Word: socializing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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According to the theory, history is a succession of such changes in social systems. The changes occur because of "contradictions " (jargon for conflicts, struggles). The changes are not just the defeat of one of the forces in contradiction, but the evolution of something new, something different from both (this is the "dialectic"). The something new is always a step upward, the evolution by violent cross-breeding of a higher type of society...
...Historicus shows, Stalin and the Leninist-Marxists before him were out to evolve a "science" of revolutions, a way of charting the ups & downs of social systems. This is not quite on a par with the science of physics, but it is at least parallel to, say, the Dow theory of stockmarket behavior. Some stock traders look to the Dow theory to tell them when to buy or sell. Stalin and the other Marxists wanted a theory that would tell them when a "break" was likely in the Imperialist Front. They kept their eye glued to "the material life...
Here Stalin & Co. came to pay dirt. The means of production under capitalism involves a contradiction between "productive forces" (the tools and the workers) and "productive relations" (the relations between capitalists and laborers). New tools or equipment make the old capitalist-labor relations obsolete. The new productive forces require "social ownership" (Communism) for their full expansion. Otherwise, there will be depressions, in which shoe-factory workers, as an example, will be out of work at the same time that they (and others) need shoes...
Even the girls, who used to be the mainstay of the humanities, are going in more for home economics and the newer vocational majors (recreation, social work). Meg Rothermel, the 1948 Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, is planning to be a social worker. Dean of Women Louise Troxell finds girls much franker and surer about what they go to college for these days: "To get a job, and a husband, and very possibly both...
Nothing to Sell. Many times throughout his book Dr. Wiener stops in a cold sweat and looks a few years ahead: "Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb," he says, "it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil . . . The first industrial revolution . . . was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery . . . The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions . . . The human being of mediocre...