COMMUNIST IDEALISM.

Waikato Times, Volume 110, Issue 18406, 13 August 1931, Page 6

COMMUNIST IDEALISM.

The Marquis of Lothian asked the other day whether there was not an idealism at the back of the Communist experiment in Russia which might have “ a prodigious influence on the : history of mankind." The French Revo- 1 lution, as we easily see now, fitted in with a revolution of ideas of which it was the natural expression. Is there in the Russian Revolution any similar body of new thought which will permanently influence the whole trend of European civilisation? If there is, the Marquis of Lothian suggests that it lies in the Communists' challenge to the “ divine right of property"—a right which he thinks perhaps even more fundamental than the divine right of Church and State challenged by the Reformation and the Renaissance. The difficulty is to see in the violent expropriation of property-holders anything morally fine or inspiring. That property should be held in cojnmon for common ends is an intelligible ideal. The peculiarity of Russian Communism is not in that but in the violence of the means by which the end is to be reached. In point of fact, Communists do not even seem to aim at Communism in the oldfashioned idealistic meaning of the word. Their present objective is apparently State capitalism of the sort admired by slow-going English Fabians. All Socialists want to abolish private property, and the only new inspiration provided by the Russians is the ruthlessness with which they set about abolishing it. It is quite true that there is throughout the world a new attitude towards property, a conviction that a man should not be allowed to do as he likes with his own, and it is in this growing sense that private property is a public trust rather than In forcible despoliation that one might expect to find the germ of future developments.