SMALL GROUP MENTALITY
Thinking of the welfare or interests of a small group of people rather than that of the
entire working class, or the masses as a whole. There was a campaign against this tendency
during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.
SMITH, Adam (1723-1790)
The most important classical political economist before Ricardo.
He gave classical bourgeois political economy its developed form.
SMOOT-HAWLEY TARIFF ACT OF 1930
A protectionist U.S. trade law enacted near the beginning
of the Great Depression, which was designed to
protect American industry from foreign competition. Of course other major capitalist countries
retalitated with their own increased tariffs, and so protectionism became self-defeating for
all the advanced capitalist economies because it intensified the already huge decline in world
trade. (However, this by no means proves that protectionism is not a wise choice for developing
economies trying to establish their own industries in the face of imperialist domination.)
The Smoot-Hawley Act increased tariffs for
more than 20,000 products. Although it led to an average tariff rate of 46% in 1933,
the rates for some products were much higher and much more important than for others. A
recent (2012) study by several bourgeois economists estimates that Smoot-Hawley actually
established tariffs equivalent to a uniform rate of 70%.
While the Smoot-Hawley Act and other
protectionist measures can in fact somewhat aggravate economic crises (by negatively impacting
world trade), we frequently hear from bourgeois economists that this is what “caused” the
Great Depression, or at least greatly prolonged it and made it vastly worse. This nonsence
arises because apologists for capitalism can never admit that
overproduction crises are inherent in capitalism,
and in the very extraction of surplus value (capitalist
exploitation of workers). Thus they search far and wide for other “explanations” for major
economic crises.
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