The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
1928
George Bernard Shaw brings his legendary wit and polemical fire to the thorny question of how societies divide their wealth. Originally sparked by his sister-in-law's request for a plain-English explainer on socialism, the book evolved into something far more ambitious: a roaring treatise aimed directly at women who were, for the first time in British history, gaining real political power. Shaw addresses his reader as 'dear madam' and refuses to patronize her. Instead, he dismantles the comfortable myth that capitalism is some immutable natural law, showing how property relations are human creations that humans can reshape. He walks through Marxist concepts like surplus value, grapples with Henry George's single-tax ideas, and confronts the uncomfortable truth that every society must decide who gets what, no invisible hand will do it for you. The result is a book that feels less like economics and more like a bracing argument at a dinner party, conducted by someone who genuinely believes his reader is capable of thinking for herself. It launched the Pelican Books empire for good reason: it made ideas that should be complicated feel urgent and within reach.
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“As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy withwhich we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.””
— Bernard Shaw
“لقد نجحت الجمعية الفابية لأنها كانت تخاطب طبقتها هي و لم تدع انها تخاطب الطبقة العاملة فحسب. كانت تهدف الي انجاز التنظيمات الفكرية اللازمة للتخطيط الاشتراك لجميع الطبقات . وفي نفس الوقت لم ترفض الاوضاع الراهنة ، و التنظيمات السياسية القائمة و لم تحاول ان تتخطاها . بل صممت على ان تتغلغل في جميع هذه النظيمات و تبث فيها المفهوم الاشتراكي للمجتمع الانساني””
— Bernard Shaw
“It is the people who hate poverty, not those who sympathize with it, who will put an end to it.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Even as a professional reformer you had better be content to preach one form of unconventionality at a time. For instance, if you rebel against high-heeled shoes, take care to do it in a very smart hat.””
— Bernard Shaw
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Shaw, Bernard. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-intelligent-woman-s-guide-to-socialism-and-capitalism-16f38008-c0c5-4bde-b783-1e0eccae5a52.Shaw, B. (1928). The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-intelligent-woman-s-guide-to-socialism-and-capitalism-16f38008-c0c5-4bde-b783-1e0eccae5a52Shaw, Bernard. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-intelligent-woman-s-guide-to-socialism-and-capitalism-16f38008-c0c5-4bde-b783-1e0eccae5a52.
