The Falling Rate of Profit, by Joseph Gillman

[p019] The Falling Rate of Profit, by Joseph M. Gillman (Dobson, 25s.) Britain and the Arabs, by Glubb Pasha (Hodder and Stoughton, 30s.) The Great Powers, by Max Beioff (George Allen and _ Unwin, 20s.) Gillman has started an important discussion. What forces have prevented the rate of profit in U.S. economy from falling as much as might have been expected a century ago? Did Marx fully explore what he called the ‘countervailing’ forces? This study, which would gain from simpler language, suggests the vast growth of State spending as an important. reason. There are others which he has not explored, such as creeping inflation, the exploitation of ‘intern.] colonies’ in agriculture and the imperialist exploitation of colonial countries. The book’s main drawback is that it does not raise at all the point that there is no crisis from which the bourgeoisie cannot extricate itself in the absence of a politically aware working- class revolutionary leadership. Glubb Pasha’s discursive account of the actual politics ot Western Imperialism in the Arab world is an interesting eye- witness report of his lifetime’s work to maintain the rate of profit. He calls it ‘keeping order’, but order is to be kept for the rival oil interests and the conflicting strategies of the Great Powers to work themselves out over the helpless Arab peoples. He gives much interesting historical information, seasoned with the clichés of a Victorian out of his time. * * % _ Beloff’s parade of scholarship puts forward with all the weight of All Souls’ a succession of nonsensical propositions, as the ‘principles’ of twentieth-century political science for present-day British imperialism. For instance, he suggests that we can only understand a régime by studying primarily the theoretical principles which it professes. How then did the Christian West come to make and first use nuclear weapons? Consequently he can pronounce, in all seriousness, that the Soviet régime ‘has never swerved from its original ideoiogical commitment to the spread of world Communism’. This muddle of ideas from the heart of the institutions for educating the élite points sharply to the fact that British im- perialism really has no road forward, has no future. YAE. Who Holds the Reins?