The World in Chains, John Mavrogordato

John Mavrogordato on the Destructiveness of Capitalism

Below are some selected quotes from John Mavrogordato's 1917 book The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade. Mavrogordata is an avowed socialist (He wrote in a time when this word was less discredited than it is today), but if you pay attention to the logical content of his writing rather than to the 'socialist' label you will see that he is expressing truths that could be understood by a child of ten with average intelligence. However, for better or for worse, objective, logical thinking about large scale economic/social systems issues is almost non-existent. Samuel Butler in his essay God the Known and God the Unknown opines that this general refusal to examine the underlying assumptions of dominant cultural paradigms is actually a good thing since it helps societies to cohere and to survive. However, Butler also recognized that in some cases sweeping wholesale changes in social institutions are necessary in order to meet the requirements of changed circumstances.

I am personally convince that the probability is high that we are approaching a point in history where the dominant economic/social paradigm is going become highly disfunctional, and we will be required to think hard about he underlying assumptions upon which our economic/social institutions have been founded.

Selections from The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade (These selections are taken from the Project Gutenberg etext of The World in Chains):

Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require.

Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity; and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism.

More generally, the State is entitled to demand from Commerce that it should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really "enlightened self-interest"; by what Plato has called Temperance and Mr. H. G. Wells "a sense of the State." We find instead that the trader has "day and night held on indignantly" in his disastrous hunt for markets, destroying by accident or design whatever amenity in the world does not contribute to his "one aim, one business, one desire."

True nationalism may indeed be differentiated by the absence of this artificial element of ethnological hatred. True nationalism is simply the feeling for the small independent community, a movement for the autonomy of the local group. No true manifestation of the nationalist movement in Europe is ever opposed to other nationalisms; but all alike are involved in a desperate political conflict with their common enemy Imperialism.

Only the Socialist seems to realise that in the world conceived, as modern thought must conceive it, as a continuous process, Government rather than Trade, Science and Art rather than Industry are the chief activities of the citizen.

August 17, 2009