I. THE MARXIST THEORY.

It is not an accident that 1848, the year of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, was the year of revolution. It was the reaction of certain men, primarily Kari Marx and Friedrich Engels, to the injustices and evils of their generation that led them to the investigation that produced the theory of Marxism. Starting with the desire to cure an obvious disease, a disease the symptoms of which were war, poverty, oppression, injustice, they were driven to hunt for the real cause in order that the treatment might be appropriate.

It is often suggested in our generation, as indeed before it, that but for communists and other such agitators there would be no political trouble in the world. This is plain nonsense. Injustice and the instability of capitalist society are as much the causes of conversions to communism today as they were in the days of Marx and Engels. The spectre which, in their words, is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism, is a frightening and terrifying spectre to many precisely because it professes to have the cure for diseases which it would not be profitable to some to cure.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that for long the discussion of communism in ecclesiastical circles has been held to be rather less than respectable and that rapid publication has been secured, and can indeed be secured today, for any book that “exposes” Marxism, however inadequate the exposure or however distorted the presentation of Marxism. This is one of the fields in which the commandment not to bear false witness has never been seriously applied. We, however, can discuss the subject with calm and respectability and can afford to face the facts. The Fathers of Lambeth have summoned us to study communism. Let us, then, to our task.

The conclusions which Marx and Engels reached in their investigation are embodied in many works. Among the most important and the one from which I propose to take the first part of what I have to say is the Manifesto I have already mentioned.

It begins with a statement fundamental to the whole communist position. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The proof of this in the [1/2] contemporary world is there for all to see as it was in the days when these words were written. While there are many individuals and even groups where the lines of distinction are blurred, in the main people are divided into those whose income is derived directly from the work they do, whether by hand or brain, and those whose income is derived from their possessions. The former, although not all of them will like the title, are the proletariat. The latter are the bourgeoisie. The gulf that is set between them may be read in a long story of strikes and lock-outs as well as of political struggles.

But does this go right back into history? Marx and Engels saw that it did. They pointed to the freeman and slave, the patrician and plebian, of the Roman Empire; to the lord and serf and the guildmaster and journeyman of medieval society. The one of these groups, as the bourgeoisie of today, was the economic oppressor; the other the economically oppressed. It is important to realise what they meant by this. They were not, as we say, “imputing motives.” They were not declaring that the individuals concerned were wicked or that they set out to oppress. They were pointing out the simple fact that they stood in a particular relationship to others which secured particular consequences in that they gained by the labour of others and, by doing so, deprived others of the fruit of their toil.

But how do these things change? How did the pleb become the serf and the serf the proletarian? Marx and Engels saw the answer to this question in the development of production. It is worth quoting the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of the means of life, human beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are independent of their will–production relations which correspond to a definite stage of the development of their productive forces. The totality of these productive relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a legal and political superstructure arises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. . . . At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing production relationships, or what is but a legal expression for the same thing, with the property relationships within which they have hitherto moved. From forms of development of the productive resources, these relationships turn into their fetters. A period of social revolution then begins. With the change in the economical foundation, the whole gigantic superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations we must always distinguish between the material changes in the economic conditions of production, changes which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, æsthetic, or philosophic, in short ideological forms in which human beings become conscious of this conflict and fight it out to an issue.

So, as Professor Tawney has rightly stressed, behind the [2/3] Reformation there lies the transition from feudalism to capitalism. As the Communist Manifesto points out, it was the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape which, by opening up new markets and increasing commodity exchange, stimulated the elements in society which were to compel this change by breaking the medieval bonds on capital and replacing the guild system of industry with the manufacturing system.

At this point a common mistake is to be avoided. Marx and Engels, in saying this, were not asserting that the economic factor was the only operative one. Engels put this in a letter to Bloch in 1890:

According to the materialist conception of history the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase.

The fundamental fact, however, remains true. The development of modern industry and the factory system on which it is based has brought together and welded into organisations such as Trade unions the working class, which is destined to take over the management of society from the capitalist class and replace capitalism itself with a form of organisation more suited to the complexity of modern society, the form of socialism in which the means of production and distribution are owned in common.

The ultimate outcome of the class struggle is socialism. But what then? Is that the end?

The answer of the Marxist is that with the victory of the working class struggles between rival classes will be no more. Real human history will begin. It begins first with socialism, the communal ownership of the means of production and distribution, everybody making his contribution to society and everybody being rewarded according to his work. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” At a later stage comes communism. Here technique and work combined have produced abundance. The slogan is now, “From each according to his, to each according to his need.” This society is one of great freedom. The oppressive state has “withered away.” The government of persons has been replaced by the administration of things.

Lenin stated it like this:

The socialisation of production cannot fail to lead to the transfer of the means of production into the possession of society, to the “expropriation of the expropriators.” An immense increase in the productivity of labour, a reduction in working hours; replacement of [3/4] the remnants, the ruins of petty, primitive, individual production by collective and improved labour – such will be the direct consequences of the transformation. Capitalism finally breaks the connection between agriculture and industry, but at the same time, in the course of its highest development, it prepares new elements for the establishment of a connection between the two, uniting industry and agriculture upon the basis of the conscious use of science and the combination of collective labour. [1] [(1) The Teachings of Karl Marx.] 

He saw this carried further to the abolition of rural seclusion on the one hand and the over-development of cities on the other. He saw the family rising to a new and higher position and a new and genuine nationalism producing a real internationalism.

It is essential to realise that communism, to use the words of the Manifesto, “deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.”

Marxist theory has not remained static. To the general analysis of capitalism made by Marx and Engels Lenin added the analysis of modern imperialism, the inexorable drive of capitalist nations to divine and re-divide the world as they hunt feverishly for markets and the source of raw materials. The struggle to re-divide is a basic cause of modern war.

But perhaps the most interesting developments are those which relate to the period of change from capitalism to communism. The difference between communism and socialism is more clearly stated today than in the time of Marx. It is seen that the state can only “wither away” when the majority of nations have abolished capitalism. In the interim period the task of the new socialist state is to safeguard the advances the community has made from attacks whether they come from within or from without.

It is from Lenin that the clearest definitions of this interim period derive. He saw the necessity of firm organisation to protect the workers’ advances. There must, he said, be a dictatorship of the proletariat. As so often, the phrases of Marxism, which constitute a language of their own, have caused misunderstanding in the minds of those not prepared to study. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not stand in opposition to democracy. In Lenin’s mind it was, indeed, the most democratic form of state yet devised. This is what he wrote in the The State and Revolution:

In capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority – the exploiters. Communism alone is capable of giving a really complete democracy, [4/5] and the more complete it is the more quickly will it become unnecessary and wither away of itself.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the democratic assertion of the will of the mass of the people over a minority who would, given the opportunity, return to a corrupt and decaying system. Such a democracy is only possible if there is a leadership which knows precisely where it is going. In Marxist theory this leadership is provided by the Communist Party, an organisation of those whose lives are pledged to the new society and are prepared to fulfil any tasks that are laid upon them. Such a party must be an organisation of practical and practising theoreticians.

At this juncture we do well to remember the classic phrase of Marx himself. “Hitherto philosophers have explained the world; our task is to change it.”

This phrase is basic to any understanding of the Marxist approach to philosophy. Dissatisfied with the existing world the Marxist desires to understand it in order that he may change it and remould it “nearer to the heart’s desire.” So far we have discussed what is technically known as historical materialism. The next, and biggest, claim of Marxism is that the approach we have discussed in the historical field is valid for the whole of reality as we know it.

So we turn from historical materialism to dialectical materialism.

Here it is important to define terms. Dialectics means change and change brought about by clash. The phrase is first used of the clash of argument. It is later used of the clash of reality. Matter is the word used of the real, objective world. It is whatever “has the property of objective reality.”

Dialectical materialism, then, according to Marx, is “the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thinking.

It begins with the assumption that the external world is both real and knowable, and it is here that it parts company with the various schools of philosophy known as idealism. It asserts that historically matter precedes mind and consciousness. It sees realty as an intelligible whole (here it is opposed to all forms of dualism), but it sees it not as static but as in constant motion. It then goes on to examine phenomena, things and people, not in isolation form each other, but in their relationships

In this examination two things stand out as of fundamental importance. The first is that the process of development of all things is not simple. Small and sometimes insignificant changes
lad to large and fundamental changes. Change in quantity leads [5/6] eventually to change of quality. Gradual change leads to sudden and abrupt change.

Two examples of this may be taken from Engels’ Dialectics of Nature:

Change of some form of movement either inherent in a body or imparted to it. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.

Chemistry may be called the science of the qualitative changes which take place in bodies as the effect of changes of quantitively composition. . . . Take oxygen. If the molecule contains three atoms instead of the customary two, we get ozone, a body definitely distinct in odour and reaction from ordinary oxygen. And what shall we say of the different proportions in which oxygen combines with nitrogen or sulphur, and each of which produces a body qualitatively different from all other bodies!* [*For a real understanding of this subject Engels’ book should be read. After physics and chemistry he goes on to discuss the very important realm of biology.]

The same law is seen at work in human history when the slow and gradual changes taking place within the womb of feudalism suddenly issued in the revolutionary changes which gave birth to
Modern capitalism, or when changes taking place within capitalism give birth to socialism. Evolution and revolution are not alternatives but complementaries.

The second fundamental law of dialectics is that internal contradictions are inherent in all things. All have a negative and a positive, a past and a future, a dying away and a being born. Dialectics become, therefore, in use the words of Lenin, “the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things.” “Development to use another formulation of the same writer, “is the struggle of opposites.”

One of the greatest writers on this subject, G. V. Plekhanov, in his Defence of Materialism, quoted in illustration of this theme a passage from Goethe’s Faust:

“In the tides of life, in Action’s Storm
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing,
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at Time’s humming loom ‘tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears!”

[7] He went on to say:

At a particular moment a moving body is at a particular spot, but at the same time it is outside it also because, if it were only in that spot, it would, at least for that moment, become motionless. Every motion is a dialectical process, a living contradiction, and as there is not a single phenomenon of nature in explaining which we do not have in the long run to appeal to motion, we have to agree with Hegel, who said that dialectics is the soul of any scientific cognition. And this applies not only to cognition of nature. What, for example, is the meaning of the old saw, Summum jus, summa injuria? Does it mean that we act most justly when, having paid our tribute to law, we at the same time give its due to lawlessness? No, that is the interpretation of “surface thinking, the mind of fools.” The aphorism means that every abstract justice, carried to its logical conclusion, is transformed into injustice, i.e., into its own opposite. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice serves as a brilliant illustration of this. Take a look at economic phenomena. What is the logical conclusion of “free competition?” Every capitalist strives to beat his competitors and to remain sole master of the market. And, of course, cases are frequent when some Rothschild or Vanderbilt succeeds in happily fulfilling this ambition. But this shows that free competition leads to monopoly, that is to be negation of competition, i.e., to its own opposite.

It remains to pose the question, what has Christianity to say to all this?

According to the Fathers of Lambeth the answer is clear. “Marxian Communism is contrary to Christian faith and practice, for it denies the existence of God, Revelation, and a future life; it treats the individual man as a means and not an end; it encourages class warfare; it regards the moral law not as absolute but as relative to the needs of the state.”

The Foreign Office could not have asked for more. But it will not do. It is much too easy and too simple. It evades most of the facts and misplaces others.

A serious survey of Marxism from the Christian point of view has first to take into account the history of the relationship between Christianity and philosophy. Christianity itself did not come into existence as a philosophy in the technical sense. It started as a “way of life,” a way of corporate living that was condemned by the leaders of contemporary society as atheistic and immoral. When it needed technical philosophical expression it went to existing philosophy. It borrowed from Plato, from Aristotle, from Plotinus. Throughout its long history it has always, sooner or later, come to terms with the prevalent mode of philosophic thought, with whatever, in other words, has been the highest expression an epoch has known of the truth about reality. One revolution in this matter was staged by Abelard and Aquinas, who between them compelled the Christian Church to re-state its beliefs in the terms of the rediscovered Aristotelianism of the twelfth century. A similar [7/8] revolution has taken place within the last century in the attitude
of the Church to modern natural science. Is not another due with regard to Marxism?

In answering this question we may claim the weighty authority of William Temple, who wrote n the preface to his Gifford Lectures: “I believe that the Dialectical Materialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin has so strong an appeal to the minds of our contemporaries , and has so strong a foundation in contemporary experience, that that only a Dialectic more comprehensive in its range of apprehension of the inter-play of factors in the real world, can overthrow it or seriously modify it as a guide to action.’’

The fact is that the only proper question a Christian should ask of didactical materialism as of any other philosophy is, is it true? Is it the best way in the present stage of human knowledge of describing reality?

This is a question that cannot be answered by asserting that Marxism contradicts any preconceived dogma. We would, indeed, do well to take to heart the words of the deeply religious Abelard: “A doctrine is not to be believed because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so.” We cannot be led into “all truth” unless we allow our reason to work. We can discover whether Marxism is accurate or not only by painstaking study and discussion.

 Here I wish to make only one point. The general tenour of Marxism is not in conflict with the Christian tradition. The father of all dialectical philosophy, Heraclitus, is constantly quoted by the Fathers. Justin Martyr, indeed, claimed him as a Christian. “Those who lived reasonably,” he said, “are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them.” “Contraries,” said Athenagoras, “war against one another by a divine law.” It would be possible to multiply the quotations.

But what of the specific points of Marxism? Certainly there have been Christians who were idealists. Was not Berkeley numbered among the Bishops? But the main Christian tradition, despite the neo-platonists, has never been idealist. It has regarded the world as real and as knowable. And the priority of matter to mind? Let us go back to Temple;

Dialectical Materialism, so-called, asserts the temporal priority of matter, as we have been led to do [the reference is to his own lectures]; it regards mind as appearing within matter, as we have done; it asserts that mind, so appearing, acts by its own principles, which are not reducible to the categories of physics and chemistry, while mind is regarded as originating in, and out of, what is material, it is not in itself [8/9] regarded as identical with matter. What is postulated by this view is not an identity of mind and matter but a unity of mind and matter. [1] [(1) Nature, Man and God, p. 488.]

We might add that such a view should be regarded with great sympathy by those who have been trained to think sacramentally.

On the historical side we have to face the Bishops’ charge of class war. In the background here is the Marxian view of the economic factor in history. Again it is worth quoting Dr. Temple who, for all his disagreements with Marx, felt able to write:

Marx will continue to be a great force, because he first expressed with insight and passion the supreme importance of the economic factor in politics and the close connection between economics and ethics. [2] [(2) Christianity and the State.]

As to class itself–do the Bishops never sing Magnificat? Do they never read, “Blessed are the poor,” “Woe to you that are rich,” Go to now ye rich men, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you”? Do they never meditate how hard it is for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God?

Let us face the fact that it is impossible to read the Scriptures of either Old or New Testament and escape the conclusion that the social hope summed up in the classless Kingdom of God had, as its prelude, a great deal of class struggle.

It will be objected that I have omitted one thing. Marxism is atheist. That is true. It sees no need of the hypothesis of God. Christians do. Nevertheless, it is not the real issue of the subject we are discussing. The real issue is the validity or otherwise of Marxism as a description of the historical process and the natural order.

For the rest, in addressing Marxists, many Christians will echo the apostrophe of Clement of Alexandria: “Where, O Plato, is that hint of the truth which thou givest?” They will perhaps also remember the ancient Christian approach to atheism, which is summed up in the words of the Clementine Recognitions:

“We say that he is a worshipper of God, who does the will of God.”

It has never been a part of any sound Christian theology that the Church has a monopoly either of truth or of truthful persons It was indeed the great Augustine who reminded us that “many who seen to be within are without, and many who seem to be without are within.”

I would not, myself, dare to apply this to the Bishops, but I would venture to remind them that it would be wise to read against [9/10] the Lambeth Report the official Report on Doctrine in the Church of England, presented to their Graces of Canterbury and York so recently as 1938, where it is recorded that:

“It is through some inkling of His glory that all moral effort is initiated even in atheists.”

*          *          *          *          *          *

Note.

The question of atheism looms very large in the minds of many Christian people and really needs a quite separate discussion.

Three points should be noted:

1. Almost all Christians are accustomed to working in all kinds of fields with atheists without comment. A Bishop does not refuse to vote on the side in which he believes in the House of Lords if an atheist is on the same side. It is only in certain cases that this argument assumes major importance. When it does the first question to be discussed is why it has been raised.

2. According to the New Testament the Divine standard of judgment is not based on protestation of religion but on feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

3. It must not be too lightly assumed that the real division between human being is between those who give verbal acceptance to creeds and those who reject them. The practical atheism of many “Christian” people who act as though there were no God and no purpose in living is a much more fundamental danger to the Church than anything outside it.

II. THE BOLSHEVIK INTERPRETATION

The word Bolshevik has been so frequently used as a term of abuse that there are still those to whom it symbolises bearded agents with bombs in their pockets. In fact the word “bolshevik” means nothing more devastating than “majority.” The Bolsheviks were the majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

The first Marxist group to be formed in Russia was Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group of 1883. This was the precursor of other bodies such as Lenin’s League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which called the first Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Minsk in 1898.

The history of the party from its formation until the revolution of 1917 is a record of persecution on the one hand and internal struggle on the other. Its leaders and workers were constantly [10/11] arrested and banished. The party could only be directed from outside the country. Its papers and pamphlets had to be written abroad and smuggled in. The story is, indeed, one of the most exciting in modern history and is an outstanding record of heroic suffering and unflinching devotion to a cause.

The internal party struggles were fundamental to what followed. If the masses were to be led forward to successful action the leadership had to be absolutely right. No theoretical mistakes could be tolerated in a party whose theory was to lead it to victory. So there were struggles against narodism, economism, and the opportunism of the Mensheviks or minority wing of the party.

Lenin insisted that an organisation which aimed at leading the workers to socialism must be led by professionals, by men or women whose whole lives were devoted to this task. Such leaders must not only be masters of contemporary politics and be prepared to undertake any task in any place, but they must also be masters of philosophy and history. Only by understanding the whole world process and their part within it could they fulfil their tasks. Imbued with the conviction that history was on their side they could go forward with unquenchable faith in their ultimate victory.

The events that led to the Russian Revolution were a striking vindication of the Marxian analysis. An exploited proletariat grew ever more desperate. The imperialist conflict of the Russo-Japanese war led to the Revolution of 1905, the outstanding lesson of which was the spontaneous growth of Soviets or councils of workers and peasants. The increasing corruption of the bourgeoisie set the seal on their evil system.

It has to be remembered that Tsarist Russia was an autocracy in which both democracy and the rights of the subject were almost wholly lacking. Although serfdom had been abolished in 1861, the rule of the knout still lingered. The Church was rigidly controlled by the State. Such industrial development as existed was largely controlled by foreign capital. Over 70 per cent of the population was illiterate. Subject nationalities were not even allowed to use their own language in schools. Russia was not only “a prison house of nations,” it was the classic land of the pogrom. The sickness of this society was revealed by the position a Rasputin could achieve within it.

During the first world war this society collapsed. Over 2,300,000 soldiers were killed at the fronts; 4,700,000 were wounded; 3,000,000 were taken prisoners. At the front there was a famine of shells; at home a famine of food.

It was in this situation that an outbreak of strikes led to the abdication of the Tsar and the installation of a provisional [11/12] government. Side by side with this Soviets sprang into being once more. In October 1917, following an attempt by General Kornilov to stage an army coup d’etat, the Soviets, led by the Bolshevik Party, seized power.

This October Revolution was not the bloody business it has sometimes been made out to be. In taking the Winter Palace in Petrograd five sailors and one soldier were killed. There were no fatalities among the defenders. In Moscow the fighting was more serious and there were 500 deaths on the Bolshevik side and rather less on the other. The real blood-letting began with the counterrevolution, the war waged by Kolchak, Denikin and others with the aid of foreign armies and navies. This war devastated the country for some years and the ultimate triumph of the Soviet forces is one of the most remarkable facts of modern history.

The Soviet story from that day to this is one of a struggle to bring industrialisation, education and culture to this vast and backward land. The basis of the undeniable achievements that have taken place is the successive five year plans which have weighed the resources of the country, planned them, and built first a heavy industry and then a light industry. The extent of the achievement can be seen in the success which attended the Soviet Army in the second world war.

Behind all the achievements lies a system of government. Political parties, as we know them, do not exist. The Communist Party, as the Bolshevik party came to be called. is, as the Webbs put it, “a vocation of leadership.” It is a voluntary grouping and does not of itself wield the power of the State. This is wielded by elected representatives of the people. Local, district, national, Republican and All-Union Soviets are elected by the people. Courts, too, are elected. Each successive constitution has been more liberal. Indirect election has given way to direct election. A restricted franchise has given way to a universal franchise. Sixteen Republics form a Union in which all have equal rights and the former oppressed nationalities have revived cultures which previously were dying.

It must not be thought that everything has been changed in this vast land which covers one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Much of the past remans and will do for a long time to come. But everywhere there are signs of the new. Whole new towns and cities have been created. There are new settlements in the Arctic. The country, too, has changed. Wooden ploughs no longer scratch the soil of small holdings. Collective farms make possible the use of modern instruments as, at the same time, they make it possible to bring medicine, education, the cinema, and other modern amenities [12/13] to the countryside and so narrow the gap between town and country worker.

In less than twenty years literacy has come to an entire people. The Kazakhs, the Khirgiz and the Armenians now have their native universities. While progress was bitterly retarded by the devastation of the second world war, the U.S.S.R. remains a country of unbounded opportunity for all its citizens.

It is important to realise that the picture I have drawn here is a sober one capable of statistical verification. It is accepted by such bodies as U.N.E.S.C.O., which seeks to learn from the Russians how mass illiteracy may be abolished, and by the British Central Office of Information, which in its recent charts of world malnutrition and world illiteracy show these twin diseases as nonexistent in the Soviet lands.

It is true that a whole team of anti-soviet writers try to present the U.S.S.R. as a country arbitrarily ruled by a secret police in which millions of people languish in “slave labour camps.” What is the truth of the matter?

Certainly the U.S.S.R., in common with all other countries, has its security police. It is to their credit, and our wellbeing, that their native fifth column was discovered before the second world war began. Equally it is true that the Soviet State does not claim to have produced a society in which there is no crime. It has a penal system which is based on labour camps on the theory that paid labour is reformative.

A recent publication by Dallin and Nikolaevsky has given wide current to “estimates” which range between 15 and 30 million Soviet citizens in labour camps. This would be somewhere approximating to a quarter of the total adult population! If the number of necessary guards for such a vast undertaking were added to this the percentage of adults removed This would be somewhere approximating to a quarter of the total adult population! If the number of necessary guards for such a vast undertaking were added to this the percentage of adults removed from the normal labour market would make nonsense of known Soviet achievements. But the best refutation of these stories is the recent Soviet resolution in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nation asking for an international trade union commission to investigate “forced labour” in all countries including their own. The rejection of this resolution show how little confidence the opponent of the U.S.S.R. have in their own assertions. (28 Feb., 1949.)

It is not surprising that the new system of the U.S.S.R. should have produced its pathological opponents whose wild assertions go to any lengths. The preparations for Hitler’s war provided countless examples. But what is to be said of the more balanced and weighty critics?

He we must turn again to the Fathers of Lambeth who object [13/14] to Soviet communism that it has used individuals as means to its ends and made the moral law subservient to the needs of the State. This is an important criticism to which Christians must give full weight.

Before they can do this, however, they must be sure of their own position. Is it true that Christianity can never countenance such a practice? Those Christians who are pacifists will aver at once that the individual is, and must be, supreme. But the Bishops are not pacifists and gave strong support to their own countries in the second world war. Indeed, they supported the whole allied cause including the Soviet. In other words, as they supported their own countries in using individuals as means to an end that was regarded as necessary and desirable, so also they supported the Russians in doing the same thing. War, indeed, is the supreme example of individuals being used as means to a collective end, and of “the moral law being made subservient to the needs of the State.” If it can be right here, is it less right when directed to more positive social end?

Let us be honest. The main Christian tradition has never asserted that individuals must not be asked to conform to desirable social goals even if personal sacrifice is involved in their so doing. It is precisely that the Soviets today assert.

This kind of facile criticism completely evades any attempt to evaluate the real achievements of Soviet morality. Of these the most important is the abolition in the main areas of living of the exploitation of man by man. It is no longer possible for one man to live on the labour of another. Men may work in partnership, they may employ each other, but they may not sell the labour of another and keep the proceeds. “He that does not work neither shall he eat.”

There are other kinds of exploitation that are ruled out. Race may not exploit race. Anti-Semitism is a crime punishable by law. Nation may not exploit nation. Kurd, Armenian, Tadjik, Russian, Ukrainian, all have an equal position in the new community. Equally man may not exploit woman. Men and women have an equal status in law and women are encouraged both to work and to participate in the running of the community. Human beings have a status as such and there is no such thing in Soviet law as an “illegitimate” child.

These are things that pervade the whole sphere of morality and affect it at every stage. Children are regarded as having first claim on the community. It was indeed most striking to notice in 1946, when so many things were lacking in the U.S.S.R. [14/15] that children’s clubs, children’s hospitals and clinics wanted for nothing.

Soviet morality regards man as a creature imbued with human dignity, who is to be treated accordingly. So it is a common thing in the Soviet press for attacks to be launched on any officials whose departments behave in such a way as to diminish the dignity of man. It is for this reason that the family is treated as an honoured institution and divorce is strongly discouraged. This same approach runs through the whole realm of sex. Prostitution is virtually nonexistent. Promiscuity is openly denounced. There is a complete absence of erotic advertisement.

If we turn from the Soviet Union to the new democracies of Eastern Europe we see the same kind of forces at work designed to lead to a communal society where man lives freely with a high level of culture.

In each of these countries the communist parties play a leading role. There is freedom to all except those who would plunge society back into the corruption, chaos and dependence upon other countries that wrecked all of these countries before the second world war. There are varying degrees of nationalisation of industry. The land is given to the peasants who work it. The Balkans are gripped by a great movement to bring literacy to all the people. Racial and national antagonisms are eliminated by careful measures appropriate to the particular situation. Woman has come into her own.

To the sociologist these Eastern European countries are, today, places of infinite hope. The things which were so obviously lacking in years past are now coming into being. Visitors to these countries find the people enthusiastic and full of hope. The ennui of so much of western society is strikingly absent.

It is a tragic, but not a surprising thing, that there is such widespread misrepresentation of what is happening in Eastern Europe today. Czechoslovakia is an interesting case in point. It is alleged that there democracy has come to an end. Should this occur in any other country the Atlantic Pact is to be brought to bear. But what really happened in Czechoslovakia in February 1948? A coalition government was in office headed by the leader of the largest party, the Communist Gottwald. With the object of forcing this government to resign, its right wing members themselves resigned. Acting completely within the terms of the constitution Gottwald presented to the President a list for a new government. The workers came out on the streets to support this action. In other words real popular democracy came into play. [15/16] The President had to accept the obvious wish of the masses of the people. Never has there been so constitutional a revolution.

The most vital thing to note about the Soviet Union and the Eastern Democracies is that the peoples stand behind their governments. And—here is the great challenge to us—with the peoples stand the churches.

There are exceptions to this. Mindszenty, with his loyalty in Rome and not in Hungary, plotted with the Hapsburgs against the Hungarian people. Nevertheless, in the main the churches of Eastern Europe, themselves free to run their own affairs, and with a high percentage of adherents in their respective countries, support their governments not because they support atheism, which in fact they constantly denounce, or because they are compelled to, but because they have learned to support progress and moral advance when they see it.

This is the background on which the Russian and other Orthodox churches gathered in Moscow last summer issued their appeal to the Christians of the world to work for peace and oppose  those who work for war. It is for this reason that these same churches are supporting the Paris Peace Congress.

May I conclude by quoting a speech recently made by the Hungarian Bishop Bereczy at a peace meeting in Budapest:

“Peace is not rest, nor is it passive pacifism. There is a false longing for peace, an idle dream that prosperity will fall into our laps. The result of such daydreaming has always been the prosperity really came to a select group of people without their expending any effort for it—or something that is an even worse form of false peace! longing for the imaginary flesh-pots of Egypt. The task of the Church is not to try to set back the development of society with one or another kind of  false peace, but just the reverse: to lead souls into the fight for true peace and to make everyone understand that the inner abandonment of social and material privileges is the great commandment of human solidarity, while a longing for the evils of the past even at the price of war is a sin against God. . . . We would like to ask the Western Protestant Churches, and particularly the World Council of Churches: Let your eyes and hearts be open to the countries which walk on the road to socialism, and to the so-called ‘Eastern Churches’ which fight for peace in profoundly serious agreement with their socialist countries. We send you this message that we are counting on you and believe that in this fight you will be with us.”