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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Economics of the Real World
Peter Donaldson
Pelican/BBC TV, 45p
THIS BOOK is useful if you want a guide to liberal bourgeois economic thinking today. It tells you whay Keynes contributed to economic theory, how governements try to control economics through fiscal and monetary policy, and a host of other topics likely to be found in a GCE ‘O’ level textbook.
In addition, Mr Donaldson looks deeper into some commonly accepted policy aims: he shows that a high ‘growth rate’ is meaningless, and that the content of the growth of output is what matters. He argues that the balance of payments ‘problem’ would be much less if massive government overseas spending (especially on troops and military bases) were out.
In fact, a good deal of the book is taken up with criticism of the inequalities and waste of the capitalist system, and the author offers his own conclusions.
It’s here that the book’s defects become apparent. The author sees that inequalities exist, that people are alienated from their jobs, that firms take no account of the effects of their actions on others. Yet, instead of arguing for an alternative to capitalism, Mr Donaldson argues for its reform.
In true liberal fashion, he wants a process of national debate, where questions of worker participation etc. are thrashed out, where independent governments act on the decisions popularly arrived at, and where big business gracefully bows to public pressure and cuts the income of top management while raising workers’ incomes.
He has nothing to say about the role of the working class in any such transformation. Their role is purely passive. The debate is about the wages that should be ‘awarded’ to groups of workers. Although the author argues workers should have a ‘say in controlling their own economic destinies’, he is very vague on how this is to be achieved.
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Last updated on 21.1.2008