Socialist Answer

PROPERTY OR PEACE -- Henry Noel Brailsford--Covici, Friede ($3).

Though Communism and Fascism are the loudest sideshows in today's Bartholomew Fair, Socialism is still doing business at the old stand. By contrast with its fiercer-breathing rivals. Socialism has come to seem a much less frightening creed than oldsters used to think it. Even conservative quidnuncs, if they can bring themselves to read Author Brailsford's 329 big pages, will see that his doctrine is less fatal, more optimistic, than the present faiths of Rome. Berlin and Moscow. A sometimes brilliant and always lucid writer, Author Brailsford has given a masterful summation of the Socialist worldview.

No defeatist or delighter in destiny, Author Brailsford believes ''this is not one of those hopeless moments in the world's history . . . our age is poised precariously between order and chaos. . . ." Democracy is in retreat, but democracy as the world has known it has been a middle-class laissez-faire system whose results "curiously resemble a dictatorship of the owning class. ... It is rather a prize to be won than a possession to be defended." The root of economic disorder, says Author Brailsford. is the institution of property. A planned capitalism is impossible, "a contradiction in terms." If the capitalist world is not to end in fire in some near tomorrow, then some industries, all banks must be nationalized, armament firms put under an international authority, the League of Nations replaced by something more potent.

Author Brailsford differs from the peerage of panaceatic prattlers in his levelheaded, often ironic detachment. Though he is a Briton, he can take a truly-international view of disarmament: ''It would be unfair to question the sincerity of the general wish to disarm one's neighbors." Though he takes off his hat to the Fascists with a left-handed gesture ("The efficacy of beating as a method of refuting adversaries ranks among the major political discoveries of our century'') he does not regard Hitler as one of the beasts foretold in the Book of Revelation. And though he considers the Communists no better than they might be, he admits frankly that he would "as soon face the Ogpu on a charge of counterrevolution as I would confront a British-Indian court as an opponent of capitalism."

If it does nothing else, such a book as Property or Peace should impress its readers with the fact that in a world of tear-gas bombs, castor oil. strikes and politico-religious excommunications there is still such a thing as tart reasonableness.

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