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IAT DO YOU THINK?

UBEESADEREEERAKES2O5ER0

Nazism in all parts of Ger-
many and giving every support
to the forces of German dem-
oecracy. To confuse the issue
would mean to play inte the
hands of the Tory Munichites

and pro-fascists in high places -

who seek to protect many of
the leading war criminals,
under one pretense or another,
and who fear a virile German
democracy as a threat to the
‘ordered” way of life so be-
leved by these reactionaries.
SGT. JACK PHIELIPS.

B.C.Collectric i
To the Editor:

While riding on a streetcar

the other day, a process which

to say the least is a painful

one due to the dilapidated con-
dition of the roadbed, and
quietly cursing the B.C.Electric

under my breath, I happened to |

notice a sign-board upon which

the advertising department of-

the jJoeal power octopus had
rented space. Fhe sign board

“had a flashy ad. in which was

portrayed a power develop-
ment, undoubtedly the long-
awaited Bridge River promise.
{. opened my paper, and there
before me was another of the
B.C.Eleetric’s, fantastic press
statements promising the cit-
izenry the utmost in, travelling
comfort, speed, safety, embod-
ied in a trolley bus, at some
vague and indefinite date in
the future. When I~ arrived
home, I no sooner got settled
than a velvety voiced individual
who represented a post-war
planning department of the
B.C.Electric asked me what my
post war electric needs would
be.

After riding on the dilapi-
dated tracks and archaic trolley,
viewing the ads and press
statements of the company, and
having their soothing super-
charm salesman attempt to
convince me that the B.C.Elec-
tric was actually interested in
something that I, as a mere
consumer, wanted,

fe
Fe

PACIFIC ADVOCATE

power,

I fell to

—- =

inking about the B.C.Blectric.
J; harked back to the long
string of tomorrows upon which
the B.C.Electric has promised
to give their customers better
service, better streetcars, better
roadbeds, better everything.

In the midst of my reverie I
compared the results with the
promises and found the B.C.
Electric sadly lacking.

Unfortunately the B.C.Elec-
rie does not give the average
citizen, one of which I un-
doubtedly am, credit for a great
deal of intelligence. When the
company spends as much money
as they are on trying to con-
vince people to wait a few
more years for them to give us
these things there must be
something in the wind.

It is plain to. me that this
sudden interest in the consumer
has arisen out of the possibility
that provincial power might in
the near future be taken over
as a publicly owned utility. One
can well imagine the directors
of the company lying awake at

_nights and seeing nightmares
“of soft jobs and fat incomes

flitting out of their hands.

It is time that the provincial
government took steps to put
the power facilities of this prov-
ince into the hands of the pub-
lic. The B.C.Electric has proven
that they are both unwilling
and incapable of supplying
either the transport or power
needs of the province. Public
wherever tried, has
proven immeasurably better for
the consumer than monopoly
controlled power. It is time that
the province acted to get rid
of the B.C.Electric power mon-
opoly and take over the admin-
istration and distribution of the
provincial power system.

JAMES PARTRIDGE.

Food Supplies

Editor, P.A.

According to press reports
Canadian foodstuffs are to be
shipped to. Germany; which is
evidence cargo vessels are
available. But why feed our
enemies when but a short time
ago aid was denied our famine-
stricken Indian allies because
of| alleged lack of shipping!
Surely our ‘government is
aware of the heroic record of
the Indian armies as manifest-
ed by unprecedented casualties
suffered in the defence of dem-
ocracy!

That the people of India are
in much greater need of our
support than the German loot-
ers of Europe is. vouched for
by - responsible residents in
India such as Dr. B. C. Roy.
Just a few months ago he esti-
mated that in Bengal alone half
of the population of 60 million
were emaciated from starvation
and suffered from malaria
while ‘early death was inevi-
table for hundreds of thousands
of victims.

The question is not whether
the German defenders of
fascism should be permitted to
starve but why should they

have preference for food over

the Indian champions of democ-
racy? Our own sons fighting in
the war. welcomed the British
Indians as fighters par excel-
lence and they certainly will
ask why Canada should feed
the Germans while their Indian
comrades die.
J. E. BOYD.

MAROEOEEDORCsQREEROSRABDGASERRERODURVOSEESTLORoDERRPREESR OSD SOOSRSSPSSESLOSAREERTLSOCRODSR RED PBDBEVORSUESUESOUREE

tific foundation.

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Short Jabs » o sn

7

Frederich Engels

N Sunday, August 5, it will be fifty years since Frederich Engels died.
We cannot allow that date to pass without paying our tribute to one
of the two founders of the Socialist movement as we know it today.
Engels had been one of the most active figures in the revolutionary
labor movement for just over fifty years when he died. His first con-
tribution, “Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844,” was
published in 1845. :

The period between these two momentous events, for to the working
class, they were momentous évents, were crowded years for Engels. He
and his great fellow worker, Marx, came into the socialist movement of
the period together. They found it made up of people, workers and
others, dominated by a formless collection of hazy Utopian ideas, dreams
flowing from the good intentions of well-to do individuals like Robert
Owen,. Fourier and St. Simon, dreamers whose plans for a better world
were to be realized by themselves and given to the workers, or even im-
posed on them, whether they liked such plans or not.

Marx and Engels came into a labor movement which had no knowl-
edge whatever .of the economic functioning of the capitalist system,
whose political concepts were visionary in the extreme and to whom
philosophy, materialist or idealist, was something that only college pro-
fessors were competent to deal with. :

The half-century that Engels spent in the labor movement saw a
change in its whole character, a.change which was brought about ‘en-
tirely by Marx and Engels. Although Marx’s contribution is considered
the greater of the two, and Engels always considered himself to be the
“second fiddle,” the history of the movement during those busy years
proves that the part played by “the General’ as his close friends called
Engels, was no less important than that of Marx himself. Without
Engels, Marx would never have been able to finish his life’s work. .

The contribution of each was complimentary to the contribution of
the other. The outcome was that body of thought known today as
Marxism; that group of ideas, economic, political and philosphical, which
the workers have grasped and converted into a mighty force which is
today guiding the life and destinies of 200 millions of people living on
one-sixth of the world’s surface, the Soviet Union; is a beacon light
with a promise of hope for the future to millions more in capitalist
lands, in colonial and oppressed countries; a fear-inspiring spectre to
all reactionary tyrants. :

The Utopianism of the early socialists was supplanted by a con-
ception of socialism which had its roots firmly established on a scien-
This was accomplished by showing the production of
surplus value to be the motive which made the capitalist system tick;
struggles between classes, culminating in revolutions, as the “‘loco-
motives of history”; and applying the dialetctical method of Hegel,
“stood upon its feet” as Engels explained, as a measuring stick for the
understanding of history. These three innovations in socialist thought
lifted socialism out of the dream world category and made of it a science.

Engels writes in a note to “Feuerbach” one of his greatest works,
that “Marx was a genius. We others were at best talented. Without him
the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his
name.” ‘That statement is due largely to the innate modesty of Engels,
who was head and shoulders above any other German who ever lived.
He was without any trace of the philistinism he saw in the whole Ger
man people when he wrote that Hegel and Goethe were philistines be-
cause they were Germans.

Besides adding his share to the fundamental concepts: of scientific
socialism, Engels had to deal with all the pin-prick criticisms of the
snarling apologists for the old order, a sort of division of labor that
enabled Marx to carry on is basic work without interruption.

This has given us one of the most profound works in the whole
range of our socialist literature, “Anti-During.” That book and “Dia-
lectics of Nature,” written later, show the comprehensive range of
Engels’ knowledge which was wider than that of Marx.

Three chapters of Anti-Duhring were reprinted for popular reading
under the title of “Socialism, Utopian and, Scientific.” He wrote a
special introduction for that issue. Many writers have written about
historical materialism but none have succeeded in equalling that intro-
duction. It is the most masterly explanation of historical materialism
available to us and like the Communist Manifesto, it has been translated
into many languages. If Engels had never done anything else, that
introduction would place him amongst the great men of our movement.

For twelve years after the death of Marx, Engels carried on, com-
pleting much of Marx’s unfinished work and acting as counsellor and
guide to-the new socialist parties which were springing up in the Euro-
pean countries and America.

It was well that he could do so for a time, because in the closing
years of -his life reformist elements wormed their way into the move-
ment and the cancer of reformism began to sap the firm foundations
thatghe and Marx had fashioned for it.

Kautsky, the leader of “the group that hesitated between theory
and practice” as Bergerstrasser called them, earned Engels’ contempt
and hatred for bowdlerising the introduction that Engels wrote for an
1894 edition of Marx’ “Class Struggles in France.”

Every revolutionary passage in it was cut out over the protests of
Engels, whose death during the discussion allowed the revision to be
used to delude the Social-Democratic workers. One result of that kind
of revisionism was that when the Nazis, whom it helped to power by
disarming the workers, did seize power, Kautsky had to flee from Wei-
mar to Vienna, from there to Prague and again from there to Amster-
dam, where he died unwept, unhonored and unhung.

Nor was Kautsky the only revisionist. Eduard Bernstein became
the leader of one wing of the party about the time that Engels died.
He “improved” Marxism *by castrating it. Instead of class struggle, he
injected the tactic of evasion of struggle. “What is known as ‘final
objective’ is nothing to us, the movement is everything.” By “the move-
ment” Bernstein meant the Social Democratic party.

Anonia Oliviera, a Spanish socialist attended the funeral of Her-
man Muller, President of the Social Democratic Party, in 1931. After-
wards he wrote, “Muller’s body lay in state in the courtyard of the
Vewarts .... An old man, paralyzed from the waist downwards, was
carried to a seat in front. As he was borne past the waiting crowd, all
heads were uncovered. That mummified figure was Eduard Bernstein.
Shortly afterwards he died’... Had they both lived a few months longer
they might have been buried along with’ Social Democracy itself.”

Such is the fruit of- revisionism of Marxism!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 1945