Is Keynesianism a socialist Maneuver?

October 12, 2010 14:04


Marx’s socialist forces intended to “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie” and that private savings would be eliminated by the simple expedient of, “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.”(1) This is pure Keynesianism 45 years before Keynes was born.

KEYNES
AT
HARVARD
Economic Deception
as a Political Credo

BY

ZYGMUND DOBBS

A  Veritas  Study

2009 Web version transcribed from the

REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION (1969)

IS KEYNESIANISM A SOCIALIST MANEUVER?

There has been a steady and increasing chorus of denials that Keynes and his theories have anything to do with socialists and socialism. Incongruous as it may seem, most of the disclaimers have come from socialists themselves. Beware when socialists defend anyone against socialism! However, there are those bearing conservative labels who join in the same denial. The campaign has been incredibly successful.

Keynes is fixed in the minds of most observers as a savior of capitalism. The argument proceeds that the private enterprise system was failing and take-over either by communists or fascists was imminent. Along came Keynes with a presumably unique and original plan to save the doomed capitalist system from complete disaster. The major precept was projected as a theory of “mixed economy” whereby the government would act as receiver and administrator of the “national product.”

The liberals, bankers, manufacturers and government officials who embraced this package went through the motions like men grabbing at life preservers while still standing on the shore. The sight of the economic waves in the distance was projected histrionically as actual drowning. This stampeded the foolish, the timid and the opportunistic into accepting an old reactionary propaganda device that was refurbished in the modern tones of a cultured English accent.

The first thing Keynes did was to disclaim any connection with marxism. This was an elementary Fabian socialist diversionary move to distract the public from noting Karl Marx’s projection of a “mixed economy” in the Communist Manifesto of 1847. Academic pundits suddenly developed a conscious amnesia about the fact that Marx’s socialist forces intended to “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie” and that private savings would be eliminated by the simple expedient of, “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.”(1) This is pure Keynesianism 45 years before Keynes was born. The elimination of private savings and the “euthenasia of the rentier” was the touchstone of the entire Keynesian edifice. Government manipulation of credit policies and regulations that control production movements to undermine the principle of property rights was boldly and directly proclaimed by Marx:

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.(2)

Of course, the heavy lever to make all this possible is proclaimed as, “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”(3)

Karl Marx laid down these strategic devices not as socialism per se but as the means of emasculating private enterprise before instituting a functional socialism. This is precisely what the hard core Keynesians set out to do. With Marx’s clear exposition we begin to understand the Keynesian give-away programs and the soaring national deficit policies in which as stated above, “appear economically insufficient and untenable.”

When John Maynard Keynes was seven years old (1890) his father authored a volume entitled the Scope and Method of Political Economy. The Keynesian method of double entendre was developed by the elder Keynes to a fine art. An economist who could write a 370 page book studded with marxist-like metaphors without once mentioning the name of Marx must be credited at being a master of skillful literary concealment. J.N. Keynes’ talent of assuming a respectable posture within an academic sanctuary while chipping away at the edifice of private enterprise, was passed on to his son. John Neville Keynes managed to smuggle in the marxist theme that, “Schemes of socialism, moreover, as distinguished from pure communism, do not necessarily involve the entire abolition of free exchange.”(4)

J.N. Keynes illustrated through a most intricate web of subtle suggestions that the concept of private enterprise can be switched around to prove it either as desirable or a menace according to one’s motives. He also made allusions to government regulations and the possible need for a world body to control the economic life of man thus predating his son John Maynard by 54 years on the same proposition.(5) J.N. Keynes had two fellow leftists to aid him in his book. One was Henry Sidgwick and the other was Alfred Marshall, both being socialists and mentors of young John Maynard Keynes.(6) The elder Keynes book was required reading among Fabian socialists and was listed for sale in the official organ of the American Fabian Society under the listing, “Recommended books on Socialism and Social Reform.”(7) Thus John Maynard Keynes was nurtured on socialism and atheism practically from his mother’s milk.

At the age of 21 Keynes was taken in hand by G. Lowes Dickinson, the effete Fabian socialist at Cambridge University. There he was joined by Leonard Woolf, a life long Fabian and G.E. Moore the philosopher of the Fabian Society of socialists. John Maynard Keynes reported his activities dutifully to his father, who was a lecturer in moral science at the University. The role of steering his son into the respectable facade of Fabian socialism has not been properly aired in biographical sketches of the elder Keynes. It is generally overlooked that John Neville Keynes was general overseer of his sons activities and associations at Cambridge.

It is reported that in 1905, “A wave of Fabian socialism was soon sweeping over the new undergraduates, and politics, not psychological literature, became the principal topic of conversation among the intelligentsia. This new tide caught up many of Lytton’s friends—including James, Maynard Keynes, and Brooke himself.” (Lytton and James Strachey and Rupert Brooke. –ed.)(8) James Strachey was a life long member of the Fabian Society and Rupert Brooke, an intimate of Keynes, became the president of the Cambridge Fabian Society.(9) The teachings of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, as Fabian leaders, became the guide line for this group. In fact, every basic theme brought out by Keynes in later life can be traced to the economic and political principles taught by the Webbs many years before.

The chronology of John Maynard Keynes’ association and activity with Fabian socialism is unbroken from 1904 until his death. In 1912 Keynes was reported as a member of “an astonishingly brilliant batch” of Cambridge Fabians.(10) Like his American Fabian colleagues, such as Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann and Frederick P. Keppel, Keynes was a key expediter of conscientious objectors in England. Like his American counterparts, Keynes was also a government official while at the same time carrying out socialist defeatist policies. This covered the World War I period from 1914-1918.

In spite of his public record as a socialist, Keynes was appointed as an aid to Prime Minister David Lloyd George during the Paris peace talks with Germany in 1919. During this period he was asked by the Fabian socialists to head their London School of Economics.(11) As mentioned previously, Keynes quit the peace conference along with Walter Lippmann because their leftist proposals were not accepted.

At the end of 1919, Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace of which a special edition was published bearing the imprint of the British Fabian Society. This special edition was distributed among socialists both in England and the United States. It was at this time that the Fabian socialists began to pass off Keynes as a “capitalist economist.” At the same time the identical process was applied to Frankfurter and Lippmann in America.

However, Keynes privately was quite insistent that he was a red. During December 1917, Keynes wrote to his mother,

My Christmas thoughts are that a further prolongation of the war, with the turn things have taken, probably means the disappearance of the social order we have known hitherto. With some regrets I think I am on the whole not sorry. The abolition of the rich will be rather a comfort and serve them right anyhow. What frightens me more is the prospect of general impoverishment. In another year’s time we shall have forfeited the claim we had staked out in the New World and in exchange this country will be mortgaged to America. Well, the only course open to me is to be bouyantly bolshevik; and as I lie in bed in the morning I reflect with a good deal of satisfaction that, because our rulers are as incompetent as they are mad and wicked, one particular era of a particular kind of a civilization is very nearly over.(12)

The following year Keynes reiterated to his mother about “being a Bolshevik.” In September 1918 Keynes wrote confidentially,

My most amusing job just lately has been to invent a new currency for Russia. Dudley Ward and I have been spending a great deal of time on the details, as we have had to design the notes, get them printed, choose the personnel, answer conundrums and do the whole thing from top to toe. We hope to have the plan launched on the world in two or three weeks’ time.(13)

The plan to refashion Keynes as a capitalist authority who would play the role of ‘admitting’ the dastardly deeds of his ‘class’ was not confined to the socialists in England. The Bolsheviks pursued the same line. In 1919 Nicolai Lenin issued a wildly enthusiastic panegyric on Keynes book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He declared, “Nowhere has the Versailles Treaty been described so well as in the book by Keynes.”(14) The fat was in the fire and Keynes’ pro-bolshevism was in danger of being publicly established. Keynes as a covert leftist partisan posing as a defender of capitalism was in jeopardy.

Lenin later manipulated one of his adroit propaganda side-steps by quoting Keynes and utilizing his material and at the same time damning him as, “a ruthless opponent of Bolshevism.” This saved Keynes for the role as an anti-bolshevik figure among influential circles in Great Britain. It was a brilliant deception and indicated a skillful close-order drill in left-wing political cover-up. Lenin, of course, was well apprised of Keynes bolshevik sympathies. The red cells at Cambridge University were in close contact with the Fabians and a full dossier on Keynes was available to the Soviet leaders.

Lenin managed to exploit Keynes’ leftist slant in the Fabian Society’s edition of the Economic Consequences and at the same time sufficiently damn him so as to safeguard his role as a ‘plant’ in conservative economic circles.

Lenin formalized this Keynesian posture at the Second Congress of the Communist International addressing red delegates from every country in the world on July 19, 1920 with the declaration; “I will quote another economic source which assumes particularly great significance, the British diplomat Keynes, the author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, who on the instructions of his government, took part in the Versailles peace negotiations, watched them directly from the purely bourgeois point of view, studied the subject step by step, and took part in the conference as an economist. He arrived at conclusions which are stronger, more striking and more instructive than any a Communist revolutionary could advance, because they are conclusions drawn by an acknowledged bourgeois, a ruthless opponent of Bolshevism, which he, like an English philistine, pictures to himself in a monstrous, savage and brutal form. Keynes arrived at the conclusion that Europe and the whole world, with the Versailles Peace, is heading for bankruptcy. Keynes resigned; he threw his book in the face of the government and said: ‘You are committing acts of madness.’ ”(15)

In this case when Lenin engaged in name calling he obviously furnished Keynes with political defenses that could be employed to further infiltrate the more respectable British institutions. This was and is a common Bolshevik device to cover their ‘respectable’ agents.

This “ruthless opponent of Bolshevism” was allowed to move freely throughout the Soviet Union in 1925 and again in 1928 with his Russian born wife. If Lenin’s accusation had any serious intent then Keynes and his wife would have naturally been barred at the red frontier. Otherwise they would have been shot since these were the years of the Red Terror where even menshevik socialists were being executed by the thousands.(16) Keynes had to be a pro-bolshevik in order to receive these special privileges. Keynes was not the only one since thousands of so-called reform socialists were flitting in and out of communist organizations at that time. In the United States the Fabians even applied to the Russian Bolsheviks for admission into the Communist International, with headquarters in Moscow.(17)

In 1926 Keynes emphasized his pro-bolshevik position by writing that he was on the “extreme left” as compared to Sidney Webb the head of the Fabian socialists in Britain.(18) Keynes’ subsequent organization of the International Monetary Fund in cooperation with Soviet representatives and American Soviet spies (1945-46) demonstrates his continuing Soviet associations even towards the end of his life.

Keynes’ sociological and economic devices are applicable to the entire dictatorial spectrum. In 1928 on his way back from the Soviet Union Keynes had a long conference with the German economist Hjalmar Schacht. Keynes reported that he and Schacht agreed on Keynesian policies. Thirty-four months later Schacht joined hands with Hitler and utilized Keynesian methods to socialize the German nation for a war economy. When World War II began Keynes declared, “that Britain would have to employ all of the weapons of Dr. Schacht.”(19) Later Keynes reiterated that, “the various recipies devised by Dr. Schacht for Germany would have to be applied by Britain. . . .”(20) The Fabian socialists pondered over the Keynesian nature of Hitlerian economics. As mentioned before, Mussolini saw in Keynes projections the basic economic weapons with which to shore up his Fascist System. Earl Browder while still National Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States also realized that Keynes furnished the perfect battering ram with which to topple the system of free enterprise thereby laying the groundwork for an American Soviet system. Hitler, Mussolini and the communists all found Keynesian formulas equally acceptable as a means of expediting totalitarian rule.

The British Fabian socialists analyzed this controlled state potential and passed the lesson on to their followers. John Strachey a top Fabian (and a former communist) and a cabinet member in the Labor government, (Fabian socialist) explained the Keynesian lesson in Hitler’s economic successes as follows:

By what black magic, as it seemed to most contemporary observers, had the thing been done? As a matter of fact, the Nazis had merely applied, albeit with whole-hearted vigour, measures for the restoration of full employment which now have become commonplace of almost all informed economic and political discussion. They had simply applied those obvious remedies of ‘re-flation’ which follow naturally from Keynes’ critique of the loss of inherent stability in latter-day capitalism.(21)

With the Fabian admission that Nazism was a socialistic form of rule we have the callous observation that Hitler made things work. The fact that this was made to function by planned human sacrifice of millions of humans and massive expropriations of private property is overlooked with coldly clinical detachment by the Fabian mind.

One of the most puzzling paradoxes is the insistant claim by almost all leftists that Keynes was a ‘capitalist economist.’ Since the original leftist projection in 1920 (after Keynes’ publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace) of Keynes as a follower of classical economics there has been a concerted campaign to present him as the ultimate in scientific detachment.

The follow-up tactic was to pose Keynes’ pronouncements as ‘confessions’ of wrong-doing from inside the ‘capitalist camp.’ This political duplexity and improvised make-believe has beguiled an unbelievable number of bankers, manufacturers and key political figures. The tactic of political impersonation coupled with the utmost contempt for those who have been seduced has been reflected in the United States through such Fabians as John K. Galbraith, Seymour Harris and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Extraordinary efforts have been made to deny Keynes’ connections with Fabian socialism. There has been an almost hysterical chant insisting that Keynes was anti-socialist and anti-bolshevik. Actually Keynes periodic surfacing as a pro-Soviet partisan is much more recognizable than the records of such notorious Soviet agents as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.

Keynes’ tie-in with Fabian socialism is so extensive that it is difficult to compress the record within the confines of a few pages. Even a thousand page book would not exhaust Keynes’ Fabian trail. A few high points will serve to dramatize the depth and extent of Keynes Fabian immersion. In 1925 in an article entitled “The Future” Keynes declared rapturously, “What a debt every intelligent being owes to Bernard Shaw!” This statement was repeated by Keynes in 1932.(22) Shaw along with the Webbs was the high priest of Fabianism in both Britain and the United States. About that time Shaw had just completed his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism laying down the rules for future socialism wherein all dissidents would be killed mercifully. Keynes retained political intimacy covering the entire period when Shaw became in turn an advocate of Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s nazism and Stalin’s bloody rule.

In the 1920’s Keynes set the pattern for devious Fabian permeations. As noted previously Margaret Cole a high Fabian executive, blamed Keynes for leading the younger socialists into the dishonest use of statistics in putting across Fabian propaganda.(23)

Exploiting the political naivete of Americans both Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter in 1919 served as Fabian socialist midwives in the birth of Keynesianism in this country. In that year Frankfurter brought over the manuscript of Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace from England to be published here. In the 1930’s Lippmann and Frankfurter again expedited Keynes’ writings.

In 1933 Frankfurter was ensconced as a lecturer in Oxford University. Fellow Fabian socialist Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reports that, “Later in the Autumn Keynes had talks with Frankfurter, who was then at Oxford; and in December Frankfurter forwarded to Roosevelt an advance copy of an open letter to the President scheduled for publication in the New York Times at the end of the year.”(24) Thus the New Deal coterie of Fabians arranged a preplanned ‘spontaneous’ open letter that was made to appear as an expression from an independently minded English economist. In the meantime F.D.R. had the copy in his hand well in advance of the N.Y. Times publication date. The Times was privy to this unprincipled scheme to fool the American people and has been in the forefront selling Fabian socialism, writ ‘Keynesian’ ever since.

When American Fabian socialists within the New Deal found need to organize another ‘spontaneous’ point of pressure the deception was pulled off again. Schlesinger boasted that when Keynes visited the United States in 1934, “Keynes found others in Washington more receptive. Steered around by Tugwell, he met a number of younger men and told them to spend—a monthly deficit of only $200 million, he said, would send the nation back to the bottom of the depression, but $300 million would hold it even and $400 million would bring recovery. A few days later he sent Roosevelt the draft of another New York Times article entitled ‘agenda for the President.’ ”(25) The sequence of multi-layered trickery was carried off with the dispatch of a smooth confidence game. First Keynes conspired with Fabians in Washington to establish policy pressures from within the administrative bureaucracy. This was done behind F.D.R’s back. Next he conspired with the president to plant a so-called independent article. F.D. Roosevelt went over this material with Keynes beforehand. Next Keynes arranged with the leftists in the New York Times to put over this piece of manufactured news onto the public as an exclusive feature. In this intricate maneuver everyone was deceived in some measure, except the Fabian socialist center.

The intertwining deceptions became a habituated reflex among Fabian schemers. Their success in duping those in high finance to serve leftist purposes is phenomenal. They developed psychological skills especially tailored to get the pompous and opportunistic collectors of fame and glory to dance to the leftist tune. These clever intriguers became highly skilled in the black art of planting ideas in the minds of those self-admiring egocentrics who occupy positions of influence. The diaries and private letters of the founders of Fabian socialism are filled with self-congratulatory gloatings over how the selfish and power-hungry in high places, are seduced into carrying out Fabian policies under the illusion that these are their own independently thought out concepts.(26)

Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under F.D.R. and an official of the vital National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Problems under President Truman is a classic example of a Fabian manipulated policy maker. Eccles was duped into thinking that his Keynesian Economic projections were the product of his own brain. While his autobiography is full of barbs as to the lack of intelligence among the banking and industrial community, his own involvement shows an amazing degree of obtuseness. Eccles was so anxious to show up his own peers that he fell under the spell of the same dupery that he practiced on those in the business world.

Eccles was a Western banker who inherited a tremendous fortune and managed to control a massive interlocking complex consisting of banks, real estate, utilities, minerals and industries. In the early 1930’s the word passed among the Fabian socialist idealogues in the University of Utah that Eccles was ripe for a Trojan horse role while dressed in the garb of ‘international banker.’ A reading of his autobiography clearly shows that he was impelled by continuous pressures and brain washing applied by Fabian socialists who ‘just happened’ to wander into the Utah territory. The deliberate scheme to set Eccles up as sort of an economic ‘Judas bull’ and fashioned to bludgeon his fellow capitalists into Keynesian paths, is a raw example of a time worn strategem that had been tried out on wealthy dupes in England many times before. One could list a dozen examples of other so-called American business representatives of that time, who carried the Fabian package in the shelter of their personal copyright. They sounded and acted as if they were all shaped by the same cookie cutter. Keynesianism was the new name brand for the old Fabian recipe.

The record shows that Eccles was bounced along between such Fabian socialists as Adolph Berle, Isidore Lubin, Paul H. Douglas and Leon Henderson. Included in this pressure group was Lauchlin Currie who later fled the country when faced with the charge of being a Soviet spy.(28) However, the chief convincer was Stuart Chase who sold Eccles on the theories of John M. Keynes in 1933.

Chase was the crafty manipulator who just a few months before issued a book advocating a reign of terror against capitalists via firing squads. Chase’s book, incidentally, was published by the presumably staid Macmillan Company. The first sentence of the book declares, “John Maynard Keynes tells us that in one hundred years there will be no economic problem,” and the last sentence proclaims, “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”(29) It became must reading among New Dealers who enthusiastically embraced the title of the book as their own name.

Chase pulled Eccles along by his ego and ensconced him in Washington among the Fabian wolf pack using him as front runner for socialistic utterances. Thus Fabianism had another of its perfect Trojan Horses effectively disguising its leftist motives. In recent years Stuart Chase has sunk his roots in the Rockefeller controlled giant, Standard Oil of New Jersey. Ensconced as policy maker Chase has pulled the strings that stimulate the Rockefeller political reflexes.

Stuart Chase listed the sixteen categories of capitalists slated to be killed after the Fabian take over. Five of the sixteen proscriptions fit Mr. Eccles performances in the investment field. They were: 1. Loaning of money at high interest rates to small borrowers. 2. Speculating in securities. 3. Speculating in land and natural resources. 4. Speculating in commodities. 5. Promoting of products through high pressure advertising gimmicks.

On the basis of the above Mr. Eccles would be a candidate for execution at least five times under Stuart Chase’s socialist ground rules.(30) Since Stuart Chase in recent years attached himself to the Rockefeller financial complex it is interesting to note that they qualify for at least ten of the categories that invite the firing squad. Thus many of the very wealthy seem to be almost morbidly attracted to those who intend to destroy them. It makes an interesting study in human incongruity.

We are all familiar with the victims of communist or nazi butchery who were forced to dig their own graves. In the case of Eccles and others of his ilk they rush to embrace their own potential executioners. Through people such as Eccles the Fabians were able to get a strangle hold on the Federal Reserve system and were able to siphon off billions of American dollars onto foreign soil. The siren song of Keynesianism has been the catalyst binding the willing dupes to the hard core socialist schemers.

Keynes’ card-carrying record as a Fabian socialist is clear and unmistakable. This fact alone is remarkable because the usual procedure by the Fabian leadership is to disguise their prominent political operatives under non-socialist and even anti-socialist colors. In England the knowledge of Keynes Fabian connection has long been an accepted fact. It is only in the United States that the Fabians have been able to successfully cast Keynes in the role of an independent non-socialist.

For many years editions of the Fabian News bore announcements of Keynes’ lectures at Fabian socialist functions. Although Keynes found permanent sanctuary within the British Liberal Party his real influence was within the Fabian dominated Labour Party. A prominent Fabian leader admitted that, “J.M. Keynes’ theories were far more powerful inside it (Labour Party) than elsewhere.”(31) And John Strachey, veteran Fabian within the Labour Party, in commenting about the second Labour Government of 1929 admitted, “We young people in the Labour Movement were in touch with him (Keynes) and we were convinced that whether he was right or wrong, an attempt to combat unemployment with some sort of Keynesian lines was the one hope for the Government.”(32)

Keynes was admittedly an associate member of the influential New Fabian Research Bureau which was wildly pro-Soviet.(33) During the early 1950’s the Home Research Secretary of the Fabian Society openly admitted that J.M. Keynes was a Fabian.(34)

In 1935 Sidney and Beatrice Webb had published a two volume work ghosted for them by the Soviet Foreign Office and were fully immersed in glorifying the Soviet Union. At that time Keynes visited them and complained that his General Theory wasn’t selling well. Soon the Fabian juggernaut began to pass the word through in Britain and the United States. The intercession on the part of his fellow Fabians worked like magic for Keynes. Soon his General Theory became a best seller and the campaign was on to peddle the socialist line via the Keynesian label. Thus the question whether Keynes was a Fabian can be coupled with the question was Stalin a Bolshevik? Some observers ask the question in compound form;—Was Keynes a pro-Bolshevik Fabian?

The defense will immediately greet our thesis with the declaration that Keynes’ moral conduct has nothing to do with the validity of his teaching and advocacy. The left-wing continually claims scientific objectivity and impartiality for its minions regardless of their ideological faith or their depraved conduct.

One could conceivably concede that an individual with an addiction to something odious could advocate something of merit if he would recognize to himself that his problem was indeed a perversion and a threat to society. However, Keynes and his entire circle operated in the firm belief that their depravities were superior to the accepted norm of morality. Sexual molestation of children was adorned with a philosophic justification that denounced heterosexual society as stupid and tradition bound. Underscoring this animalistic nest of perversion, and drugs, was a general leftist belief in socialism.

Already the New York Times has sent out journalistic feelers that perhaps it is time to abandon Keynes as a symbol of the Fabian process.(35) However, their fear of public arousal due to the scandalous disclosures in the Strachey-Keynes letters has proven to be groundless. The American public has been apathetic and even indifferent to (the fact that the main economic theory governing our society was conceived in a mind depraved through sexual perversion. It is our contention that Keynes is no more qualified to furnish a healthy economic theory than a gangster chieftain would be to furnish the guidelines in the pursuance of criminology.


1 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Introduction by Harold Laski, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society. Foreword by the Labour Party. Allen and Unwin, London, 1961, pp. 144-45. (An earlier version with an introduction by Laski was published by the Fabian Society in Great Britain in 1921. In 1933 the League for Industrial Democracy—The American Fabians—republished the British edition with an introduction by Norman Thomas which stated at the outset:

The Modern, world wide Socialist movement has antecedents far back in history, but in its present scientific formulation it began with the appearance of the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Later Thomas proclaimed,

It is only the very greatest of the leaders of the historic religions of mankind who can vie with Karl Marx in the hold their names have over the affection—yes, the reverence of men.

In concluding Norman Thomas in speaking of the Communist Manifesto, declared:

It still remains, however, as a charter of a great working class struggle for its own emancipation and the achievement of the classless society.

It is important to note that both Laski and Thomas were also avid supporters of the so-called non-socialist theories of J.M. Keynes.

2 Ibid., p. 145.

3 Ibid. (Contrary to common opinion the income tax is an ancient device used from time immemorial to extract wealth and to control populations, particularly by despotic systems.)

4 John Neville Keynes, Scope and Method of Political Economy, Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 69

5 Ibid,. pp. 76, 78, 81.

6 Sidgwick was referred to in the Fabian socialist Encyclopedia of Social Reform as supporting the “views of the men sometimes called Socialists of the Chair. . . .” (p. 1238). Marshall’s socialism will be dealt with in further detail in the next chapter.

7 American Fabian, Dec. 1895, pp. 13, 16.

8 Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, Vol. 1, p. 250.

9 Ibid.

Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, Longman’s Green and Co., London, 1948.

“James B. Strachey, the psychoanalyst, brother of Lytton Strachey. As an undergraduate of Trinity College joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society in 1908.” p. 526.

10 Anne Fremantle, This Little Band of Prophets, Mentor, p. 230.

11 Harrod, Life of Keynes, p. 249.

12 Harrod, Life of Keynes, p. 224.

13 Ibid., p. 227.

14 V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Moscow, U.S.S.R. Vol. VIII, p. 289.

15 V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. X, p. 184.

16 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, Macmillan, N.Y. 1968, p. 298. “To have anything to do with foreigners was one almost certain road to arrest.”

17 In 1920 top Fabian socialists in the United States declared for the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow. (See State of New York Proceedings of the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly, Legislative Document No. 35, Volume II, pp. 1352-53.)

18 A speech by Keynes before the Manchester Reform Club on Feb. 9, 1926. (See Essays in Persuasion, p. 341)

19 Harrod, J.M. Keynes, p. 513.

20 Ibid., p. 525.

21 John Strachey, The Strangled Cry, William Sloane Associates, 1962, New York, pp. 241-42.

22 Essays in Persuasion, p. 357.

23 Margaret Cole, Growing Up Into Revolution, p. 90.

24 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1960, p. 404.

25 Ibid., pp. 406-07.

26 See Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Harrod, Life of Keynes and Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, (2 Vols.).

28 Ibid., pp. 85, 87, 304.

Burnham, Web of Subversion, pp. 162-69.

29 Stuart Chase, A New Deal, pp. 1,252.

30 Ibid., pp. 6-19. (Chase reduces the sixteen ‘capitalist crimes’ to five “basic patterns.” The five categories would entirely cover both Eccles and the Rockefellers. On that basis there would be no hope for either in the projected socialism to come.)

31 Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, p. 262.

32 John Strachey, The Strangled Cry, p. 186.

33 Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism, pp. 228-235.

34 Sister M. Margaret Patricia McCarram, Ph.D., Fabianism in the Political Life of Britain, 1919-1931, p. 569.

35 “Is Keynes Defunct?” New York Times, November 6, 1968.



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