Aptheker Claims Marxist Solution Needed in U.S.

Claiming that the U.S. is second only to South Africa in "spreading the poisons of racism and chauvinism," Herbert Aptheker last night called for a Marxist solution of domestic problems.

Aptheker, who recently returned from a trip to North Vietnam, had to limit his remarks in order to catch a plane to Washington, for a court battle concerning the validity of his passport.

Addressing an audience of 100 in Kirkland House dining hall, Aptheker charged that modern American society is founded upon abstractions--power, money, growth, expansion--that are fundamentally hollow, Social ills, such as poverty, bigotry, and water pollution, he continued, refute the myth of American prosperity and show the state of a nation based on a "parasitic relation to peoples who are underdeveloped because they have been over-exploited."

Final Solution

While Marxism cannot solve every problem, Aptheker stated, it offers the most coherent approach to a final solution. Evidence of the strength of its appeal, he said, is clearly shown in the growing number of respected figures outside the Communist world who give it serious consideration in their books on society. "To call them all criminals, as does the McCarran Act," he asserted is an insanity that destroyed Germany."

In answer to a question from the audience, Aptheker also defended the motives of the North Vietnamese government in seeking a reunified Vietnam. Hanol, he said, has proposed a long-term interim government for that area which would not force socialism upon it and would follow a neutral foreign policy.

After several years, an international committee would conduct free elections to determine the final form of government, Aptheker said. "What else," he concluded "can North Vietnam offer but surrender?"