BOOKS
149
med\ate purpose in the future, that is, if they succeed in finally
transcending the system altogether, will it be possible to realize a society
in
which democratic diffusion of power throughout the community
will not be crushed by economic concentration in the hands of the
major oligopolies.
The above is a most schematic outline of the main thesis of the
book. There are other chapters on Marx, on Lord Keynes, and on
the process of capital accumulation in capitalist and noncapitalist
countries which also reward close reading. Since the present volume
is only the first of a projected series of studies it is perhaps too early
to criticize the author for sins of omission. Yet one would have wished
that he had shown more awareness of the dangers of bureaucratization
and statism which, though linked to the oligopolist dominance that he
describes, seem yet partly independent of it.
As to Strachey's main thesis, one feels that he sometimes pushes
the argument a little too hard. May not, for example, the surplus
colonial profits of nineteenth-century England and the lack of an in–
dustrial reserve army in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America
also have contributed to the invalidation of the Marxian pauperization
theory? Reading the book brings up many other reservations and
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