BACK TO CAPITALISM.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 February 1922, Page 11

BACK TO CAPITALISM.

FAILURE OF COMMUNISM. The communist experiment in Russia has failed, says the New Statesman. The Russian Communists regret it bitterly, but all, save a handful of desperate doctrinaires, acknowledge the failure. Lenin has acknowledge it in unmistakable terms. And, indeed, he could not very well deny it; for he is driving the Russian State furiously back on the road to capitalism. The stolid opposition of the peasantry long since broke the storm-troops of the Bolshevik ideals. They got the land, and they have kept it’—as proprietors. They are taxed on a bourgeois basis, by handing over to the State one-fifth of their produce, while they can sell the rest m the market for whatever price they can get for it. And what was begun in the country is being completed in the I towns. “Free trade” is triumphant today in Moscow. Not only has street marketing, on the old profit-making system, been permitted. The shutters have been taken down from the shop fronts, their owners are resuming the disused wavs of pre-revolutionary times. We find factories opened once more by private enterprise, and that without any let or hindrance by the authorities. Technically, the State is the owner of all these works, and the manufacturer pays his tax to the Exchequer under the name of rent, but there is no interference with his control of his business or his marketing of his output, I whether he is a Russian or a foreigner.