BAFFLED POLITICIANS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 48, 25 August 1933, Page 7

BAFFLED POLITICIANS

AN EXAMPLE FROM FRANCE

PLIGHT OF THE SOCIALISTS

There have been few more striking illustrations of the general puzzlement of professional politicians about where the world is going politically than was provided by the French Socialist conference held in Paris, says the "New York Times."

They are almost the last of the Marxians, and their whole debate turned on the question of whether they could any longer count themselves in the vanguard or whether they were just out of date.

Tho majority of their Parliamentary party during the last two sessions has consistently, and despite instructions from the party congress, supported Premier Daladier's Eadical Government. After four days of heated eloquence, it was censured for so doing. But here is where things begin to get complicated. While the Socialist Party may censure its Parliamentary representatives for joining their votes with those of the Eadicals, most of these Parliamentarians themselves are acutely aware that they owe their election as much to Eadical as to Socialist votes.

On the second ballot at the last election the Badicals switched their votes to the leading Socialist candidate in the constituencies where they did not themselves have a majority. That, of course, did not seem to affect the attitude of the Simon-pures, who apparently prefer not, only that the Parliamentary group, but even-the party itself, disappear,-so long as its doctrine survives. . THE SECOND QUARREL. And that is where the second quarrel began. Even many of those to whom Karl Marx is still the law and gospel have become dismayed at the way all persons except the Socialists seem to be applying—though in the wrong way, they think—many of his ideas. Eussia claims Marx as its prophet, but Bussian Communism as practised by the Soviet does not seem to the French Socialists in the least what Marx wanted. Then Hitler and his party call themselves National Socialists, and in that name have imprisoned and persecuted Socialists and Communists by the thousands. Fascism has some elements of the Marxian State, but pure Socialists denounced the Fascists as all wrong in the matter of application. Still, all these others are trying to give their people a "new deal," while the French Socialists do nothing, in the opinion of some of them, except prod the Eadicals on to give unsatisfactory subsidies to this and that without cutting the roots of the supposed capitalistic evil.

It was this spirit that led two speakers to demand that Socialism do something to change the world. There was even a suggestion that the Socialists borrow something in method from Premier Mussolini and Chancellor Hitler. That suggestion was heard in a horrified uproar by those who want to make quite a different kind of revolution but do not quite know how to do it or what they want.

They swung back and forth, denouncing now Bolshevism, now Fascism, as the real enemy, and now that their eloquence has cooled they, are all trying to explain that there was not any real difference among them.