Dr. Wright is William Dow Professor of Economics and Political Science, McGill University. This article is from a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1961.
The letter of Korean student Sugwon Kang (Aug. 28) which urged us to treat communism as a highly rational point of view to which we should give rational and intellectual answers, is one of the first bits of common sense I have seen on this subject for some time.
I have been a lecturer on Marxism for years, and have striven desperately for years to persuade our propaganda authorities to go beyond a mere travel-folder level. Six years ago I said that our propaganda was like trying to fight an atomic war with a pre-Revolutionary shotgun, and that we would lose out if we did not tackle Marxism on a fundamental level.
The truth of the matter is that when we undertake to answer Marxism intellectually, we have to contradict so much of our own policy and attitude it shocks us into silence. But what will be the end of this?
We say that foreign aid will make people love us. Yet we apparently dare not answer the Marxian doctrine which appears to prove “scientifically” that all our wealth was stolen anyhow. But if a man feels that you have stolen a million from him, and you stand on a corner and give him $10 as a handout, will that make him love you? Or will he not rather use it to buy a gun—to use on you?
Let me now try to indicate some of the other problems involved in really answering Marxism.
To show the falsity of the Marxian claim that they can create a state in “which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” or that the root of all conflict is the conflict of the “bourgeois” and “proletariat,” it is necessary to use the following line of thought:
“The creative instinct is one of the attributes of free men. So if we make men free they will, for good or ill, become creative. From this spontaneous creativity will come both growth and disturbance. The ultimate justification of growth is thus that it is the natural product of spontaneous creativity. You stifle it; you stifle creativity. Yet growth comes through change and causes change. And change upsets some people.”
The argument for capitalism is the argument for spontaneous creativity, adaptation, and growth.
But how can we present this argument for adaptation when every U. S. pressure group, labor or capital, is clamoring for relief from the need to adapt—and is being encouraged in this attitude by those who profess to wish to re-investigate us?
How can we argue for the need of economic spontaneity when central coordination is being preached as the cure for all our ills?
How can we initiate growth in other countries if we teach that “insecurity” is bad or when a leading U.S. psychologist speaks of our participation in the “corporate sin” of believing in economic growth?
Another communist doctrine is that profits are exploitation. Can we answer that if we also think most profits should be recaptured either by the union or the tax collector?
Is our only real difference with the communists the method of obtaining the same end?
These are but samples of the problems involved. The long and the short of it is we no longer believe in our own institutions—at least not intellectually enough to defend them.
