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of socialism. I also want the child of socialism to come to India, but on one condition -- that it completes its full nine months in the mother's womb. This country has not achieved capitalism as yet. So talk of socialism here at this moment is as dangerous... as dangerous as it proved in Russia, and is going to be proved in China. China is out to kill millions, and yet socialism will not come there, because nothing in life happens before its time. The law of life does not permit haste. This country has yet to develop its capitalist system.
It is necessary to understand what capitalism means. Today the word "capitalism" comes to our minds as a four-letter word. It is now a much maligned word. We rush to condemn capitalism without knowing what good it has done to human society, and that it is the instrument that will lead human society to socialism. If all men are ever going to achieve equality, if they all are ever going to be free of poverty and attain to affluence, then a hundred percent credit for it will go to capitalism.
It is, however, essential that we understand a few things about capitalism very clearly. First, capitalism is a system that creates capital, creates wealth. Before capitalism, no other system in the world had produced capital. By capital I do not mean natural resources -- it is that tangible wealth which is man's own creation. If man had not created it, it would not have come on its own from the earth or the skies. Wealth means solid wealth, accumulated capital, which today is the source of all investment, all production. The wealth in the present world is created wealth. And it does not include that natural wealth which is available from land and sea, from mine and forest, from stream and waterfall, or from anywhere else. During the last hundred and fifty years, capitalism brought into being a real wealth-producing system.
All the social systems that preceded capitalism were predatory systems -- systems wholly based on plunder and loot. Whether it was Genghis or Tamburlaine or any feudal lords of the world, they all had plundered their people and filled their coffers with the wealth of looting. But the wealth in the capitalist
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