Extract 2 from Draft of Autumn Testament

Here in Wellington the shopgirls and the boys who work in garages and construction yards go to see a film called ‘Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’. The film is one which holds up a comic mirror to the real powers of economic liberalism. . . .

To define the problems of the times in Marxist terms, or in extremity to suggest Marxist solutions, may seem a curious folly in a Catholic . . . who is also a citizen of an affluent country. But the situation is more complex than a simplicist critic might suppose. I recognise four major social problems in this country –

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Depersonalisation
Centralisation
Desacralisation
The tacit survival of [indecipherable]

It happens that in the country the Marxist thinkers are in a tiny minority. This has come about for two reasons – because our conditions of work are those of an affluent, under-populated nation, lacking the objective harshness that would stimulate revolutionary attitudes, and because middle-of-the-road unionism of the Labour Party has tended to absorb our Leftists like a sponge, offering in most cases pragmatism without clearly defined ideas. There may be a third reason, namely that the New Zealand Marxists have been their own worst propagandists. Again and again.

Neither Marxists nor economic liberalists offer a solution to the problem of depersonalism in industry or in domestic life, though Marx does touch on the problem as part of his discussion on dialectic. The Christians correctly recognise the problem but lack a social philosophy to effect changes even in their own Church groups.

Règis Debray, now serving thirty years in jail in Bolivia for writing it . . .

1971 (664)