A BRITISH LABOR LEADER ON RUSSIAN COMMUNISM.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3134, 11 September 1922, Page 7

A BRITISH LABOR LEADER ON RUSSIAN COMMUNISM.

«•♦ The comments of Mr J. Ramsay Macdonald, of the British Labor Party, on the meeting of the International at Berlin, as expressed in the Socialist Review, reveal very important points of difference between him and the Communists. Describing the failure of extreme methods in Russia, he says: "A retreat had to be made back td capitalist contacts, back .to the point where the I.L.P. stands in this country, until we see Tchitcherin appearing at the Genoa Conference in a top hat pledging Id's Government to satisfy certain capitalist requirements. Moscow has abandoned the world revolution and cataclysmic Socialism. . . . The world revolution was not coming off, and Communism in every country was weakening as an organised movement." After recording the various splits in the International gatherings, he comes to the Berlin meeting, when some sort of agreement was reached in conference among Radek, Bucharin, Longuet, Bauer, Vandervclde, and Macdon ald himself.

"In my reply to Radek I referred to tin a ran tees of a moral kind. At that he laughed. All thoughts in the cotegory of morals belong in their minds to 'bourgeois ideology.' This has a direct issue in tactics. It makes the Communist the most unscrupulous of opportunists; it makes it impossible for you to know whether he is working at any given moment on belied' or on tactics. Tactics occupy the same place in his mind as right does in that ,)1 : a innn who is entitled to claim your trust. I am compelled to doubt the sincerity of the Moscow demand for a united front I asked both in

public sessions at Berlin for reasons to enable me to clear my mind of the suspicion that all this was a same played first of all to help Russia at Genoa, but, secondly, to enable the Communists to pursue from a more advantageous ground their policy of hostility to us. I got no answer. But an answer must be given. I want to know how long a spoon I must take with me when the Communists and I sit at the same table. "I 'know that 'good faith' cannot be proved liko a. sum in mathematics, and the lack of it is only of temporary and conditional importance to us. Communism is weakening. Only the distress of nations is keeping it alive. . . The differences between Communism properly understood and Socialism nroperly understood are real; the difference between them as two actual movements in our life to-day is still greater. J have no concern, for instance, with tiio reasons which have influenced a colleague to become a Socialist, whether they were moral or non-moral, but if a hotly of colleagues put such an emphasis upon the non-moral as to make that essential in the official philosophy of the organisation to which T belong, then I am interested. I am not interested if a colleague holds that when democracy has done its best by political means.' the reaction will compel it to resort to coercion in the end and in order to lav the last stones of the Socialist State, but if that colleague says that in view of the possibility of that trouble I must resort to arms and dictatorships at the beginning and wishes to make that the characteristic position of our organisation, then, again. I am interested. Therefore, we must maintain nationally and internationally an organisation of democratic Socialism whose doctrine will be clear and not a confusing compromise as the Vienna Union s declarations were."