World Socialist Debater Charges U.S. Capitalism Starves Masses

"Comrades, friends, by forcible expropriation, by outright thievery, the capitalists have taken the means of production out of the hands of the workers," Harold T. Meyerson of the World Socialist Party charged last night in a debate with the Harvard Debate Council.

This expropriation has produced the "twin horrors of capitalistic war," Meyerson claimed. Representing the Debate Council, Marc E. Leland '59 and Edward C. Pinkus '59 opposed the resolution, supported by Meyerson and George J. Gloss, "Resolved: That Socialism is the cure for our ills."

"Capitalism has brought poverty, crisis, war, and misery for humanity," Gloss declared, "while socialism will end the wars." Socialism will liberate the enslaved masses, Meyerson added, through "absence of state, absence of government, and absence of money."

Countering the Socialists' declaration that almost half of the people living in the U.S. have incomes below the maintenance level calculated by the Federal government, Leland said, "Some people are worth more than others; I personally do not feel that I could live on the scale set up by the government."

"Furthermore," he ventured, "since that 50 per cent of the people are still living at all, I would say that things seem to be coming along all right." In justifying the Socialist accusation that capitalism causes wars, Leland declared, "Some of our most magnificent history has come from wars."

Transatlantic Debate

"We thank God that the Atlantic stands between us and the ignominy of a written constitution," a member of the Cambridge University Debate Union declared yesterday afternoon in a transatlantic debate with the Harvard Debate Council.

In opposing the proposition, "Resolved: That this house thanks God for the Atlantic," members of the Harvard Debate Council pointed out that "The Atlantic is a pretty inactive stretch of real estate," and "a dull, dirty ditch that prevents us from seeing each other as we really are."

Furthermore, although it enabled us to have the "Boston tea party, the revolution, and the DAR," if it were dried up, we could have the Henley races on the East River from the U.N. to Wall St., and could juxtapose Hadrian's wall and the Mason-Dixon Line.