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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 10. September 20th, 1949

When Greek Meets Greek

When Greek Meets Greek

Sir.

W. H. Oliver renders easy the destruction of Marxism by first asserting in its name things which are not implicit in dialectical materialism. Having said, "Partisan may reply that the only valid values are proletarian values." he then assumes that Partisan has in fact said this, and proceeds to demolish "a fallacy which is . . . the general property of Marxism." By all means let him demolish that fallacy (if there be such), but let him not attribute to Marxists the idea that "values are wholly and in every way relative," and thus that "proletarian values" are "completely relative"; or that "Marx wanted to give eternity to the proletariat and make their dominance the end point of the human process, to make their values absolute" (sic!).

In refutation of this preposterous statement I need only remind Mr. Oliver of the well-known Marxian thesis of the development of a stateless, classless society, accompanied by the "withering away" of the state forms and by the disappearance of the proletariat as a class. The general concept is expressed by Engels, "So this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth, and of a final absolute state of humanity corresponding to it. For it. nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything: nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascending from the lower to the higher."

It is always more difficult to dis-pose of arguments of sincere and well-intentioned critics such as Mr. Oliver than those of the conscious falsifiers of history; so I would suggest that to learn what Marxists think, he should turn to the writings of Marxists, and not to those of the traducers of Marxism perennially infesting History Departments. Only from the latter would he have derived his gross distortions of the dialectical materialist view of history.

W. H. Oliver (The Elder—Ed.).