Poland

Press, 29 January 1982, Page 12

Poland

Sir,—On January 26 the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, said that the Government will not relax the restraints placed on official relations with the Soviet Union since the invasion of Afghanistan and reaffirmed after the military take-over in Poland. This official, protest against Soviet imperialism is to be congratulated; but surely it is not too much to ask that we protest consistently, rather than selectively, against oppression. It is possible that such a policy followed without exception would isolate us completely from the rest of the world but I do wonder why such official restraints have not been placed on our relations with, for example, South Africa. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have the impression that we are merely extras in a B-grade Western where the "goodies” can get away with anything, the “baddies” always wear red and only the director has a script.—Yours, etc.*, S. R. ARCHER. January 27, 1982.

Sir,—The quotation by Graeme Yardley from John McMurray (January 26) is not so much a “legitimate critic-, ism,” as a statement of simple fact. Marxism uses the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” in no pejorative sense. Every historical social organisation, from slavery to socialism, has been a dictatorship of the ruling class, slave-owners of slavery, the landed aristocracy of feudalism, the owners of capital of capitalism, the

proletariat of socialism; but only the proletarian dictatorship .is a transition stage. Marx, in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” says it thus: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” Between the dictatorship of the proletariat and fascist dictatorship lies a world of irreconcilable differences.— Yours, etc., M. CREEL. January 27, 1982.