When I was in my freshman year in college, in my English class, I believe it was, perhaps it was a history class we had been required to read, it was a history workshop, we had been required to read the Communist manifesto which presents an outline of the theory of the Marx-Engels outlook on past and future history. The dialectical outlook. Oswald was also familiar with this outlook. As to what it constituted we both agreed. Oswald had argued previously that communism was a rational approach to life, a scientific approach to life, Marxism. Mr. JENNER. This was in argumentation with you? Mr. THORNLEY. Yes. Mr. JENNER. All right. Mr. THORNLEY. With me. I challenged him to show me any shred of evidence to support the idea that history took place in the manner described by Engels and Marx (this was not just an arbitrary system looted as many suspect, from Hegel) and he, after some attempt to give me a satisfactory answer, which he was unable to do, became aware of that and he admitted that there was no justification, logically, for the Communist theory of history or the Marxist theory of history, but that Marxism was still, in his opinion, the best system for other reasons that there was---- Mr. JENNER. Best as against what? Mr. THORNLEY. As against, well primarily as against religions. He did--that first comment of his always sticks in my mind, about communism being the best religion. He did think of communism as, not as a religion in the strict sense but as an overwhelming cultural outlook that, once applied to a country, would make it much better off than, say the Roman Catholic Church cultural outlook or the Hindu cultural outlook or the Islamic cultural outlook, and he felt that, as I say, to get back to this argument, he felt that there were enough other things about communism that justified it that one could accept the theory of history on faith. Mr. JENNER. What other things? Mr. THORNLEY. Well, for one thing: the idea that he felt--as did Marx--that under capitalism workers are exploited, that in some way they are robbed of their full reward for their work by means of entrepreneurs' profits, and he felt that Marxism took his money but instead of taking it away from the worker spent it on the worker. He felt that under a Soviet--under the present Soviet system, for example, that the money was spent for the benefit of the people rather than going to the individual who happened to be running the enterprise, and he thought this was a juster situation. Mr. JENNER. Did you raise with him the price the individual had to pay for the material accommodation accorded the worker under the Communist system; for the substance or money, of which you speak, being returned to the worker? The price paid in terms of individual liberty as against the capitalistic or democratic system? Mr. THORNLEY. You couldn't say this to him. Because he would say: "How do you know? How do you know what is going on there."