INTRODUCTION

Communism is called, by its own followers, a "philosophy in action." As a philosophy, it is characterized by a basic attitude of uncompromising hostility to all non-Communist societies and the ideas held in them. Beyond this, however, it is a philosophy armed with means of power.

First, it is armed with the strength and resources of a big country and the more than 200 million people living there. Using this country's might, it has added to itself the further strength of an empire of over 700 million more people. Second, this philosophy is the guiding motive for a network of organized adherents in all countries whose loyalties are basically alienated from their respective nations and fellow citizens and committed to the overthrow of the existing social order in favor of the Communist alternative.

At present, communism has concentrated its hostility on the United States as the most powerful among the nations not yet under its sway. The United States thus finds itself under attack by an enemy whose motive for hostility is not any practical grievance or limited aspiration but rather the basic will to destroy the order of life in the United States in order to make room for a Communist rule.

The enemy has engaged us on many fronts at once. In the field of international power relations, he has pursued an aggressive policy seeking to isolate the United States in order to destroy our power, an objective toward which he has pressed with or without war, by means of diplomacy, propaganda, trade, and subversion. In the framework of internal political and social order, the enemy has sought to influence, paralyze, or disintegrate the processes of our common life, operating under the facade of ostensibly responsible citizenship. In the realm of ideas, finally, the enemy has attempted to use many kinds of intellectual and cultural activities (education, science, literature, art) in order to destroy all loyalties other than those to Communist leadership.

This multifarious attack, unprecedented in history, differs so much from the normal pattern of relations between nations or political groups within nations that many people fail to grasp the full extent of the threat. Some tend to mistake communism for a mere part of what it is and does. Others are not informed about the concealed aspects of communism. Still others find the Communist philosophy strange and incomprehensible.

Ignorance of communism in all its aspects is a dangerous weakness in this struggle. The committee has therefore considered it one of its

most urgent tasks to assemble all the salient facts about communism for a full, undistorted, and revealing picture of communism's true nature. This is no small undertaking. It amounts to a comprehensive and intelligible, as well as fully documented, description of the Communist philosophy, the rise of the Communists to power in Russia, the regime they have established there, the expansion of Communist rule from Russia, and the methods used by Communist imperialism.

By way of an introduction to the more detailed treatments of these various topics, it behooves us briefly to identify the political movement with which we are dealing, the men who originated it, and the place they and their ideas occupy in contemporary history.

The term "communism" is now commonly confined to the organization and ideology of the revolutionary movement centering in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This party, in turn, acknowledges as its undisputed authority Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Lenin confessed himself a faithful pupil of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and he began to organize his Communist Party within the framework of the larger organized movement initiated by Marx and Engels. Lenin, however, was also influenced by a specific Russian revolutionary tradition which had its own thinkers-notably Nechaev and Tkachev-and its own succession of revolutionary organizations, which indirectly affected the Russian Marxists. The ideology of communism, as finally elaborated by Lenin, formally adopted all of the thoughts of Marx and Engels, even though in substance these ideas were developed and revised by Lenin. Its organizational and operational methods are, however, strongly influenced by non-Marxist revolutionary traditions in Russia.

In the following we shall briefly identify the men, ideas, and organizations that contributed to communism in its present form.

Marx and His Time

For a brief survey of the biographical data of Karl Marx, we rely on the following sketch by Sidney Hook:

Marx was born in 1818 in the little Rhenish town of Trier which boasted of its origins as a distinguished Roman outpost of early times. On both sides of his family he was descended from a long line of Jewish rabbis. For social reasons, Marx's father became converted to Protestantism and his son grew up without any consciousness of himself as being Jewish. After a conventionally brilliant career at school, Marx attended briefly the University of Bonn and then the University of Berlin where he developed strong intellectual interests in law, philology, and theology. Upon the completion of his doctorate he was made editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, which was shortly suppressed because of its advanced liberal views. In 1843, Marx married. He then moved to Paris where he plunged into a study of

1

1 Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1955), especially chapter 6.

French communism and political economy. While in Paris he met Friedrich Engels and forged a lifelong friendship with him. Engels, son of a wealthy manufacturer, shared, helped develop, and popularized Marx's ideas. He also relieved the burden of crushing poverty on Marx's family. Exiled from Paris, Marx went to Brussels where he joined the Communist League and on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 wrote the Communist Manifesto. He took a lively part in helping to organize the Revolution of 1848 in Western Europe, was banished from Brussels, arrested, tried, and freed in Germany, and compelled to leave France again. He finally found political asylum in London, where he spent the rest of his life in research, writing, emigrant squabbles, political journalism of the highest level, and in organizing the First International Workingmen's Association. He published comparatively little during this period aside from the first volume of Capital, although he left behind the draft of several other volumes.

Fame and acknowledgment came slowly to Marx, and when he died in 1883 few outside of the circle of his political followers were aware of his work and stature.2

Who were the French Communists whom Marx went to Paris to study, and what place does Marx occupy in comparison with them? Socialist movements had taken form in the wake of the French Revolution (1789) which had powerfully propagated the ideas of freedom and equality. In the framework of the developing industrial society, people began to ask how these ideas applied to the industrial workers.

...

The workingman was told by respected economists that he could not hope to change the system in his own favor. . . . He was told by the Manchester School, and by its equivalent in France, that the income of labor was set by ineluctable natural laws. . .

There were two means of escape. One was to improve the position of labor in the market. This led to the formation of labor unions. . . The other means of escape was to repudiate the whole idea of a market economy. It was to conceive of a system in which goods were to be produced for use, not for sale; and in which working people should be compensated according to need, not according to the requirements of an employer. This was the basis of most forms of socialism.

Socialism spread rapidly among the working class after 1830. In France it blended with revolutionary republicanism. There was a revival of interest in the great Revolution and the democratic republic of 1793. . . . In Britain, as befitted the different background of the country, socialistic ideas blended in with the movement for further parliamentary reform.

It was in the Western countries where socialist ideas had been developed by various schools of thought and various political movements that Marx found men with revolutionary minds akin to his own.

Sidney Hook, Marx and the Marxists, The Ambiguous Legacy (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1955), pp. 12, 13.

'R. R. Palmer, A History of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1950), pp. 475–477.

Marx was a revolutionary, and his mission to prepare the proletariat for revolution. This is the simple and important fact about him which is the clue to all his public life. The real difference between him and such socialists as Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier-the Utopians, as he called them, although he also spoke of them with considerable respect-was not that he was scientific and they were not. That was only the difference as he and Engels conceived it. Saint-Simon had a theory of history at least as intellectually respectable as Marx's. . . . Marx compared Saint-Simon's theory with his own and found it unscientific; but the impartial student, looking at the two theories, finds one characteristic common to them: they both claim to be scientific.*

The three "Utopians" mentioned in the above-quoted passage were contemporaries of Marx. Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a British reformer and socialist who reconstructed a community into a model town with nonprofitmaking stores and advanced working conditions. He also pioneered a number of cooperative societies and instigated the Factory Act of 1819. Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was a French social philosopher of noble birth. His writings foreshadowed socialism, European federation, and the positivism of Comte. His pupils constructed a political program calling for public control of the means of production, abolition of inheritance rights, and the emancipation of women. Fourier (1772-1837) was also a French social philosopher. He called for small economic units based on common property."

5

As soon as Marx, in polemical discussion with other socialists, had defined and proclaimed his own "scientific" socialism another revolution broke out, spreading from France to all of Europe (1848).

Governments collapsed all over the Continent. Remembered horrors appeared again, as in a recurring dream, in much the same sequence as after 1789 only at a much faster rate of speed. Revolutionaries milled in the streets, kings fled, republics were declared, and within four years there was another Napoleon. Soon thereafter came a series of wars.

...

only the Russian Empire and Great Britain escaped the revolutionary contagion of 1848, and the British received a very bad scare.®

This revolution, coming in little more than half a century after the Great Revolution in France, seemed to confirm Marx's theory of revolutions as the driving force in history. Together with other revolutionaries, Marx now began to prepare systematically the ground for further revolutionary upheavals. He was, however, to see only one more, and that a minor one: During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, an uprising occurred within the walls of besieged Paris and a revolutionary regime established itself in the city for a few months. This was the

John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1954), p. 118.

*The above data based on The Columbia Encyclopaedia (2d ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).

Palmer, op. cit., pp. 479, 480.

so-called Paris Commune, a movement first rejected and then eagerly espoused by Marx who succeeded in incorporating this event into the revolutionary tradition acknowledged and venerated by his own adherents."

To turn back again to the relation between Marx and other contemporary socialists:

What really distinguishes Marx from the socialists falsely called Utopian is therefore not science but revolutionary zeal; and what distinguishes him from the other socialists who believed in the class war, from Blanqui, Proudhon and Bakunin, is again not science but the peculiarities of the theory he invented to explain his faith in the proletariat. Proudhon had no developed philosophy of history; his theory of exploitation was different from Marx's; he wanted to abolish private capitalism without substituting for it the public ownership of the means of production and exchange; and he did not believe that the workers should try to capture political power. He was a more confused thinker than Marx, but just as determined an enemy of capitalism. Bakunin was an anarchist, an almost incoherent doctrinaire, and an irresponsible political leader, but as much a friend of the proletariat and as ardent a fighter as Marx. It is his immense learning, the greater coherence of his theories, his ability to work hard, his tenacity of purpose, his sense of responsibility and-dare I say it?-his bourgeois morality, that distinguish Marx from Bakunin.8

Here we meet three more contemporaries of Marx. Blanqui (1805– 81) was a French revolutionist and radical thinker, as well as a leader in the Revolution of 1848. The Commune of Paris in 1871 was largely controlled by his followers. Proudhon (1809-65) was a French social theorist who achieved prominence through his pamphlet What Is Property? He sought a society of loosely federated groups in which the government might become unnecessary. Bakunin (1814-76) was a Russian anarchist who was exiled to Siberia from where he escaped. In the First International he was opposed by Marx who had him expelled. He believed "anarchism, collectivism, and atheism" would give man complete freedom and advocated violent revolution."

... Blanqui, the most famous active revolutionary leader of the nineteenth century, was not really a theorist at all; he merely invented a social philosophy to justify his practice long after he had adopted it, and then only because it was the fashion to do so. Blanqui, like Marx, had nothing to say about the future society, it would emerge of itself and no one could know beforehand what it would be like. His business was merely to destroy bourgeois society; and to that business he devoted his whole life.10

'R. N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism (New York: the Macmillan Co., 1957), p. 104.

Plamenatz, op. cit., p. 119. The phrase "bourgeois morality" obviously intends to indicate that Marx was governed by certain scruples which Bakunin had entirely shed.

*The above data based on The Columbia Encyclopaedia, op. cit.

10

Plamenatz, op. cit., p. 120.