One cold evening in February 1949 Max Bladeck, the chairman of the works council representing 2,500 miners at No 2 mine of the Rheinpreussen Coal Company, called a meeting at the Heier Tavern on the outskirts of Moers. A member of the Communist Party for twenty-four years, he was a small man, every inch a fighter, with sharp eyes, an intellectual forehead and a chest racked by silicosis. He had brought with him some of the keenest debaters in the Party. 'Their aim', writes Leif Hovelsen,13who was one of a small Moral Re-Armament team at the meeting, 'was to sink us with all hands, and six of them opened fire, one after another. Their basic theme was: "The West European countries are preparing for a new war. Every capitalist is a fascist at heart. The system must be changed. For 2,000 years Christianity has tried to build a new world - and failed. There is no ideology above class." The "blitz" went on for an hour.'

'Then', continues Hovelsen, 'it was our turn. A Clydeside shipworker, a small, solidly built, energetic man, got up. "The working class has never been so powerful as today, yet it has never been so divided," he said. "We have learned to split the atom but we have not learned to unite men. People must be changed all over the world. Only so will a classless society come. But we don't have to wait for it till we are in our graves."

'A worker from East London followed. "If we British had lived up to what we talked about after the First World War, you men would have been spared the suffering you have gone through," he said. "God help the party or the nation which does not change these conditions. But we need a full dimension of change - new social relations, new economic relations, new- international relations, all based on personal change. To have any lesser aim is reactionary."'

'The next speaker', continues Hovelsen, 'was a Canadian employer (Bernard Hallward). "What has created injustices in the Western world is selfishness and moral compromise in men like me," he said. "I can see how the hard-boiled materialism of the right wing is reflected in the bitterness of the left wing." As the tall, slim employer, with many humorous touches, told the story of his own change, of his two factories, his workers and their hopes, his wife and his two sons, he carried everyone with him. The meeting lasted four hours; when it broke up all were agreed to meet again. The Germans came to see The Forgotten Factor and we noticed its ideas gripped them.'

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