The Ethics of Communism

Abstract

There is a sense, perhaps, in which our present topic is like Mrs. Harris, or snakes in Ireland, or the reigning King of Portugal—that is to say that there is no such thing. For if by communist one means simply a “ red,” it is at least permissible to argue that Moscow and Leningrad are places where there can be no ethics at all. In saying this I do not mean to refer to any particular actions whose object has been to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, or in other words the next immediate step in the policy of these communists. What Zinoviev and others of them say is that they are engaged in a war against all bourgeois administrations, and that, being at war, they are not bound to accept the rules of French duelling,i.e. any outworn conventions, whether these are called ethical or not. Since it is admitted, I suppose, by nearly every