PORTRAIT OF COMMUNISM
Sir,-The contributor to the Observer to whom you pay the compliment of reprinting is remarks is guaranteed neither by’ his name nor by any stated qualifications to speak on his subject, of which he knows very little. Evidently he commenced with the delusion that the Communist movement was founded on a few cast-iron dogmas and directed by a handful of clever dictators, at whose word all the other Communists hopped along the lines of the blue-prints. The promoters of this curious theory have never tried to explain the phenomenon that literally millions of men and women, including some of the world’s leading writers, artists and scientists, have joined and made sacrifices for this supposed monstrosity of a Party. Communism HAS principles, which are broad and based on a scientific investigation of social development; but it has NO dogmas. The diversity of the activities of Communists at various times and places is logically derived from the great changes which in our time occur with startling rapidity, and from the obvious differences in conditions from one country to another. Your writer is supremely innocent of this, just as your editorial is innocent of any appreciation of the Communist attitude to the "common man" and the "multitude"; hence the contradictions bulge here, there, and everywhere out of these breezy attempts to simplify the complicated politics of to-day. Alas, my space will be brief; suffice it to say that neither Communism, which is nowhere yet attained, nor socialism, its transition period, nor the policies which Communists advocate while capitalism rernains, can possibly be attained without the overwhelming and active support of what you call "the multitude."
ELSIE
LOCKE
(Christchurch).
{It was nowhere suggested in the Observer article, or in our own, that the Communists can attain their ends without "The Multitude." Our suggestion was that they do not trust the people; not that they do not use them.-Ed. |
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 294, 9 February 1945, Page 5
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317PORTRAIT OF COMMUNISM New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 294, 9 February 1945, Page 5
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