The True Socialist

Extract

Catholic not being a true socialist, ought not to call himself a socialist. The Pope has said so.

The true socialist, the genuine Marxist, was never a Catholic and never could be one. For the economic theory that capitalism was fated by inexorable law to pass away, superseded by a class-conscious proletariat that would order all industry on a basis of social equality and thereby produce a co-operative commonwealth, was the dogma and the hope of the true socialist. We say was because when Lenin and his supporters resolved to enforce in their own way the Marxian doctrine in Russia, the old-fashioned Marxian socialist, particularly in England and Germany, was profoundly shocked. Hyndman, the ‘father of English socialism,’ with Kautsky and the ‘old guard’ of the German Social-Democratic Party, protested that Lenin and the Russian communists were not behaving according to plan, since no classconscious proletariat had yetbeen organised in Russia. What happened at Moscow queered the pitch altogether for socialism. The Bolshevik tyranny, in fact, did not, and has not, inaugurated social equality, neither has it produced the co-operative commonwealth of the socialist vision.