Capitalist Manifesto Quotes

The state, rather, is a parasitic institution that lives off the wealth of its subjects, concealing its anti-social, predatory nature beneath a public-interest veneer.

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.

Marginalized women, specifically Black and Latina women, make up the largest group of laborers in a capitalist system. Our labor historically has been used to make the lives of white women less hectic and more relaxed.

Capitalist manifesto : Profiteers of the world, unite!

The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism. What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.

Revolutionary Marxism sees in fascism a militant self-defense movement for the structure and interests of the capitalist system, directing the movements of the petit-bourgeois masses with pseudo-ideologies formed for the purpose of its own preservation.

Radical change is scary. It’s terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply allowed to participate in the world as it already exists—an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers—but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire.

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.

It can be easier to believe resting is simply about retiring to your bed when you are tired instead of beginning the messy process of deconstructing your own beliefs and behaviors that are aligned with white supremacy and capitalism. You must be committed to studying how training under the abusive teachings of dominant culture has you bound and limited. This is healing work. This is justice work. When we are aligned against the ideas of the oppressive culture, we understand we didn’t arrive on Earth to be a tool for a capitalist system.

The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation conceived in liberty has been kidnapped by the fascist State.

Why does socialist central planning not work? The means of production are not held privately, so there cannot be any exchange markets for them and therefore no exchange ratios established. That means there is no way to calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, there is no way to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative uses of resources.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.

Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.

It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won’t we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation’s wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.

Increasing prosperity for the capitalists has everywhere brought with it increasing prosperity for the proletariat, instead of the increasing misery which Marx foretold. The most advanced capitalist countries are also those where the working class has the highest standard of life.

As the great nineteenth-century abolitionist and libertarian Lysander Spooner pointed out, the primary motive of Lincoln and the war party was to preserve and consolidate Northern control of the Southern economy. The Southern states could not be allowed to evade the tariff, a key element of the mercantilist American system that Lincoln favored.

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

In America, too, the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence (issued in the same year as Adam Smith’s capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations) was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history. Indeed, 69 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial office under England. When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.

But won’t crime go up if we abandon our prison system? Let Robert Ingersoll answer: The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumb-screws and racks, with hangmen and headsmen — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented. As long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

[Capitalism's] critics argue on moral grounds; the supporters on economic grounds. The critics, wedded to a moral code of self-sacrifice, are oblivious to capitalism's practical success. The supporters, equally wedded to such a code, are morally disarmed against the onslaught of their antagonists — and are reduced to the citation of empirical facts and figures. The supporters, unable to break free of the conventional creed urging selflessness, have too often regarded capitalism's inherent pursuit of self-interest as a guilty secret, akin to an unsavory skeleton in a family closet.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The powerful community model of local libraries deserves to be both cherished and developed. Yet we can also move beyond books, to develop more 'libraries of things' and other forms of reuse and recirculation. In an era of imminent climate catastrophe, it is obscenely wasteful for people to buy hardware they might use only a few times a year, whether we are talking about power drills, expensive children's toys or waffle makers. It's possible to refuse the disastrous capitalist system of planned obsolescence and share objects within communities. As a result we would limit carbon emissions, save money, and develop our capacities to care not only for animate but also inanimate things.

At this stage in the discussion one has to mention the specter of communism. What is the threat of communism to this system? For a clear and cogent answer, one can turn to an extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and National Planning Association called the Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, a very important book. It was compiled by a representative segment of the tiny elite that largely sets public policy for whoever is technically in office. In effect, it’s as close as you can come to a manifesto of the American ruling class. Here they define the primary threat of communism as “the economic transformation of the communist powers in ways which reduce their willingness or ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” That is the primary threat of communism. Communism, in short, reduces the willingness and ability of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of, for example, the Philippines which has developed a colonial economy of a classic type, after 75 years of American tutelage and domination. It is this doctrine which explains why British economist Joan Robinson describes the American crusade against communism as a crusade against development.

Just as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement "Property is theft" is usually misunderstood, so it is easy to misunderstand Benjamin Tucker's claim that individualist anarchism was part of "socialism." Yet before Marxists monopolized the term, socialism was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the "unscientific" varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado. He (and most of his writers and readers) understood socialism to mean a set of theories and demands that proposed to solve the "labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem varied (e.g., poverty, exploitation, lack of opportunity), as did explanations of its causes (e.g., wage employment, monopolies, lack of access to land or credit), and, consequently, so did the proposed solutions (e.g., abolition of private property, regulation, abolition, or state ownership of monopolies, producer cooperation, etc.). Of course, this led to a variety of strategies as well: forming socialist or labor parties, fomenting revolution, building unions or cooperatives, establishing communes or colonies, etc. This dazzling variety led to considerable public confusion about socialism, and even considerable fuzziness among its advocates and promoters.

In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

Here’s the wrong part: we don’t live in a capitalistic society. We work in a capitalist system. We live in a democratic society. And just to make sure, I checked what the Preamble to the Constitution had to say about capitalism, as I seemed to remember it being more of a statement of basic human rights than an economic manifesto. Here is what it says about capitalism: nothing.

These measures provoke turmoil as capitalists muster desperate acts of resistance. But in the end banks are nationalized, and the state takes over all private firms. You see firsthand how things play out at the pasta sauce plant.

Capitalism has cornered us in such a way that we only can comprehend two options. 1: Work at a machine level, from a disconnected and exhausted place, or 2: Make space for rest and space to connect with our highest selves while fearing how we will eat and live. This rigid binary, combined with the violent reality of poverty, keeps us in a place of sleep deprivation and constant hustling to survive. The work of liberation from these lies resides in our deprogramming and tapping into the power of rest and in our ability to be flexible and subversive. There are more than two options. The possibilities are infinite, although living under a capitalist system is to be confronted with a model of scarcity. This space makes you falsely believe there is not enough of everything: not enough money, not enough care, not enough love, not enough attention, not enough peace, not enough connection, not enough time. There is abundance.

In order for a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs in productivity and labor must remain. We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in Spirit and exhausted in body. So we push ourselves and each other under the guise of being hyperproductive and efficient. From a very young age we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our bodies’ need to rest and are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion. We tell our children to “stop being lazy” when they aren’t participating in work culture with the same intensity as us. We lose empathy for ourselves first and push excessively. We become managers, teachers, and leaders who fall prey to the allure of a capitalist system and treat those we have the honor of working with as human machines. We become rigid and impatient when our checklist isn’t completed to perfection. We become less human and less secure. We believe we are only meant to survive and not thrive. We see care as unnecessary and unimportant. We believe we don’t really have to rest. We falsely believe hard work guarantees success in a capitalist system.

The possibilities are infinite, although living under a capitalist system is to be confronted with a model of scarcity. This space makes you falsely believe there is not enough of everything: not enough money, not enough care, not enough love, not enough attention, not enough peace, not enough connection, not enough time. There is abundance.

Where people are given a little bit of freedom, they begin to develop their countries and make great progress. The unequal distribution in the world is due to the uneven distribution of capitalism: people who have it become rich; those who do not have it stay poor.

There are no free lunches, and wealth has to be created before it can be distributed.

Capitalism is merciless against capitalists who do not deliver.

Great leaders produce great cultures.

In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. “The executive of the state,” they wrote, was “nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them.

When Sanātana Gosvāmī asked Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu about the svarūpa of every living being, the Lord replied that the svarūpa or constitutional position of the living being is the rendering of service to the Supreme Personality of Godhead. If we analyze this statement of Lord Caitanya, we can easily see that every living being is constantly engaged in rendering service to another living being. A living being serves other living beings in two capacities. By doing so, the living entity enjoys life. The lower animals serve human beings as servants serve their master. A serves B master, B serves C master and C serves D master and so on. Under these circumstances, we can see that one friend serves another friend, the mother serves the son, the wife serves the husband, the husband serves the wife and so on. If we go on searching in this spirit, it will be seen that there is no exception in the society of living beings to the activity of service. The politician presents his manifesto for the public to convince them of his capacity for service. The voters therefore give the politician their valuable votes, thinking that he will render valuable service to society. The shopkeeper serves the customer, and the artisan serves the capitalist. The capitalist serves the family, and the family serves the state in the terms of the eternal capacity of the eternal living being. In this way we can see that no living being is exempt from rendering service to other living beings, and therefore we can safely conclude that service is the constant companion of the living being and that the rendering of service is the eternal religion of the living being.

rural India live like refugees is not that they don’t work as hard as we do, or are not as smart as we are, but that they live in an economic system that doesn’t allow them to be productive. The basis of our economic prosperity is market capitalism, individual liberty and responsibility, and limited government.

is rather a system of voluntary exchange based on private property rights, limited government, and individual freedom.

Voluntary exchange ensures that only businesses that provide what consumers want at the right price will survive, fostering continuous innovation.

We do not take the time to consider that millions of people will awake in our largest cities tomorrow and there will be the right amount of coffee, dental floss, toilet paper, and an astonishing array of other goods and services sold during the day. Yet if we do stop to think about it, it is a miracle.

Imagine the dawn of man, clans of hunter-gatherers following the

fall of 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Interviews with these anticapitalism protesters reminded me of a scene in the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian

One becomes wealthy in a market system by pleasing others, and the more individuals you please the wealthier you become.

Societies that do not have market economies have been forced to concede that only free markets are capable of producing on a scale that affords even the poorest person a standard of living well above what would have been unthinkable just a few hundred years ago.

Frédéric Bastiat noted, it is not possible to develop a science of politics without understanding how the economic system works. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek refined this idea by offering that if people do not understand and believe in market capitalism, they will ask their government to undertake actions that in the end will make us less wealthy and free. This

In other words, the good economist can imagine the unintended consequences of a policy action. The goal of this book is to make you a good economist.

Yet Wyatt Earp, who is an adult when he participates in the gunfight at the OK Corral, sees the movement from four-wheeled carts to the Model T.

Each day we go about our business in complete confidence that the rest of society will provide for our basic needs. Typically, we do not stop to wonder how food gets to our table, clothes into our closet, or how our

But it may be that some students would be willing to loan their money only if compensated by receiving interest,

Nonetheless, some may be bothered by the fact that the wealthier students have a better chance of remaining on the bus.

In a market economy people act to improve their well-being, not necessarily their wealth or number of possessions.

Even at this primitive stage, other members of the clan would have specialized in the making of tools or the tanning of hides, activities

characteristics distinguishing human behavior from that of all other animals; we alone have developed the ability to satisfy our needs and wants through the peaceful exchange of value for

Capitalism is not a collusion between big business and big government to advance the interests of stockholders and management at the expense of workers

One solution is an impromptu capital market where people can borrow from each other. Some students will give up some of their current purchasing power in order to receive the money at a later date. Being friends, and supposing that they will all be back at their dorms later to settle their accounts, the students might simply loan the money to one another at no cost.

This illustrates that in the market process, exchange will occur whenever two people value a good differently and when both will benefit from the exchange.

Those earning a greater share of the bounty would exchange some of their perishable surplus for a straighter spear or warmer clothing

West gradually developed the economic system of market capitalism and a compatible political system.

A solution that came immediately to my colleague and me was to have everyone exit the bus and then buy their way back on.

They appear to think that the cell phones they use, food they eat, hotels and tents they stay in, their sleeping bags and clothes, the cars they drive and the fuel that powers them and all the goods and services they consume every day would exist under a different system, perhaps in more abundance.

and students can express their intensity of preference by the amount they are willing to pay to get back on the bus.

Let’s suppose for now that the money is divided among the ten students who did not ride the bus. This would compensate them for their misfortune and might seem like the right thing to do. Another obvious question: What does one do about those students who forgot to bring their money?

This is because we will always pay less for a mere chance than for the object itself.3 In either case, free market exchange allows everyone the opportunity to improve his or her position.

In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant’s feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.

Almost everyone now accepts, at least implicitly, the claim that a different set of moral rules applies to the State, or that to one degree or another the State is above morality as traditionally understood.

We know that the free market supplies goods and services far better than any alternative system. Why are protection and defense any different? Rothbard asked this question in 1949, and thinking about it made him an anarchist.

Political crisis is rooted in the institutional structure of capitalist society. This system divides “the political” from “the economic,” the “legitimate violence” of the state from the “silent compulsion” of the market. The effect is to declare vast swaths of social life off limits to democratic control and turn them over to direct corporate domination. By virtue of its very structure, therefore, capitalism deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much to produce, on what energic basis, and through what kinds of social relations. It robs us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce, how we want to relate to nature and to future generations, and how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally antidemocratic.

One of Thiel’s favorite books was The Sovereign Individual, a little-known political screed—that is, until Thiel started talking it up. The book, published in 1997 by a venture capitalist, James Dale Davidson, and a journalist, William Rees-Mogg, is a cyber-libertarian manifesto that predicts the end of the nation state. The book, which was reissued in 2020 with

Today, however, we could say that in a certain contradictory fashion, at least, the refutation of Marx has itself been refuted. In a broad sense, class society in the Marxian sense has re-established itself. For Marx, class was a relational concept: the exclusion from ownership of the means of production implied a fundamental asymmetry of power and distinguished workers from capitalists.155 Viewed in this way, Marx’s concept of class is completely relevant again today, as never before have more people been dependent on wages, above all because they do not possess any means of production.156 The (working) class-in-itself—as Marx called it—has grown both nationally and globally. At the international level, social distinctions between nations may well have lessened in the recent past, but within states they have increased immensely.157 Nevertheless, we cannot speak of a dichotomous class society as Marx and Engels prophesied in The Communist Manifesto.158 Despite downward mobility, the middle class continues to be important. For a modern class analysis, then, the most appropriate approach is a ‘pragmatic realism’ that embraces the dimensions of power, exploitation, closure and life chances.159

countries with freer markets have faster growth, better wages, greater poverty reduction, more investment, less corruption, higher subjective well-being and are more democratic, with greater respect for human rights.29

Historically, the 1 percent have always been indifferent to the interests of society or the majority. But today they are especially dangerous. In their single-minded pursuit of short-term profits, they fail to gauge not only the depth of the crisis, but also the threat it poses to the long-term health of the capitalist system itself: they would rather drill for oil now than ensure the ecological preconditions for their own future profits!

Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people. The Rest Is Resistance movement is a connection and a path back to our true nature. We are stripped down to who we really were before the terror of capitalism and white supremacy. We are enough. We are divine.

Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes-totalitarian ideology, The Communist Manifesto, Rousseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as the result of capitalist globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the 16th century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people.

What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so. That is it! Rest in this proclamation for a moment.

What Rest Is Resistance is not: We are resting not to do more and to come back stronger and more productive for a capitalist system. Rest is not a luxury or a privilege. This lie has been drilled into our brains and minds forever and it’s time to begin to remove this veil. The deepest

reclaiming our divinity, given to us by our birth. The concept of filling up your cup first, so you can have enough in it to pour to others feels off balance. It reeks of the capitalist language that is now a part of our daily mantras. Language like “I will sleep when I am dead,” “Rise and grind,” “While they sleep, I grind,” “If it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense,” “Wake up to hustle,” and many more. The cup metaphor also is most often geared toward women, who, because of patriarchy and sexism, carry the burden of labor. Marginalized women, specifically Black

Detox from social media weekly, monthly, or more. Begin to heal the individual trauma you have experienced that makes it difficult for you to say no and maintain healthy boundaries. Start a daily practice in daydreaming. Accept that there is no quick fix, magic bullet, or instant change. Slowly accept you have been brainwashed. Your socialization in a capitalist culture makes this true. Begin to deprogram by accepting this truth. Slow down. You are enough now. If you have to repeat this to yourself every day, do so. Begin to repair the way white supremacy and capitalism have wrecked your self-esteem and self-worth. Understand exhaustion is not productive. You are not resting to gain energy to be more productive and to do more. Listen more. Create systems of community care.

Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people.

Marx stepped into history as the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Capitalism, he said, stood for the rule of human products over human communities. It gained power, grew out of control, constrained human expectations, and blighted the lives of the overwhelming majority, the working-class proletariat. Communism was precisely the abolition of capitalist tyranny and liberation from it.

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it.

It is clear that Lincoln’s decision to use force against the Southern states that had seceded did not meet the just war criteria. States under the Constitution had the legal right to secede.

Anarchy is precisely the reverse of chaos.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

The belief in the growing global pie eventually turned revolutionary. In 1776 the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, probably the most important economics manifesto of all time. In the eighth chapter of its first volume, Smith made the following novel argument: when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits. The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity. This may not strike you as very original, because we all live in a capitalist world that takes Smith’s argument for granted. We hear variations on this theme every day in the news. Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world. Karl Marx claimed, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that the industrialization capitalists had set in motion was simultaneously expanding and exploiting the working class, which would sooner or later liberate itself. Not content to wait for this to happen, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sought to accelerate history in 1917 by seizing control of Russia and imposing Marxism on it, even though that state failed to fit Marx’s prediction that the revolution could only occur in an advanced industrial society. Stalin in turn fixed that problem by redesigning Russia to fit Marxist-Leninist ideology: he forced a largely agrarian nation with few traditions of liberty to become a heavily industrialized nation with no liberty at all. As a consequence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, at the end of World War II, the most authoritarian society anywhere on the face of the earth.