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From International Socialism, No.47, April/May 1971, pp.33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Great Slump – Capitalism in Crisis, 1929-1933
Goronwy Rees
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £2.75
‘It should be clear by now why the bourgeois economists find it impossible to point out the essence of their science, to put the finger on the gaping wound in the social organism, to denounce its innate infirmity. To recognise and to acknowledge that anarchy is the vital motive force of the rule of capital is to pronounce its death sentence in the same breath, to assert that its days are numbered.’ (Rosa Luxemburg, What is Economics?)
Without a Marxist analysis commercial crises are embarrassingly difficult phenomena to account for; and when the crisis is of the scale of 1929-1933 the lack of explanation becomes painful. Goronwy Rees offers a very readable description of the slump and its impact on Britain, Germany, France and the USA; but when he has concluded his Cook’s tour of the Wall Street Crash, the fall of the Labour government, the rise of Hitler and Roosevelt, and the collapse of the world’s financial institutions, all he has to offer by way of analysis of these extraordinary events is that hoary old favourite that the ruling class of the period didn’t have knowledge of the modern wonders of Keynesian economics. For Rees no one was to blame for mass unemployment, the victory of fascism in Germany, the shooting down of striking miners in the USA, and the impoverishment of tens of millions while food rotted in the warehouses and factories lay idle.
Economic crises are not natural catastrophes like typhoons or earthquakes any more than economics is an objective science. Its subject matter is the relations between men engaged in the production of the necessities of life. And the basic conflict inherent in these relations under capitalism is quite transparent in a slump. 1929-1933 was a period of naked class warfare; and the best thing in Rees’s book is his account of encounters such as the fate of the ‘Bonus Army’ of unemployed First World War veterans. The workers’ movement cannot afford to forget incidents like these:–
‘In the late afternoon a mixed force consisting of four troops of cavalry with drawn sabres, six tanks, and a column of infantry with fixed bayonets and tear-gas bombs in their belts moved on the Bonus Army camp at Hard-Luck-on-the-River. At its head, on a white horse, rode General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, accompanied by his aide. Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower ... The Bonus Army and its dependents were given an hour to evacuate the camp; then the troops moved in, throwing tear-gas bombs among those veterans who still lingered on and setting fire to their shacks and huts. A seven-year-old boy who had returned to recover a toy was bayoneted in the leg by a soldier; Major George S. Patton, Jnr. personally accomplished the destruction of a shack which happened to belong to a veteran who, during the war, had been decorated for saving the major’s life.’
Despite the author’s liberal sympathies, in the last analysis he is an apologist for the ruling class whose barbarities he describes so well. A Marxist re-examination of the experience of the last great capitalist crisis would be especially relevant at this time, when thirty years of uninterrupted expansion are coming to an end.
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