UNSOCIAL SOCIALISTS.

Evening Star, Issue 18852, 29 January 1925, Page 6

UNSOCIAL SOCIALISTS.

The blinded Cyclop howling at Ulysses is recalled most naturally by the spectacle of M. Zinovioff shouting his scurrility at Mr Bernard Shaw, who had endeavored to remove a mote from his eye. The rabid leader of the Third International, if he could not profit by his good intentions, would have done better to ignore his brother Socialist. There was nothing to be gained, except humiliation, from engaging in a contest with his quick-wittedness. Not improbably there was reason, however, in Zinovie.fTs madness. It may have seemed to liim the less of two evils, in an address to an educational congress, to attempt to answer Mr Shaw's attack on the International and on Marxism than to dwell on the present state of education in Russia, which must be a painful subject. His reply in one respect was appropriate to his antagonist. It ran to the length of eight columns in the ‘ Pravda,' which would be almost as long as a Shavian preface. But it was more an exposure of Zinovieff than an exposure of Shaw. “ Bernard Shaw was the best example of petty bourgeois intelligence. His attitude towards revolution was that of the remotest Philistine. There was no educated man in Russia with such ossification or with such enormous blinkers over bis eves. . . . The desiccated bourgeois of to-morrow, . • • As for his aspersions

upon Karl Marx, if the dramatist were beside the founder of Socialism no one would notice this pigmy called Shaw.” The Fabian Socialist can smile at this abuse. Zinovieff may speak truly about the educated men of Russia. His party has done its best to kill them off. But those who have read Mr Shaw’s prefaces, or those who are flocking to performances of his ‘St. Joan’ in Leningrad and Moscow, will not dream of decrying his intelligence. M. Zinovieff was evidently driven beside himself by the bantering attack upon his own statesmanship, which, if it could have taught him anything, would have been most useful, and the depreciation of Marx, whom his admirers do not read. If it was an offence for Mr Shaw to derido that idol, we wonder what the Bolshevists must thing of Mr H. G. Wells. His references to Marx are quite the most entertaining portion of the book in which he recorded his impressions of Bolshevy—- ‘ Russia in. the Shadows.’ “ I have always regarded him,” he states, “ as a bore of the extremest sort. His vast unfinished work, ‘ Das Kapital,’ a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the ‘ bourgeoisie ’ and the ' proletariat ’—a book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary discussions—impresses me as a monument of pretentious pedantry. . . . When I encountered Marxists I disposed of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people constituted the proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows.” It was the statues of Marx in Russia which caused Mr Wells’s passive objection to him to be changed to a very active hostility. ‘‘About two-thirds of the face of Marx,” he writes, ‘‘ is beard—a vast, solemn, woolly, uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible, It is not the sort of beard tliat

happens to a man; it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It. is exactly like ‘ Das Kapital ’ in its inane abundance, and tho human part of the face looks over it owlishly, as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind.’’ The father of British Socialism was not Karl Marx, but Robert Owen.