WHAT COMMUNISM STANDS FOR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 5 October 1931, Page 2

WHAT COMMUNISM STANDS FOR

1 THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL “The system of individualism, based on the laws of monogamy, the family and private property, is not completely separable from the notion of the absolute value of the individual; and that notion again can only he justified by a type of ethical religion which involves some sort -of belief in eternal reality, Canon Oliver C. Quick, of St. Paul s, wrote recently. “Now Communism (if we are to accept Mr Shaw’s account of it), stands for the rejection of this whole connected system of ideas. Its vigorously enforced religion is the anti-reli-gion which denies eternal reality in toto, and consequently makes the _ temporal survival, not only of the individual, but of the State, the only end of life. Action then becomes ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘right’ or wrong,’ solely in so far as it is a means to this end. Therefore, what wo call morality vanishes altogether. If the action of an individual tends to endanger the survival of the Communistic State, then, and then only, he must disappear. It is meaningless to ask whether to kill him is ethically right or wrong—we can only ask whether it is the most efficient means to preserve the State, or else possibly a- blunder. In the same way, if an individual’s views or beliefs are opposed to Communism it is irrelevant to consider whether it is not- expedient to stamp them out. Communism in principle is seeking to convert human society into something which resembles an infinitely more complicated and efficient ants’ nest or beehive, where each particular ant or bee is not an individual at all, but merely a link in the chain which constitutes a surviving comnrunity.”