Dissertation on Red Pig

In any place but Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker, the letter would have passed for a piece of broad satire. But not in the humorless Worker. Last month Writer Walter Lowenfels had written an article in the Worker on the high cost of meat entitled "This Little Piggie Went to Market"--and had thereby tripped over the party line. Last week, in a letter to the Worker, he told how it had all been a horrible mistake:

"The question I have put to myself is this: How did a story that was originally provoked by anger at the high price of supposedly 'cheap' cuts of meat turn into an anti-pig story? I find that the Little Piggie story changed and warped the facts in such a way that the snobbish and un-working-class attitudes our readers detected crept in and received the main emphasis rather than the high price of pork --once a staple in the diet of millions . . .

"One gets exaggeration that completely warps the real picture and expresses contempt for pig meat, rather than sharpening the focus on the trusts that have forced its price so high ... It is not the slightness of the Piggie story that is involved here, or even the price of meat, but rather the critical responsibility to the working class of a Marxist writer.

"We are all of us surrounded each moment with infectious attitudes from the ruling class and their culture ... We must, as Mao Tse-tung has pointed out, wash our hands several times each day. It was in its departure from socialist realism, with all its ironical possibilities, that the Piggie story laid itself open to the adoption of ruling-class snobbery about pig meat."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.