ARCHITECTS OF SOCIALISM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 490, 12 November 1948, Page 17

ARCHITECTS OF SOCIALISM

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: SOCIALIST LANDMARK. A new appreciation written for the Labour Party by Harold J. Laski. George Allen and Unwin, London. NE hundred years after the first publication of The Communist Manifesto the British Labour Party has brought out a new edition, heavily supported by an introduction from Harold J. Laski. The document written by Marx and Engels fills only 44 of the 168 pages in the book: the rest is comment and explanation so exhaustive that the reader with mild political instincts is left wondering at the ramifications of socialist theory. Marx and Engels were adepts in polemic: they wrote vigorously and sometimes violently. There was in them

no desire to concede a small portion of truth to their opponents. The political revelation had been’ entrusted exclusively to members of the Communist League: a workers’ organisation which at first was German, though it later became international, It is instructive to notice that Marx and Engels, in spite of their dogmatism, insist that the Communists "do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties." Further, they do not seem to have visualised a dictatorship. "Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune," writes Marx, "than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture." And Professor Laski comments: "The idea of a separate Communist Party dates from the Russian Revolution: it had no place in the thought either of Marx or of Engels." Political theories grow beyond the vision of their authors, and it is not easy to-day to disentangle what Marx really

said from ideas that are sweepingly attributed to him. Marxian Communism was apocalyptic. The clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was to occur almost immediately. Now that the revolution has’ been delayed in the west, and superseded in the east by party dictatorship, the vision might seem to have been false. There is, however, strong thinking in the Manifesto, and it is a little startling to discover how fresh are some of the ideas to-day, even after they have passed for a hundred years through the minds of men \in all parts of the world. The theory of economic determinism, leading to a materialist conception of history, is less impressive than it used to be, and even after Professor Laski has thinned it out it seems to be an over simplified explanation of human destiny. Yet it has elements of truth, and no thinker can ignore it safely. Marx and Engels made some predictions that have been fulfilled, and others that have gone astray. But it was a tremendous achievement to write in a few days a document--which was to be the source of a new mythology, and which, as a practical instrument, was to have. far-reaching results in history.

M. H.

Holcroft