance is much more rounded, the articles falling in this important field show a sophistication of analysis and methodology reflecting the constant concern with it for so long. In this section the extent to which the behavior of victims to intense Communist pressure is conditioned by their awareness of an imaginary supporting audience far away has been stressed. The distinctive character of uniform and controlled, (rather than multi-sided and uncontrolled) communication has been described. The operating principles of Soviet foreign mass propaganda and some of its strengths and weaknesses have been looked at. A very different code of Communist propaganda has also been presented, that was used on captive victims. The section also looks at the ways in which one can predict from wartime and similar propaganda, what the enemy intends to do, working from knowledge of his code of propaganda strategy.

This article presents an approach to the study of the economic behavior of collectivities, one that places a central emphasis on the structure of political decision-making institutions, as of August 1971. While one can recognize the gravity of the fiscal problems besetting many state and local governments, the existing literature on revenue sharing cannot help but prove somewhat puzzling to students of public finance. Using an analytic framework designed to describe models of collective choice, it was found that, for a reasonably broad class of processes of collective decision making, revenue sharing is precisely equivalent to a specific set of lump sum grants directly to the individual members of the collectivity. However, there are also a number of not implausible circumstances under which the equivalence theorem does not hold and for which revenue sharing may allow the realization of outcomes not attainable under any set of grants to individuals. In assessing the empirical plausibility of the equivalence condition, it must be recognized that any actual revenue sharing will take place in a growing system, one in which for a number of reasons state and local budgets are probably going to rise fast enough to call for increases in tax rates.

Mainly on the strength of his unpublished doctoral dissertation, professor Ian Matley has become known, both in his country and Soviet Union, as an important observer of trends in Soviet geography. Therefore, the recent article on Marxist geography, representing a selection from and an updating of the material in his dissertation, was a welcome event for both soviet specialists and geographers in general. Matley's article does not appear to contain a few notable misinterpretations. Metlay's articles emphasize on the role of natural environment so strongly that the editor of the Marxist journal in which it appeared felt compelled to express in print his reservations about it.