Puzzle Corner

(1) “Capitalism is now, we are told, well on the road to permanent recovery; all talk of breakdown, of impending wars and revolutions is now happily out of date; an epoch of peace and plenty is opening out before us. What are we to say to scientists who give way to such ‘wishful thinking’? A dozen times now the cycle of boom, crisis, depression, recovery, boom, crisis has gone through its phases, and as each crisis has passed into depression, and then as symptoms of recovery have appeared to lighten the depression, the shallower prophets of capitalism have told us at length, but now for ever, all was well. Do they still believe it? Certainly we cannot.

  “Unfortunately, however, as we have seen, whatever else may happen upon this uncertain planet, the establishment of a planned stable and high-wage-paying Capitalism is impossible.

(2) “It is impossible for the capitalist system to give to the workers the rewards that are promised under a policy of social reform. It is impossible . . .  to carry out a policy of getting as much as we can out of Capitalism, it will lead to a fresh crisis in Capitalism as arose in 1931, and we shall find that the force of economic power still residing in the hands of the capitalists will again be called in to defeat the workers’ Government.”

(3) “Unlike the investors of capital, the investors of labour cannot cash in on any accumulation of wealth they have helped to create’.

   “It is doubtful if this injustice will be remedied within a capitalist structure.”

(1) Mr. John Strachey, M.P., Minister for War in the present Government, in his book “The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” pages 19 and 354.

(2) Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking at the Labour Party Conference at Southport in 1934 (page 159 of the conference report).

(3) Mr. Arthur Deakin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, writing in “Tribune,” May 14th, 1943.