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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 10. September 20th, 1949
Why Comms have Enemies
Why Comms have Enemies
The Communists are not content to sympathise with the working class; they want them to be organised for victory. It is precisely because of this that they are singled out for the most violent and extravagant abuse.
The enemies of the working class do not object to arm-chair socialists, pacifists, or long-haired philosophers, however outrageous their ideas. Likewise, they do not object so much to Marxism as a "philosophy". In all the attacks and slanders launched against the Communist Party today, the economic or philosophical basis of Marxism is seldom attacked; most critics do not even bother to acquaint themselves with it. The enemies of Communism reserve then-most bitter attacks for the Communist Party itself—as a Party. They say it is corrupt, dictatorial, ruthless and dishonest. They say it is alien, un-British, traitorous, the agent of a foreign power. In short, they say there should be no Communist Party.
The thought of an organised and united working class strikes fear into their hearts, and no abuse is too extravagant, no persecution is too vicious, to be Justified In preventing that.
For who would benefit from this new strength? Certainly not the big businessman, for socialism and militant trade unionism pays no dividends. Certainly not the Roman Catholic Church, which always thrived on ignorance and despair, and exhorts the working class to "tranquil resignation" (Leo XIII, "Rerum Novarum").
Who then are the most violent enemies of Communism? We have quoted from a representative selection of them in an inset on this page. There we have Churchill, the mouthpiece of British Conservatism, whose ducal blood revolts at the idea of a workers' state. There we have the Trumans and the Dulleses and the Vandenburgs, representatives of Wall Street, who seek to chain the world to the dollar, and whose shells and bombs have been dropped on every workers' liberation movement from China to Indonesia, from the Philippines to Greece. There we have the Hitlers, the Lavals and the Francos, the fascist hangmen who reduce the workers to slavery. There we have the Attlees and the Frasers, the Bevins and the Semples, the men who climbed to power on the backs of the workers, and then betrayed everything they had stood for. And there we have the Church of Rome, no longer a religion but a political creed, maintaining its proud and traditional position at the forefront of all that is reactionary, ignorant and oppressive, clinging like a leech to society, and sapping the spirit of the workers—the Church of Rome, which after opposing and persecuting every progressive movement since the baptism of Const an tine, now poses as the champion of liberty. In the Communist Parties they recognise their most dangerous enemies.
And they have prepared their answer: Fa turn and the Corporate State—beloved alike by Wall Street and the Vatican—that idyilic state where the class straggle is "abolished", where all disputes are settled by conciliation tribunals appointed by benevolent governments where workers love their bosses, and there aren't any Communists (except in prison). In every capitalist country in the world, including our own, the foundations of this state are already being laid.
Of course, the workers of most countries, being somewhat disillusioned with fascism after the recent war, some extra inducement is needed to make them accept it. The lead here is given by the Roman [unclear: Chur] which, after preaching fascism for over a decade, is now given to telling us that there is no such thing as fascism, that it is merely a term of abuse coined by the Communists to describe all their enemies.
"Communism the Disrupter"
There are two stock replies to the Communist recognition of the class straggle: one is to deny that it exists, and the other is to blame the Communists for starting it. And just as the Church of Rome used to try to make the earth flatter by burning heretics at the stake, so they try now to make the class struggle less real by destroying the new heresy of Communism.
"The Philosophy of Violence"
Communists are accused of fostering violence, "the violent overthrow of the existing order". Communists do not advocate violence: they merely say that the workers should resist the violence of the ruling classes.
Who started the violence of the Russian Revolution? It was started by the government of the Tsar, by the police spies and the Black Hundreds, who sent thousands of workers to Siberia and to the prisons, before the standard of revolt was ever raised; and it was perpetuated by Keren-sky, who sent his troops to disarm the workers and dissolve the Soviets, and then called in the foreign armies of intervention.
Who started the violence in Spain? The friends of Franco, aided by the Luftwaffe and the Italian Fascist divisions, by the Moors and the blessing of the Church—by the Tour Insurgent Generals", who refused to be taken on the peaceful road to Socialism. And who began the violence in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe? Who but the Nazis and their collaborators, the holy Father Tiso, who handed over thousands of militant workers to the Naxi executioners.
"An Alien Philosophy"
They say Communism is alien and unpatriotic, emanating from Moscow—unlike the Roman Church, who merely take their orders from a cabal of Italian bishops in Rome. They say that, because the Russian Government is Communist, therefore all Communists are Russian.
But the Russian Communists were accused of being German spies. The German Communists were accused of being in the pay of the English, since Marx lived in England; and English radicals were always suspected of being Frenchmen in disguise.
The truth is that Communism, like the working class, is native to every land. It knows no frontiers.
"Soviet Slavery"
Before 1917 the favourite argument used to be that Socialism would never work, since the workers had neither the experience nor the intelligence to govern themselves. But now there is the Soviet Union, the greatest citadel of Socialism, the only country which by its constitution guarantees the social ownership and control of the land and the factories, guarantees the right of every worker to a job, forbids racial discrimination, and gives women equal pay and statu; with men.
The Soviet Union is the hope, of the working class, the living challenge to the capitalist order.
Therefore, they seek to prove, by the coining of such phrases as "Red Fascism", and by a continual barrage of newspaper horror stories, that the Soviet Union is not Socialist at all, or else that it proves that Socialism is bad for the workers. Or, if they can't destroy Socialism in the minds of men, they propose to destroy it physically with a few thousand well-placed atom bombs.