Intelligent Woman's Guide

Bernard Shaw

Description

As a lifelong socialist, Shaw believed that economic inequality was a poison destroying every aspect of human life, perverting family affections and the relations between the sexes. According to him, all British institutions were "corrupted at the root by pecuniary interest" - and idealism, integrity and any piecemeal attempts at political reform were futile in the face of the gross injustice built into the Empire's economic system.Begun in 1924 - the year of the British Labour Party's first period of office under Ramsay MacDonald (who hailed it as "the world's most important book since the Bible") - and first published in 1928, The Intelligent Woman's Guide draws on Shaw's decades of activism and remains a brilliant, thought-provoking classic of political propaganda.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714545592
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism
Bernard Shaw
Foreword by Polly Toynbee

ALMA CLASSICS




alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd
3 Castle Yard,
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism first published in 1928 First published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2012 This mass-market edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2014
Copyright 1928 by Brentano’s Inc. Copyright © 1955 by the Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of Bernard Shaw
Foreword © Polly Toynbee, 2012
Cover image © Jem Butcher
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy
isbn : 978-1-84749-333-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Foreword
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide
1. A Closed Question Opens
2. Dividing up
3. How Much for Each?
4. No Wealth without Work
5. Communism
6. Limits to Communism
7. Seven Ways Proposed
8. To Each What She Produces
9. To Each What She Deserves
10. To Each What She Can Grab
11. Oligarchy
12. Distribution by Class
13. Laissez-faire
14. How Much Is Enough?
15. What We Should Buy First
16. Eugenics
17. The Courts of Law
18. The Idle Rich
19. Church, School and Press
20. Why We Put up with It
21. Positive Reasons for Equality
22. Merit and Money
23. Incentive
24. The Tyranny of Nature
25. The Population Question
26. The Diagnostic of Socialism
27. Personal Righteousness
28. Capitalism
29. Your Shopping
30. Your Taxes
31. Your Rates
32. Your Rent
33. Capital
34. Investment and Enterprise
35. Limitations of Capitalism
36. The Industrial Revolution
37. Sending Capital out of the Country
38. Doles, Depopulation and Parasitic Paradises
39. Foreign Trade and the Flag
40. Empires in Collision
41. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
42. How Wealth Accumulates and Men Decay
43. Disablement Above and Below
44. The Middle Station in Life
45. Decline of the Employer
46. The Proletariat
47. The Labour Market and the Factory Acts
48. Women in the Labour Market
49. Trade Union Capitalism
50. Divide and Govern
51. Domestic Capital
52. The Money Market
53. Speculation
54. Banking
55. Money
56. Nationalization of Banking
57. Compensation for Nationalization
58. Preliminaries to Nationalization
59. Confiscation without Compensation
60. Revolt of the Parasitic Proletariat
61. Safety Valves
62. Why Confiscation Has Succeeded Hitherto
63. How the War Was Paid for
64. National Debt Redemption Levies
65. The Constructive Problem Solved
66. Sham Socialism
67. Capitalism in Perpetual Motion
68. The Runaway Car of Capitalism
69. The Natural Limit to Liberty
70. Rent of Ability
71. Party Politics
72. The Party System
73. Divisions within the Labour Party
74. Religious Dissensions
75. Revolutions
76. Change Must Be Parliamentary
77. Subsidized Private Enterprise
78. How Long Will It Take?
79. Socialism and Liberty
80. Socialism and Marriage
81. Socialism and Children
82. Socialism and the Churches
83. Current Confusions
84. Sovietism
85. Fascism
86. Peroration
Instead of a Bibliography
Note on the Text


To my sister-in-law
mary stewart cholmondeley
The intelligent woman
to whose question this book
is the best answer
I can make


Foreword
by Polly Toynbee
Lady Cholmondeley certainly got more than she bargained for when she asked Bernard Shaw for “a few of [his] ideas of socialism”. Bernard Shaw’s sister-in-law expected a brief summary, a simple user’s manual on his political and ethical beliefs. Instead in 1928 she was presented with a great tome that encompasses the meaning of life and just about everything, from marriage and children’s upbringing to how to run industry.
What she got was one of the great, passionate and indignant expositions of how social injustice destroys human lives. Class and inequality create rich and poor – equal only in the obnoxiousness of both their stations – causing both the degradation of poverty and the idleness of wealth. He has no truck with sentimentalists who romanticize the poor: “The blunt truth is that ill-used people are worse than well-used people.” “I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination.” All the classes are “each more odious than the other: they have no right to live”. Nor has he any truck with Rousseauian romantic views of nature. It is the tyrant to be vanquished by civilization: “We are not born free.”
He begins as he ends: the only way to live is in a society where everyone earns and owns exactly the same, regardless of skill, effort, age, gender, character, intelligence, inheritance, merit or power. Women would at last be free of dependence on men: even now the gap between women’s and men’s earnings and wealth still leaves most mothers with a choice between relying on a man or bringing up children considerably poorer without one. Absolute parity of income would mean merit and moral worth would be rewarded with esteem and not with cash. He has high hopes of humanity’s capability for moral improvement: “In a Socialist future any attempt to obtain an economic advantage over one’s neighbours, as distinguished from an economic advantage for the whole community, might come to be considered such exceedingly bad form that nobody could make it without losing her place in society, just as a detected card-sharper does at present”. The rosy prospect of his socialist future stands in stark contrast with his miserabilist view of present humans: “We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable.”
It is Capitalism that debases character and all human relationships, reducing everything to monetary value while misunderstanding the extent to which humans are not motivated purely by greed or acquisitiveness. This suddenly looks fresh in our post-2008 Crash world, when conventional economics have come under attack for making exactly that error. What the economists got wrong in all their models and forecasts was their reliance on the odd notion that people are entirely driven by money. Look around you and it’s immediately obvious how many other forces and other choices people make. Humans are not perfect calculating machines making rational getting and spending decisions to extract maximum monetary gain out of all their lives’ transactions. Bernard Shaw’s call for the nationalization of the banks and the need for local municipal banks has a pleasingly contemporary ring too.
However, few would turn to Bernard Shaw’s Guide for a lesson in practical economics. Nor, alas, would this book make for a practical course in winning modern-day elections, though how our political discourse would be brightened up with platform speeches of Shavian quality! What you get here is as fine a debunking of all the myriad excuses for inequality as you will ever find. Give each what they deserve? That is what the well-off think they get, but once you try to devise a total audit of each person’s merits or faults, the idea is rendered absurd. Let everyone have what they can grab? That is partly what happens, but traders need law and justice to operate, and themselves need the collective state to mitigate brute force. How much is enough, he asks? His wise reply is that there is never enough: “we shall never have enough of everything […] The only way out of this difficulty is to give everybody the same.”
“Why do we put up with it?” That question has perpetually perplexed the left. Why is rebellion by the poor so rare? In this recession era of austerity and shrinking household incomes, Bernard Shaw’s answer is much the same as observers might give now. People earning so much less than others are kept going in the illusory hope of “pageantry”, winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune from a mystery relative. Charity, the dole – or nowadays the ever-diminishing top-ups to low pay from the welfare state – are kept just high enough to prevent destitution and revolution. The problem, Bernard Shaw says, is that the poor are kept “ignorant of big business matters”, so they cannot see “the corruption and falsification of law, religion, education and public opinion”. Or if a few are plucked out and sent to university, they are “de-classed” and captured by capitalist thinking. Most people “put up with all this, and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public morality”. That, I suppose, is what the Communists used to call “false consciousness” as an explanation for the disappointing docility of the masses.
What makes Bernard Shaw so likeable and readable is the odd blend of soaring idealism and no-nonsense realism. He is a Fabian, a believer in the parliamentary route to socialism, yet has no illusions about the unsatisfactory deficits in democracy. “The hopes that we founded on the extension of the franchise, first to working men and finally to women, which means in effect to all adults, have been disappointed.” He is disgusted at