Antoni
SZYMANSKI (1881-1942)
Catholic priest,
a distinguished representative of Catholic scholarship and social
thought in Poland. B. Oct.
27, 1881, Praszcza (county Wieluñ). Editor of the Pr¹d
monthly and social activist (1928 founded the Society of Christian
Science [Towarzystwo Wiedzy Chrzeœcijañskiej], from
1931 president of Polish Catholic Intellectuals League [Zwi¹zek
Polskiej Inteligencji Katolickiej], organizer of "Odrodzenie" charitable
festivals in Lublin. Wrote many works on subjects which he took
interest in (Studia i szkice spo³eczne ["Social Studies and Essays"], Polityka spo³eczna ["Social Policy"],
Bolszewizm jako pr¹d
kulturowy i cywilizacyjny ["Bolshevism as a Cultural and Civilizational
Current"], Ekonomika i etyka
["Economics and Ethics"], Problemy spo³eczne ["Social Problems"]).
D. in Be³¿yce.
The selected fragments
are from "Bolszewizm jako pr¹d kulturowy i cywilizacyjny",
Pr¹d, April 1937, pp. 227-234-241-243.
1. The characteristic feature of the socialist-Bolshevik
culture is collectivity.
Society is composed of individuals, it is a
quantifiable and in a sense mechanical entity. Man is not important,
as long as society lasts. [...]
The group, the collectivity is the only reality.
The individual is its element, but of less consequence than a cell
in an organism. The cell lives through the organism, but has its
own life. The individual does not possess his own mental life within
the collectivity. He thinks the same, he feels the same, and he
acts the same as the collectivity. [...]
Individual life is supplanted with collective
life. The individual does not have his own life and purpose. He
lives and acts within the collectivity, through the collectivity
and for the collectivity. He does not have rights as a person and,
as an individual, he possesses only those rights that are granted
to him by the collectivity. He does not have his own joys and griefs,
but only collective joys and griefs. Cultural life, social life,
and leisure have been transferred to clubs, factory buildings, and
entertainment parks. Hence collective action, collective writing,
all kinds of parades, team competitions. The poet and the writer
describe collective action, mass feelings. The human being has been
lost or is hardly to be seen. The aim of work is not to develop
individual talents or realize individual good within the framework
of the common good, but to realize the collective good, and only
indirectly one's own. In the economic sphere man labors not for
himself, but for the collectivity, and it is the collectivity that
gives him the opportunity to satisfy his needs. [...]
The idea of community is so strong in socialist
thought, that in the initial phase of the Bolshevik revolution it
assumed savage forms. When one discards natural moral law, and especially
Christian morality, a woman loses her inherent human value and becomes
a commodity. In Ekaterinodar the Bolshevik authorities issued documents
empowering their holders to socialize girls upwards of ten years
of age as they saw fit. In Vladimir it was decreed with the same
purpose in mind that all women above seventeen should be registered.
In his report to the English minister of war, general Poole wrote
in January 1919 that in some Soviet cities commissariats of free
love had been created and that virtuous women who would not submit
to the commissars' decree were publicly flogged.
What are the reasons for this socializing of
the whole of life?
A) Socialist economics claims that the capitalist
economy leads to anarchy and economic disasters, and hence to its
own collapse. The capitalist "husk is cracking. The last hour
of the capitalist private property has struck. The expropriators
will be expropriated".
Private property will be replaced with public
ownership. Anarchy of production will be supplanted with central,
planned management. "Centralization of the means of production and
the socialization of labor" will come about.
The new system will be based on "co-operative"
labor, on "joint ownership of land and of the means of production,
created by labor alone".
All goods are produced by common co-operative
labor. This fact must find its reflection in the common ownership
of the means and the tools of labor, in the common ownership of
the products of labor, and in the central management of the entire
economy. Instead of independent businesses, one big enterprise will
be created. [...]
This factory-society is conceived in a deeply
mechanistic way. It is composed of individuals, not of personalities.
[...]
Under
socialism inherently human values are submerged, man as an independent,
self-conscious and responsible creature is submerged.
This is an inevitable consequence of historical
materialism. Since economic relations are the only factor of development,
man is reduced to nothing.
Marx and other theoreticians of socialism recognize
the influence of man and man-made institutions on the course of
history, but only as secondary factors. Man is involved in production,
in the creation of culture, and thus affects the course of events,
but he thinks about and wants to achieve only what he has to think
and want, determined as he is by economic factors. The spirit of
man, his mentality, will, and feelings are products of economic
factors, and not of an independent spiritual element. Therefore
human personality has no significance in history. It is only an
instrument in the hands of a creative, but only blindly creative
matter. [...]
3. The theory which claims that man is only
an instrument of history, or to be more precise, of creative economic
factors, is undermined even by socialism and bolshevism, which have
boasted eminent personalities giving a new direction to history.
Yet this theory has important practical meaning.
It turns individuals into a group lacking individuality and will.
The new historical factor of common ownership
transforms society into a single whole, finding expression in the
same thoughts, the same actions, the same feelings, in the communality
of life and play.
Together with the principle of common ownership,
the theory transforms citizens into slaves of the state. No one
possesses productive property, labor is the only source of income,
and the state is the sole owner of enterprises; there are no businesses
which are private, not owned by the state. When the state refuses
employment, when it decides that a citizen is a liszeniec, he is deprived of a chance to make a living.
In an economy based on private ownership this cannot occur. If one
does not find work in one company, one will find it in another.
If a state-owned or syndicated company does not have a job for someone,
he will find it in a private one, not to mention the fact that citizens
have their own businesses.
Being the owner of the goods produced, the state
distributes them among the citizens. All citizens are dependent
on the state as regards the satisfaction of their needs. The state
has at its disposal industrial and agricultural products, apartments,
paper needed for printing books and periodicals, schools and universities,
railroads and means of transportation.
The citizens constitute a mass that the state
uses as it sees fit. Along with economic power, the state has political
power accompanied by the whole apparatus of coercion.
Socialism accepted the assertion of Engels that
in the communist state "the government of men will give way to the
administration of things and the management of production processes.
The state will not be removed, but will simply wither away". Marx
claims that the state will exist only in the initial stage of communist
society, as organized oppression - because every state is organized
oppression - in the hands of the proletariat. However, the problem
is that the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat has lasted
for too long. Moreover, it will continue to exist. Yet let us assume
that the state will wither away. Then economic management will also
perform political functions, connected with internal security and
external defense. Economic power will find support in political
power. This has already occurred: the same people exert political
and economic power, people from the same class. They are intellectuals,
who pretend to speak on behalf of the working class.
Lenin was right, then, when he said that "all
citizens will become employees of the state".
4. One must add, though, that in practice the
state finds its concrete expression in the ruling group. All citizens
will become employees of the ruling group, having at its disposal
the national economy and the means of state coercion.
Along with Lenin, Stalin stresses the fact that
the Bolshevik revolution, which is to transform human life completely,
cannot be carried out without the dictatorship of the proletariat,
that is without a strong, central, unconstrained organization whose
organs are the trade unions, the Soviets, and particular comrades
unreservedly committed to the cause, youth associations, and parties,
as organizations of people from the proletarian mass. In this manner
the entire life of Soviet citizens will be embraced by a strong
framework created by the ruling group.
5. The state as a representative of the collectivity
stands at the head not only of the national economy and public life,
but also of spiritual and artistic culture. It provides the impulse,
it designates the tasks and the areas of interest, it organizes
talents, it praises and condemns, and it elevates and humiliates.
Socialism places culture under the control of the state.
6. Having shed his personality, having rejected
God, the Soviet citizen believed in Stalin, as an embodiment of
the collectivity.