CAPITALISM AND THE ARMS RACE CHANGING THE SOCIAL SYSTEM?
By Tom Kemp
1958The NewsletterTom Kemp Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
LEEDS BUS AND TRAM CREWS PETITION By Our Industrial Correspondent THE idéa is frequently encountered, even in the Labour movement, that armaments are an-economic burden which can -be got rid of within the framework of capitalism with beneficial results all round.
It is surprising to find a leading Soviet economist putting forward essentially the same idea in a recent booklet. entitled ‘If the Arms Race Were Stopped’ (Soviet News booklet, no. 32). te is true that he assembles a mass of useful facts about ;
the human and material costs of twentieth-century wars and about the extent of the resources actually being devoted to _ warlike purposes.
He puts them forward, too, in ‘striking ways, as in the statement that. ‘the annual military expenditure of the advanced industrial countries is equal to the annual income of approximately 1,500 million inhabitants ‘of - the underdeveloped countries’.
Nothing about small detail Useful as such facts are, they remain suspended in the air without an accurate appraisal. of the part played by arms. and war in modern capitalism.
Professor Rubinstein falls short here; and it is hard to _— believe that he is at all acquainted with Marxist ideas on the _ Subject.