THE MENACE OF COMMUNISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23205, 1 June 1937, Page 5

THE MENACE OF COMMUNISM

TO THE EDITOR Sir, —Permit me to assure Mr Flint that it has been the perusal of Social Credit literature that has convinced mo that the Douglas system is merely a new development of an old error. On the other hand, his suggestion of emotionalism in connection with Marxism creates the suspicion that his acquaintance therewith has been limited to certain spurious quotations in letters to the press. The actual writings of Marx are as free from emotionalism as the propositions of Euclid. While exposing the cruelties of capitalism, with its waste of human life, Marx at the same time proves that it has been an indispensable phase in the development of production, leading ultimately to Socialism, with a higher cultural level for the masses of mankind. Marx proves that lack of purchasing power depends on nothing so superficial as a fault in accountancy, but on the low level of wages, which, moreover, can never be entirely remedied under the present system, because capitalism depends on profit for its very existence.

One wonders what kind of a world Mr Flint lives in that he does not know that products are destroyed and production is restricted in the interests of profit. Years before the present depression I heard an American say that he had actually seen boat-loads of strawberries sunk in Puget Sound to keep up the price. Has your correspondent not read about the wheat that was burned in Canada, the cotton ploughed in in the United Slates-, the cows slaughtered in Denmark, the spindles scrapped in Lancashire, or the-' coffee that was converted into bricks in Brazil?— l am, etc., H. Gow. Balclutha, May 29.