SOCIALISTS WANT LESS MARX

New line gives Catholics a fresh opportunity
By Douglas Hyde
CATHOL1C social thinkers will during the next few weeks be carefully studying the declara tion of principles issued from the inaugural meeting of the new Socialist International, to see to what extent they are in accord with Catholic teaching.
Extracts which have appeared in the press would appear to suggest that much of what was condemned in the Socialist parties by Papal Encyclicals of the past has, on paper at least, now very largely been dropped.
But a speech made by Kurt Schumacher, German Socialist leader, inttnediately after the declaration had been issued, bore all the familiar signs of class hatred and of an intention to continue to fight the class war as before. And there is a good deal of internal evidence to suggest that those Socialist parties who still cling to such ideas will simply disregard the declaration and claim that it is not binding upon the member parties.
Nonetheless this latest "international" represents a step away from the most objectionable features of its forerunners.
The short-lived First International of one hundred years ago, was in its early days almost entirely dominated by the idea of Marx and Engels who wrote its manifesto (the now famous Communist Manifesto) and based it firmly on the need for Labour organisations to conduct revolutionary class war.
Marxism revised
The Second International, which took its place, and which dissolved on the outbreak of the First World War, consisted of parties which had adapted themselves to the Parlia mentary democracies, but, in most cases, nonetheless retained many of the worst features of Marxism, such as its atheism and its insistence on the need for class conflict.
The Third (Communist) International, was founded by Lenin after the Russian Revolution and welded into a world force the various revolutionary parties which modelled themselves on the Bolshevik party. It was, as a propaganda move. allegedly wound up during the last war, but later reappeared as the
COMinform.
The new Socialist International. formed at Frankfurt last weekend, of which the British Labour Party is a leading member, is the heir to the Second International, but appears still further to have revised its Marxism or even, in the case of the majority of the memberparties, to have turned its back on Fundamental to most such parties has been belief in the need to socialise the whole of production. distribution and exchange (which goes a good deal further than is permissible in Catholic social teaching).
Doubts increase
Now, on the basis of experience -if Government, discussion within the Labour Party here is tending to turn from belief in State ownership as the cure for every social ill, to that of shared responsibility. In New Zealand. Labour has gone further; the New Zealand Federation of Labour has recently dropped the socialist objective from its constitution and its propaganda. Australian Catholics have tended more and more in recent years to
demand that this should be done in the case of the Australian Labour Party in which they represent a large minority.
It is generally thought that increasing doubts on the question led to many Catholics withdrawing their support and so to the defeat of Labour at the last election.
These trends are reflected in the new International's declaration. So
too, must one must suppose. is the much increased post-war influence of
Catholics in some of the Continental Socialist parties, as is also the steady outside pressure which has come from the example of Catholic parties
which have put forward enlightened social programmes which have been
both realistic and in accord with the
Church's teaching. avoiding in particular those evils which follow from the submersion of the individual by the State, and which have led to the Socialists' second thoughts.
Public ownership
"Socialist planning " says the declaration. "does not pre-suppose public ownership of all the means of production."
It adds that it is. in fact, "compatible with the existence of private ownership in important fields."
It would seem that Catholics in the Labour Party arc here given the chance to campaign for the revision of the party's aims and programme and so to prevent it from passing, as it could so easily do. into the hands of the Marxists and the doctrinaires.