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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 25. 3rd October 1973

Another Look at Comrade Dev

Another Look at Comrade Dev

Dear Editors,

Because of the sheer gutlessness of the CPNZ leadership (currently the [unclear: Wilcox]-Taylor-Wolf clique) in refusing [unclear: So] answer questions on the subject of the "People's Voice" and links with the masses (put by myself) and [unclear: the] subject of the notorious Wellington District expulsions (put by F.C.), [unclear: do] battle with their only forth-coming apologist, comrade Dev. If the leadership must cower indefinitely behind this loyal but mislead [unclear: comrade] then it is he who will stop the brickbats.

By writing to Salient I do not [unclear: oin] forces with an anti-CPNZ organisation of any description. Regular readers of Salient will have observed that this journal has given the CPNZ space for articles and has often quoted the 'Voice'. In accusing Salient of belonging to the so-called Manson-Bailey group Dev is talking through his arsehole.

I have never regarded Stalin as being superhuman. Neither do I criticise the Wilcox clique for failing to posess this non-existent quality. I merely feel that I may criticise their schoolboy politics; the fact that this is currently regarded by the CPNZ as a capital crime in no way deters me.

Dev says that the "shots" of his ridiculous article were aimed "at those, those....who had taken up the metaphysical formulation of Stalin's 'Economic Problems of Socialism', namely the theory of maximum profits." He has apparently learnt nothing from Ray Nunes' thorough refutation of "Another Look". I direct Dev's attention to the arch revisionist Varga's "Politico-Economic Problems of Capitalism", a polemic attacking "Economic Problems" for the service of revisionism. Or is it the source of Dev's original article. But where were Dev's shot heading? Left, right and centre, like a mad woman's shit.

"Stalin depicts not monopoly but the monopolists as being vicious and unsatisfied with average profit..." wrote Dev in "Another Look", and goes on to say that Stalin personalised the actual capitalists etc. as the villains rather than analyse the phenomenon. In fact Stalin originally wrote monopoly capitalism, if Dev had bothered to read the work properly.

"It may be that he (Stalin) considered himself capable of deriving laws from material which no one else could, but this can be nothing more than speculation." Well in fact, if anything it is rather less than speculation. One of the main arguments of Stalin's work was that man does not create or derive new economic laws. I could continue for pages, but to little purpose, other than further exposing the theoretician Dev and those who saw fit to publish his tripe as incompetents. As this is self evident to any worker or student who reads the "Voice" I will desist.

Dev will not drive me out of my necessary anonymity with his "docs he dare" taunts. He is moving closer to the truth than usual with his comment on the contradiction between the economic base and workers' consciousness, but necessarily avoids the contradiction between the working class and the party, which is, at the moment, rather akin to that which exists between labour and capital.

I will leave Dev and his miserable party in dreamland, with their Mansons and Baileys to haunt them in their slumbers. One thing I am certain of Dev. The fairest prince in the land could not kiss your bitch of a party awake.

Yours Fraternally,

Ex Party Member.