Science in History, by J.D. Bernal

[p029] Science in History, THIS big book by Professor Bernal has been aptly described by the News Chronicle reviewer: ‘His facts are encyclopedic, making this book an indispensable reference source —though ‘indispensable’ is a strong word. It is also a monumental de- monstration that, for a Marxist historian, an encyclopedic memory for scientific and historical facts is not enough. If this review by a Marxist journal of his would-be Marxist history of science saddens the Professor, he should feel amply compensated by the fulsome praise his book has received from the bourgeois Press. Professor Bernal is a Stalin Peace Prize winner, a noted physicist who has made important contributions to the field of X-ray spectrography and has the distinction of being des- cribed by a notable member of the ruling class as ‘the wisest man on earth’. In spite of this he remains to this day King Street’s champion whitewasher of bureaucratic terror in east Europe and Russia. Recently he wrote letters to the Press reporting the popular and professional support for Kadar which, he alleged, he observed on a recent ‘friendly visit’ to Hungary. However it is perhaps significant that he did not bring his ‘friend’ Professor Lukacs and his family back to Britain for a short holiday and a Press conference. But ‘Science in History’ must be judged on its merits as a scientific study, not on the sillier antics of its author in political affairs. The book purports to be a Marxist history of science and if it had lived up to this purpose it would certainly have satisfied a long-felt need. Yet, though it covers a gigantic field of knowledge and records a thousand and one important facts of the historical achievements of science, it is, as a whole, a pretty poor book, superficial, disjointed and inconsistent—an enormous string of apparently related facts and half-truths about science and society which passes for Marxist history in some quarters, but which serves only to prejudice Marxism in the eyes of serious thinkers. Marxism does not consist, as Bernal seems to imagine, of recording correlations between the problems with which scientists of different societies were preoccupied and those societies’ cur- rent economic and technical interests. One wonders if Bernal has ever heard of the significance of class struggle in history. Many bourgeois historians of science recognize and record these correlations and many of them have made a better job of it than Bernal. Vv It would have been easy to exemplify Bernal’s eclectic addic- tion (that is just the right word) to Marxism from a dozen different chapters, but it will perhaps be most instructive to consider his ‘corrections’, in the second edition, of his earlier estimates of Stalin’s contributions to social science. How a leading communist scientist reacted to the crisis of the Com- munist Parties is of great importance for young scientists who are looking for a comprehensive, scientific view of man, society and history. Bernal here had an opportunity to vin- dicate the Marxist method—but how lamentable is his failure. The first edition of ‘Science in History’, published in 1954, described Stalin’s achievements with all the usual superlatives employed in the communist Press of the early nineteen-fifties. Readers will remember how Bernal was, I think improperly, removed from the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for describing Stalin over Mos- cow radio as ‘the great coryphaeus of science’. In the preface to this second edition, Bernal writes: ‘On account of the great changes that have occurred since the death of Stalin, I have largely rewritten the section dealing with the Soviet Union and neighbouring countries, correcting, as far as information is available, errors in the first edition.” (My emphasis—J.D.) Now Bernal is a practised scientist and is supposed to know something about the collection and verification of informa- tion. We might therefore have expected Bernal, at the very least, to re-read the history of the Bolshevik Party, especially that period during which Stalin was consolidating his power, to study available documents of the controversies around Stalin’s policies and to re-read the views of such eminent historians as Deutscher and E. H. Carr, before publishing a

[p030] ‘reassessment’. There is not a shred of evidence that Bernal has read anything fresh except the :official Moscow ‘explana- tion’. For Bernal, as ever, the ‘available information’ in poli- tical matters appears to consist of Communist Party propa- ganda ‘releases’. For this rewriting of Bernal on Stalin consists of an almost word-for-word copy of the Pravda ‘explanations’. Reading it, one gets the uneasy feeling that he might at least have respected his readers and have rewritten and re- styled Khrushchev so that we could believe that his views are products of his own brain. But no—it ts all there: ‘The crimes and abuses of Stalin’s personal rule over the last twenty [!] years of his life.’ ‘Stalin’s life and deeds—his achievements no less than his crimes.’ Lenin had ‘admitted that mistakes would be made’. ‘Stalin must bear the main responsibility’ for these ‘mistakes’. (That lets out old B. and K.) We are then treated to the peculiar theme that the ‘first socialist State’ was created and governed dictatorially by a man ‘totally alien to the humane ideals of socialism’. ‘The conformity he demanded had a stifling effect on thought and checked the development of the arts and humanities.” (But apparently not science, though Bernal does ‘now regret’ defending the sacking of anti-Lysenko professors.) Stalin had ‘great abilities or his long rule would have brought the USSR to ruin’, but he ‘lacked the courage, the humility and the love of the people to trust people’ and so his ‘manner, which got more and more extravagant in his old age’ was ‘imitated by all persons in authority leading to . . [wait for it!] the cult of the individual.” However, we are pleased to learn that ‘since the XXth Congress, steps have been taken to preclude any return to the conditions of Stalin’s personal rule’. This pitiable regurgitation of the emptiness of the Khrush- chev ‘explanations’, which everyone with the merest acquaint- ance with Marxism can see are not explanations but the personal abuse of a ‘devil cult’, is offered, in a work called ‘Science in History’, as Bernal’s Marxist reassessment of Stalin. The merest child in Marxism would have at least asked a number of the standard questions. What social forces created Stalin and placed him in power? What were the interests and aims of the privileged social strata (those ‘in authority’ who ‘imitated him’) which Stalin served? Who will remove that social grouping which usurped the power of the working class and its soviets? To put forward the most elementary Marxist questions, to consider for a second the Marxist view of the role of the individual in history, blows to smithereens Bernal’s whole estimation of the Soviet Union and ridicules his notion of Khrushchev’s ‘revolutionary’ reforms. Of course this completely wrong estimation of modern Russia precludes the possibility of his being able to explain the reason for Russia’s economic progress and the success of Russian science. Bernal touches once on the politics of the matter. ‘It seems that the essential difference [the date is 1928] lay between Trotsky’s thesis of a world revolution and Stalin’s aim to establish socialism in one country. Stalin carried the majority of the party with him .. . fortunately so.’ This triviality, which any Communist Party member who has ever read a book in the last twelve months knows is an excellent exampie of Stalin’s fake history, is offered as a balanced and informa- tive contribution on the USSR in a long chapter called ‘The Social Sciences after the First World War’. However, if Bernal’s views on Russia today had been the product of a single ‘blind spot’ originating from too much Moscow junketing, we might be able to recommend the rest of this book. Unfortunately, the truth is that this section is all of a piece with the rest. Bernal knows much about physical science, a little about the bourgeois social sciences and scarcely anything about Marxism. A Marxist history of science still remains to be written. JOHN DANIELS Sanity on the H-Bomb Mutiny Against Madness, by Konni Zilliacus, MP. (Housmans, 1s.) _THE most significant debate at the Brighton Labour Party conference was that in which Mr Aneurin Bevan deserted his former Left-wing associates and lined up with the Right wing of the traditional executive on the key question of 186 British manufacture of H-bombs. The Gloucester by-election has not only taught the Tories a lesson but has also warned certain off-centre gentlemen of the Labour Party that a Labour government is not far off and that it is time to stop flirting with the Left to blackmail the Right if they are to make sure of a seat on the next Labour government’s front bench. Mr Bevan, for instance, was courageous enough to face the boos of his erstwhile supporters among the rank-and-file consti- tuency delegates, but not to face the Tory-minded Foreign Office diplomats as Labour’s Foreign Secretary mandated to junk policies fashioned by permanent officialdom. Vv Thank heaven, therefore, for the few Labour MPs who are more devoted to principles than to position. This new pamph- let, supported by thirty-three Labour MPs, has been prepared by Zilliacus as ammunition for a campaign to persuade the Labour Party and public opinion to oppose the Government’s policy of manufacturing H-bombs and of reliance on so-called ‘nuclear deterrents’. It is to be hoped that this campaign, which was launched before Brighton, will now be pressed forward with new urgency. The case which Zilliacus relentlessly piles up is that, on the Government’s own showing, Britain, with og without H-bombs of her own, cannot defend herself in this nuclear age. Reliance on nuclear ‘deterrents’ is therefore simply a misleading way of restating the Roman general’s ludicrous paradox: ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ This policy has always failed to bring peace and always will. Zilliacus believes that the ‘West’ and the Soviet Union both want peace but that they are driven to aggressive acts and war pre- parations by the psychosis of fear. Labour should break this psychosis of fear by unilateral renunciation of the manufac- ture of H-bombs when they come to office. Zilliacus, however, does not expose the basic class origins of this social psychosis and so fails to point the way towards ending it. I should add that Zilliacus is going to write in the next issue of Labour Review on ‘Socialism and War’, and we can expect him to go beyond the excellent propaganda of this pamphlet to a deeper study of the forces that are driving the world towards suicidal war. But you must also read ‘Mutiny Against Madness’. J.D. Mr Gluckstein’s China Mao’s China, by Ygael Gluckstein (Allen and Unwin, 40s.) BY NOW we all know what to expect from a study by Mr Gluckstein of a country ruled by a Communist Party—a mul- tiplicity of quotations from the home and foreign Press and a detailed analysis of statistical reports, all strung together with . remorseless efficiency to establish a conclusion he knew before his studies were even begun. So let us begin, like Mr. Gluck- stein (and the White Queen) with the conclusions first. Mao’s China is a State capitalist country ruled by a bureaucracy with ali the main characteristics of a class and being driven for- ward, inevitably and inexorably, by the same laws of capital accumulation as operate in modern monopoly capitalist coun- tries, suitably modified by the fact that the class of bureaucratic State capitalists fully but collectively owns and controls the means of production. The dust-jacket blurb (often the product of the author) sums up the book admirably: ‘It analyses the historical role of the Maoist bureau- cracy in its mighty efforts to break through the vicious circle of poverty, inefficiency and backwardness, to wake the sleep- ing giant of the Chinese nation, modernize the country and turn it into a great industrial and military power. Various facets of Mao’s regime are brought to bear on the central theme: land reform, forced ‘‘collectivization”, the subordina- tion of consumption to accumulation, bureaucratic manage- ment of industry, the increasing limitations of workers’ legal rights, the spreading of forced labour ...the differentiation of society into privileged and pariahs and the erection of totalitarian police dictatorship.’ In the social sciences it is possible to formulate many dif. ferent hypotheses, each dealing separately and specially with

[p031] one particular constellation of selected facts—and it is always impossible to set up an artificially controlled experiment for their verification. A book, especially a big book like ‘Mao’s China’, which is elaborating a hypothesis, will normally ana- lyse and select for inclusion that particular array of facts which most suitably fits in with that hypothesis—even though. especially in association with other facts deliberately left out, this array of facts may also be well used to illustrate some totally different hypothesis. Does this mean that it is impossible to verify any hypo- thesis in political science? Of course not. Put in the rather grandiose terminology favoured by some Marxists: ‘history decides’. Mr Gluckstein’s massive and intensely interesting and valu- able tome suffers from these difficulties. He mercilessly collects evidence to show the growth of bureaucracy, the utilization by the Communist Party leadership of the peasants’ revolt for their own purposes, the strangulation of the democratic rights of the workers in industry. But search this book as you will. you will not find any evidence that the workers, peasants and intellectuals can resist, will resist, must resist and are resisting the ‘inexorable’ laws of development of bureaucratic State capitalism. This is no accident. As one reads ‘Mao’s China’ one feels oneself slowly being gripped by a sense of pessimism, by rabbit-like, paralytic fascination as the bureaucratic snake slowly moves in for the kill. Vv But what of Mao’s China since Mr Gluckstein put down his pen and handed over his MS to the publisher? Is the ad- vance of ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ so inexorable as it once seemed? Why does Mao have to make lying but concessionary speeches and even give formal permission for strikes? The Khrushchev speech? Molotov’s disgrace? Mao’s weakness fox Chinese compromise? No—not these, but the surge forward of the workers of every land, from China to Britain, from Mos- cow to Rio de Janeiro, from Jakarta to New York—a surge forward to revolutionary consciousness. And this produces, as temporary side-growths, Mr Cousins in Britain and a Mao speech on ‘contradictions’ in China. Mr Gluckstein’s book is therefore a most useful quarry of information on China just yesterday. I hope it will find many readers. I hope (and assume) that all his statistical tables are accurate and that his quotations are literally translated. How- ever, alternative theories about the laws of development of modern China, e.g., that China is a workers’ State with bureau- cratic distortions, cover Mr Gluckstein’s facts, plus many others of a more recent date, much more adequately than does this theory of State capitalism. Therefore, reluctantly, I have to tell Mr Gluckstein that as a piece of social science and social prog- nostication, Mao’s China is, along with the theory of State capitalism, a failure. JOHN WHITAKER Studies of Capital Capital, vol. 2, by Karl Marx (Lawrence and Wishart, 7s. 6d.) The Development of Capitalism in Russia, by V. I. Lenin (Lawrence and Wishart, 9s. 6d.) THE Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow has now produced a new edition of volume two of Capital. The new translation, the ‘Publishers’ Note’ states, ‘follows the German 1893 edition, carefully checked with the manuscript edited by Engels. ... Extensive use has been made of the second volume of Capital, published by Charles H. Kerr in Chicago in 1919’. The first and second prefaces written by Engels for the German editions of this volume are also included, and it is pleasing to note what is something of an innovation for Russian publishers —three adequate indexes, bibliographical, name and subject. The translation, while not exactly ‘free’, maintains a high standard of readability. A few quick checks of several passages whose translation is well known to be tricky shows that the translators have worked with insight and accuracy. Two minor criticisms: why is it that English type faces used in the USSR are always so irregular and messy and what on earth is that smelly oil which Russian bookbinders seem to be so fond of? 187 There is no need to commend this masterpiece of Marx’s to readers of Labour Review except to remind some that, if they finish their studies of Capital at the end of volume one, as so many British Marxists seem to do, their grasp of the Marxist explanation of the developmental forces at work in capitalism will be one-sided and incomplete. We await the new edition of volume three with interest and impatience. ae * * Lenin’s first major work on political economy, The Deve- lopment of Capitalism in Russia: the Process of Formation of a Home Market for Large Scale Industry, is now published in English for the first time. It first appeared in Russian in 1899 after more than three years’ continuous work by its author. Lenin began to write the book in jail, where he had been sent for participating in the work of “The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class’. This work is a thorough analysis and refutation of the economic theories of an important trend in the early history of the Russian socialist movement, the Narodniki or Populists. These ‘Russophile’ socialists argued that because of the late development of capi- talism in Russia, compared to the countries of Western Europe, it would be possible for Russia to skip a whole stage of social development and, by utilizing certain communal forms of social organization in feudal Russia which still remained (though in various stages of disruption) in the villages, to pass directly from feudalism to a specifically Russian form of socialism. Politically, this meant that the peasants (and the intellectuals who were to think for them) were destined to become the lead- ing revolutionary class in Russia, a proposition which the Marxists rejected. They maintained that in the era of inter- national capitalism and the growth of the world market the only truly consistent revolutionary class was the proletariat. Lenin’s work is devoted to defending this Marxist view of the development of the Russian revolution by showing that, under the very noses of the Narodniki themselves, capitalism was rapidly coming to dominate the whole of Russian economy. This demonstration was the theoretical foundation for the creation of the Bolshevik Party and the education of its leading forces and was, as a theory, soon to be fully verified by the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. The care with which Lenin collected his factual data, cross-checked them, marshalled his arguments and refuted, point by point, the propositions of his political oppo- nents, is in striking contrast to the methods of those latter-day would-be Marxists who imagine that a slogan or two and a few well-chosen polysyllabic political swear-words are suffi- cient answer to a political opponent. L.N. Deakin as Guinea-Pig Trade Union Leadership Based on a Study of Arthur Deakin, by V. L. Allen (Longmans, 30s.) WHY was this book ever written? Primarily because inflation and full employment have greatly strengthened the bargaining power of trade unionists. The accumulation of capital is thereby checked, and a capitalist crisis, with revolutionary im- plications, threatens the declining economy of Britain. Allen asks: what is the power which a trade union leader holds in society, and why does’-he hold it? But why ask the question? The only serious reason is left implicit. It is the need for the trade union leadership to justify its existence and policies. Allen fails in this task. He has made Deakin his guinea-pig, and quickly shows how he was obsessed by the claim for complaisant. obedience from his hundreds of thousands of members, by the claim for ‘acceptance of majority decisions’ rather than unofficial actio against unpopular agreements. Plod through the superficial personal psychology and you come upon two useful observations. First, ever since the eighteen seventies, trade union leaders have tended to model their aspirations upon those of the petty bourgeoisie. Secondly, industrial development over the same years has fostered huge national amalgamated unions. Allen robs these correct observations of their full mean- ing. Chasing honours is not an automatic or necessary process. The ruling class has consciously and deliberately set out to

[p032] corrupt the workers in a thousand ways and to exploit their weaknesses. Allen does not hint that this process could be resisted. That militants will ‘give trouble’ is for Allen a deplorable but secondary aspect of negotiation. For the employers have judged it necessary to recognize the unions and to make bar- gains covering millions of workers in numerous sections; and these bargains do not satisfy those sections which are in the best position to fight and have militant traditions, such as the dockers and London busmen. Therefore, says Allen, the leader- ship has to use the machine to discipline them. This is simply to echo the official militants can perfectly well understand the need for self-disci- pline. Why do they reject the official explanations? Allen does not go beyond such trivialities as the London busmen being ‘excitable’! He does not look at the officials as real people, with interests and aspirations of their own, cultivated within the apparatus. What we have from him is ‘sociology’, about their favourite subjects of conversation—jobs on public boards, ex- pense accounts, cars, decorations and post-retirement sinecures! These people cannot convince the militants, because they can- not put all the cards on the table. The dockers can perfectly well see that they make rotten bargains, and they have a pretty good idea why they make them. Therefore the ranks reject the explanations; hence apathy on the one hand and unofficial action on the other. Yet from Allen’s adulatory pages there appears darkly the outline of the trade union bureaucracy, inspired by a dual purpose: first to maintain social peace and enjoy the monopoly of the fruits of being the ‘go-between’ between workers and employers, and secondly to preserve its own base in a subser- vient, dues-paying mass membership. Allen probably did not see how significant it was for him to have put his dreary and inconclusive discussion about leaders accepting honours right after his pages about Deakin’s loyalty obsession. He is right; the two subjects belong closely together. v But he has left out what the ranks would like to have ex- plained. What really goes on? Never a word about the wages council structure which relieves officials from the task of win- ning recruits and helps to secure their monopoly of negotiating rights. Never a word about the same vested interests created by the Mond-Turner agreement and the Bridlington agreement, which imprison the membership by denying recognition to new unions and set on foot a real conspiracy between officials and employers against the membership. Never a word about how trade union ‘democracy’ is manipulated, how paper majorities are obtained, who counts the votes, who uses the machine to isolate section from section, to confuse and discourage and even victimize the militants. Never. a hint that the dockers or the busmen might be right, and that consistent campaigning and class struggle could get better bargains here and now, though it would shorten the Honours List. Allen’s discussion of Deakin’s ‘trade union ethics’ under- lying his ‘empiricism’ gives no hint that his positive interven- tion to check wage claims was not at all a new and significant use of power’. The history of the German trade union bureau- cracy under the Weimar republic is full of precedents, dis- guised then not as ‘empiricism’ but in Kautskyan phraseology. The name for it is the same—class collaboration. Consequently he does not look forward to the future; after all, the bureau- cracy wants to hold back history, to preserve against further development the existing class relations in society. Already “‘wage-restraint’ has been thrown overboard, and the ‘new shin- ing light’ of the Trades Union Congress, warned by the dockers’ breakaway, has ‘exerted pressure’ through the provincial bus- men. But the new ‘Left’ phraseology from Transport House did not help the London marketmen, and in any case will be taken more seriously by the ranks, and this will further shake the ‘official’ stratum of the privileged which lifts up the Dea- kins as its arbiters and spokesmen. Allen’s explanations fail. On the one hand the employers are preparing for a struggle, and this shows that they are not satisfied with the ‘restraint’ imposed by the trade union offi- cials. On the other hand the ranks are preparing for battle. Between the upper and the nether millstone the big and little Deakins will be ground to pieces and our children will wonder why Allen took them seriously enough to write a book about them. J.A. point of view. In fact. 188 Fabian Elegance Control of Inflation, by Geoffrey Maynard (Fabian Re- search Series, no. 187, 2s.) THE CAPITALIST upsurge of the post-war years has been accompanied—to varying extents in different countries and periods—by continuous inflationary pressures. The relationship has not been fortuitous and has itself expressed the conditional and exceptional nature of the expansion. The great problem which faces the reformist socialists is whether continued ex- pansion can be assured without the distortions and dangers inherent in a prolonged inflationary process which may either turn into its opposite or get completely out of control, with equally dangerous effects. To find a solution for the guidance of Labour governments is Mr. Maynard’s task. The result is an elegant and concise piece of work worthy of the imprint it ears. According to Mr. Maynard the answer to the question, ‘To what is inflationary pressure to be attributed?’ is that it is mainly determined by ‘our social and political attitude of mind’. The answer he gives is consequently determined by the attitude characteristic of latter-day Fabianism. Vv One example should suffice to show the sort of delicacy this view imposes. It is common knowledge that a powerful element in the economic situation of the last decade has been the high level of military expenditure of the United States and the European countries and that such expenditure is especially likely to have inflationary consequences. The first time this fact is referred to is in the following way: ‘If the international situation demands a high level of defence ‘expenditure . . . there is hardly point in arguing that government expenditure ‘is the cause of inflation.’ It is a big ‘if’, and the whole sentence sneaks volumes—in Fabian dialect. Later some supplementary information is forthcoming. Thus we read: ‘Nine per cent of the United Kingdom’s national output (i.e.. more than 50 per cent of total government expen- diture) has gone into defence...’ Much of the later argument revolves round the competing claims of investment and con- sumption and the inflation which results when this is left to the free play of market forces. But, Maynard says, ‘a reliable esti- mate suggests that up to 1955 ‘only vabout five or six per cent on average of our national output was devoted to net invest- ment’. In other words, if there was both inadequate new net investment and inflationary pressure the responsibility lies with the system and the policies which determined the allocation of 50 per cent of government outlay to armaments. Even when the author returns to this question on page 25 he excludes from his frame of reference any comment upon this anomaly. In the meantime he has glossed over the problem in an inconsequen- tial manner. Thus on page 15 it is remarked that: ‘Of course [!] the intensive rearmament programme which was put in train by the events of Korea in 1950 also added to inflationary pres- sure, but we cannot doubt that the major factor was the wage- price spiral set in motion by the boom in commodity prices [!].’ v We should be justified in assuming that the latter was an independent variable. Yet on the previous page we have read, after a mention of the fact that the financial crisis and devaluation of 1949 were followed by a rise in prices of the order of 20 per cent, ‘worse still, the outbreak of the Korean war brought about a fantastic boom in commodity prices, and United Kingdom import prices rose by about 40 per cent’. In other words the boom in commodity prices was a direct out- come of the Korean war and stockpiling in the United States and not an independent causative factor at all. The war did it all, or virtually all. This turning the eyes away from the facts of life is in the true tradition of Webbery. On a more equable plane, the whole notion of costs as a factor in inflation is not clearly investigated. We are still left wanting to know why, for example, costs of imports have risen. What forces have been at work in the world market over this period? Mr Maynard, when he comes to put forward policy pro- posals, shows that he lives in the kind of private world which

[p033] academic economists too facilely construct for themselves. It is a world in which governments are strenuously working to main- tain full employment, in which ‘economic man’, converted to belief in the Welfare State, is striving to maximize social in- terest, in which to speak of a ‘struggle’ between ‘workers’ and ‘capitalists’ is to use ‘convenient but no doubt misleading ter- minology’ (p. 8). In justice, it should be said, that having been tainted with Fabianism, Mr Maynard is-less remote from life than certain of his colleagues. For example, he is very keen on asserting the need to hold back consumption in order to in- crease the proportion of resources devoted to investment. In a socialist state this might be necessary. In Britain today, in a programme for the Labour movement, such a question cannot be separated from the question of the ownership of the assets thus created. It cannot be side-tracked, as it is here, into 2 discussion of reform measures like the expenditure tax, coun- ter-cyclical investment, import subsidies and controls. Mr May- nard’s policies are intended to be applied by a Labour govern- ment operating within the existing pattern of ownership. Yei the ‘planning’ he speaks of would, for all the lip service paid to equality and liberty, do nothing to widen the economic freedom of the working class. Tt is characteristic in this regard that what is called ‘gov- ernment control of investment’ leaves the rate of investment largely under the control of ‘business men’ as long as they ‘are willing to expand’, i.e., making good profits, public investment being correspondingly reduced to avoid inflation. Public invest- ment will take up the slack when profits fall off, along the lines suggested by Hansen, Keynes and their followers these last twenty years. What is described as ‘a return to a more con- scious direction of the economy’, complete with ‘a wages pol- icy’ (details are given in a previous pamphlet) takes us back to the general line of Labour in power, 1945-51, not forward to the realization of socialist measures. S. THOMAS Pretty Poor Answers