The Nature of Communism

THE MOST COMMON source of errors about the nature of social and political movements is the idea that the words used by adherents of the movements, in alleged explanation of their aims and activities, can be taken at face value. The words are not unimportant, and sometimes they tell the truth. More frequently, however, their function has nothing to do with the truth, but is to express, as a kind of poetry, hidden sentiments, hopes and confusions. The words used publicly by communists about themselves and what they do are particularly misleading, because deliberate deception of others, as well as the normal unconscious self-deception, are an integral part of communism.

Most books on communism or the Soviet Union offer, as presumptive evidence for their conclusions, citations from speeches, manifestoes, articles and books by communists, and from the Soviet Constitution, laws and decrees. Because a Constitution or set of laws says that there is racial, cultural, and national equality within the Soviet Union, it is taken as proved that such equality in fact exists. Because communists outside the Soviet Union declare that they believe in democracy or free trade unions or civil rights or national prosperity and defense or wider educational opportunities, it is assumed not only that they do so believe but that they are practically striving toward such ends. Because a report on a Five Year Plan states that workers’ housing, food and clothing have improved such and such a percentage, it is believed that this has indeed happened. Because a Soviet diplomat speaks for disarmament or the outlawing of atomic weapons, it is granted that he is really in favor of disarmament and the outlawing of atomic weapons. Even those who have become rather skeptical about the current practices of communists are inclined to say that “Their goal—of a free classless human society—is a great and noble ideal,” thus assuming that the goal which the communists profess in words is the real goal (that is, the probable outcome in action) of what they are doing.

To understand political and social movements, we must approach reality by a route very different from this verbal boulevard. We must begin not with words but with social behavior. We must examine the deeds of the movement, its history in action, its record in practice, its dynamic tendencies, the direction of its evolution. The words it uses must always be checked in terms of behavior, and may be taken at face value only when they sustain the check. We will find, in the case of communism, that some of its words, especially those written not for a general audience but by communists for communists, are unusually revelatory of its inner meaning. But toward all words we must take the attitude: false, unless proved true.

We are sometimes told that communism is young, new, untried, so that we do not yet have enough evidence for judgment. This argument is a device to try to stop us from rendering the judgment that the facts warrant. As a specific, differentiated socio-political movement, communism (or Bolshevism) was founded in 1903, forty-four years ago. It developed out of one emphasis in Marxism, which took fairly clear form in 1848 (that is, a century ago), with certain added elements from nihilism and Blanquism, which also had a considerable prior history. Since 1903, communism has developed consistently, with no discernible historical breach in its tradition or its pattern of behavior. For thirty years it has been in control of a great nation, and it has lately extended its full control to more peoples and areas. Throughout the world, it has for decades functioned in parties, unions, governments, industries, publications, and in thousands of committees and organizations. Communism can be studied in action in every type of social, political, cultural and moral environment, in relation to every type of problem occurring in our society, in war and in peace, in power and out, on a large scale and on the most minute, in a bridge club or a Boy Scout troop as well as in a mighty army. The evidence by now at hand is not merely ample but overwhelming. The only excuse for not coming to a decision in our judgment of the nature of communism is ignorance or an unwillingness to face the truth.

For Americans, Englishmen, and in general those whose conceptions of politics are based upon acquaintance with the customary political parties of democratic countries, there is a further obstacle to the understanding of communism. Though communism is recognized as having a “different program,” it is assumed to be a political party in the same sense that applies to the Democratic or Republican or British Conservative or French Radical-Socialist parties. A member of the Communist Party is thought to be the same type of being as a Democrat or a Conservative. He has merely joined a different, but comparable, organization.

Reasoning and acting on this assumption, it seems natural to deal with communists in much the same way that one deals with the members of any other rival political party. One negotiates with the communist-controlled Soviet Union as one negotiates with any other nation. Communist parties are permitted to function legally, like any other party, and are welcomed or at least accepted into coalition governments. Electoral deals are made with communists, not only in Hungary or France, but in New York. Good citizens do not hesitate to join with communists in all sorts of committees for worthy purposes, or to form with communists editorial boards for magazines and newspapers. Liberals respond with indignation whenever communists complain that their civil liberties are being infringed.

This assumption is grotesquely false. Apart from those generic traits which characterize all organizations, in this case of secondary practical significance, the Communist Party has nothing in common with democratic, parliamentary parties. It exists on a totally different plane of political reality. The parliamentary parties with which we are familiar are sprawling aggregations of diverse individuals, limited in their objectives, loosely united as electoral machines. They have no systematic program, at most a few traditional ideas, and periodic, not very seriously meant, “platforms” covering a few items of current political interest. For most persons, “to be a Republican” means little more than to contribute a few dollars now and then, and to vote the party ticket on election day. Even for the professional parliamentary politician, “politics” is comparable to any other “business,” one and not necessarily the chief among the varied interests of life.

The true communist, in complete contrast, is a “dedicated man.” He has no life apart from his organization and his rigidly systematic set of ideas. Everything that he does, everything that he has, family, job, money, belief, friends, talents, life, everything is subordinated to his communism. He is not a communist just on election day or at Party headquarters. He is a communist always. He eats, reads, makes love, thinks, goes to parties, changes residence, laughs, insults, always as a communist. For him, the world is divided into just two classes of human beings: the communists, and all the rest. In his eyes, there are simply his own Communist Party on the one side, and all the rest of the world on the other. All non-communist parties are, as he would put it, “agents of the class enemy”; “openly” or “unconsciously,” they are all “objectively counter-revolutionary.”

In order, therefore, to understand the nature of communism, we must rid our minds of all preconceptions drawn from our experiences of the traditional parliamentary parties. If we do not, it will be like trying to infer the nature of chess from an acquaintance exclusively with checkers, merely because they happen to use a similarly constructed board. Our success in dealing with communists will be comparable to that of a checkers player, so instructed, in a chess tournament.

2

On the basis, then, of the full evidence, communism may be summarily defined as a world-wide, conspiratorial movement for the conquest of a monopoly of power in the era of capitalist decline. Politically it is based upon terror and mass deception; economically it is, or at least tends to be, collectivist; socially it is totalitarian.¹

Every word in this definition is meant in the strictest sense, and I shall therefore proceed to elaborate its content.

***

Official communism is, and has always, from the time of Marx, been conceived to be, a world-wide movement, recognizing no political, geographic or cultural boundaries. Since the founding of the Third International, this internationalism has been concretized in a rigid organizational form, so that all major policies of all official communists everywhere are controlled from a common center. It is a major effort of the propaganda of communists, and their dupes, to make us believe that Russian communists and American communists and Chinese communists and Yugoslavian communists are not the same thing. Such a belief is a naive illusion. The programmatic differences among the communist parties of various nations are themselves decided by the common center. These are never more than tactical variations, suited to the particular national conditions at the particular time. The central strategy is always one and the same.

For communists, the formal dissolution of the Third International, in May, 1943, which created such a stir of speculation in the general press, had not the slightest significance. Communists never worry about “organizational forms.” They knew that nothing had really changed, that the International had long before become a “bureaucratic excrescence,” not operationally necessary, and besides awkward in Soviet diplomatic negotiations. Already, in 1937, the Chinese Communist Party had withdrawn formally from the International, in order to further its local policy. In 1940 the United States Party took the same formal action, so that it might conform nominally to the provisions of the Smith-Connally Act. After May, 1943, nothing changed in communist world strategy, or in the subordination of the world movement to the central direction. Agents, funds, directives came and went as before—Tito, Thorez, Anton, Berger, Ibarruri, Mao, Togliatti continued to be as much at home in Moscow as in Yugoslavia, France, Mexico, the United States, Spain, China, or Italy.

***

To many, it may seem odd to call the communist movement “conspiratorial” when we all know that communist parties and multitudes of communist-controlled organizations flourish openly in all countries. The paradox here is within the non-communist world, not in communism. A conspiracy means a plan which, though it may also have legal phases, is in its basic aims and methods illegal, outside the law. From the communist point of view, legal work is always secondary, is no more than a cover for illegal activity. It could hardly be otherwise when, as Marx and Engels put it in the original Manifesto, the communist “ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” “Legal work,” Lenin declared,² “must be combined with illegal work. The Bolsheviks always taught this. … The party which … does not carry on systematic, all-sided, illegal work in spite of the laws of the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois parliaments, is a party of traitors and scoundrels.”

It is this attitude that dictates the communist conception of reforms. To wish and work for reforms is, of course, “legal work,” and Stalin sums up as follows, in his Foundations of Leninism: “The revolutionist will accept a reform in order to use it as a means wherewith to link legal work with illegal work, in order to use it as a screen behind which his illegal activities for the revolutionary preparation of the masses may be intensified.” The communist evaluation of the “legal work” of elections, the climactic political activity of parliamentary parties, is identical: “Comical pedants. They have failed to understand that voting in the limits of bourgeois parliamentarism is part of the bourgeois state apparatus which must be broken and smashed from top to bottom in order to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. … They fail to understand that, generally speaking, it is not voting, but civil war that decides all serious questions of politics when history has placed the dictatorship of the proletariat on the order of the day.” ³

Conspiracy is so much a part of the essence of communism that it persists unchanged and in fact intensified even in a country where, as in the Soviet Union, the communists are legally in control. Kravchenko notes, in I Chose Freedom: “The G.P.U. had its eyes and ears carefully deployed so that they would see and hear everything. Behind the backs of the formal authorities and the economic managers, I realized, there was a network of spies—spies of the secret police system and others of the Party, unknown to one another. Behind the ostensible government was a real government.”

***

All of communist policy is dependent upon the belief that traditional, individualist capitalist society is in inescapable decline. This belief is probably true; but unless it is true, the communists are aware they would have no chance of reaching their final goal. It is the disintegration of capitalism that provides the opportunity for a compact, disciplined army of revolutionists to acquire a monopoly of power. This belief, moreover, is one of the two sources of the communist economic policy of collectivization. Convinced that competitive private ownership cannot handle the problems of modern mass industry, that it must result in chronic economic dislocation, mass unemployment and periodic crisis, the communists reason that collectivization of industry will in the long run operate more effectively, will eliminate the worst of the economic troubles, and will thereby provide the strongest possible foundation for their regime.

There is, however, another quite different and more decisive communist motive for collectivization. Property rights in the instruments of production are a form of social power. If these rights are exercised by individuals, at their own discretion, this means a decentralization, a plurality of power. The supreme objective of communism, to which everything else is subordinate, is a monopoly of power. They therefore look upon private property, correctly, as a threat to their monopoly. Their tendency is to minimize or wipe out important property rights as soon as this is technically possible. A certain flexibility would, however, seem to be possible on this point. Communism, consistent with its own nature, can permit, at least temporarily, some retention of property rights, or even their mild revival, if this is an expedient maneuver (as under the Soviet New Economic Policy of 1921-28, or in some of the newly dominated puppet States of Eastern Europe), provided only that this does not seriously endanger communist power.

Economic collectivization, thus, which was originally advertised as the guarantor of the economic emancipation of all mankind, turns out in practice to permit the most concentrated of all forms of mass exploitation.

By calling communism “socially totalitarian” I mean that its power monopoly extends to all phases of human life: not merely to the limited ranges of experience that have been traditionally regarded as within the sphere of politics, but to art, industry, agriculture, science, literature, morality, recreation, family life. A novel or a divorce or a painting or a religion or a symphony or a biological theory or a vacation or a movie are as much a “weapon of the class struggle” as a strike or a revolution.

***

Every political regime is based upon force and myth, upon police, armies and jails, and upon an ideology which is at least partly at variance with reality. What distinguishes communism is that terror constitutes the force upon which it is founded, and deliberate deception the content of its myth. Law, like everything else from the point of view of communism, is exclusively an instrument of power, to be used or by-passed as the expediency of the moment decides. Under communism, open, legal force is always subordinate to the secret, conspiratorial terror. The leading agent of this terror is the secret police, the N.K.V.D.,⁴ numbering about 2,000,000 operatives active in every part of the world. These, however, are supplemented and at times counter-checked by many other agencies: the secret operatives of the official party and its Control Commissions, the military intelligence, the private spies of great bureaus or bureaucrats, and millions of voluntary or dragooned informers and provocateurs.

The terror is everywhere, never ceasing, the all-encompassing atmosphere of communism. Every act of life, and of the lives of parents, relatives and friends, from the trivial incidents of childhood to major political decisions, finds its way into the secret and complete files of the N.K.V.D. A chance meeting with a stranger, a casual remark to a fellow-worker, a nostalgic reminiscence with a lover, a letter to a child or mother, all may be recorded, to rise to condemn a victim during his examination in one of the great purges. The forms of the terror cover the full range: from the subtlest psychological temptings, to economic pressure, to months-long third degrees, to threats against wives and children, to exile and forced labor, to the most extreme physical torture, to a shot in the back of the neck in the corridors of the Lubianka, to the trained assassinations, in a city street or a railway train, of the special Terror Section of the N.K.V.D.

The scale of the terror is beyond computation. Its direct victims are numbered not in occasional dozens or scores, but in many millions. During 1932-33, as a stimulus to the agricultural collectivization program, 3,000,000 Ukrainian peasants were deliberately starved. In the purges, tens of thousands are shot, hundreds of thousands jailed, and millions sent to the N.K.V.D.’s concentration camps and slave-labor gangs.

The terror, though it can operate to the full only where the communists are in absolute control, as in the Soviet Union, is by no means confined within the Soviet boundaries. The N.K.V.D. operates throughout the world. It advances with the Red Army into Eastern Europe, and there supervises the liquidation of the opposition. In Spain, during the Civil War, it had its own prisons and torture chambers. Hundreds of anti-communist Loyalists were kidnapped or assassinated by its agents. It reaches into France to kill the secretary of the anti-Stalinist Fourth International, and, since the war, to arrest or kidnap Russians who have renounced Stalin; into Switzerland to assassinate Ignace Reiss, one of its own agents who thought he could resign; into Cuba, to murder Paul Maslow; into Mexico, to stab Trotsky; into China, to help settle with the Kuomintang; into Washington, to stage the faked suicide of Krivitsky; into New York, to shanghai Meyer London or Juliet Poyntz.

f

It should not be supposed that the terror with which communism is linked is a transient phenomenon, a temporary device used and perhaps abused for some special “emergency of the revolution.” Terror has always been an essential part of communism, from the pre-revolutionary days when Stalin, as “Koba,” was directing the bombings whereby Bolshevik funds were assembled, through the years before 1917 when Lenin was approving the private tortures administered to political dissidents, into every stage of the development of the communist regime in power. Terror is proved by historical experience to be integral to communism, to be, in fact, the main instrument by which its power is increased and sustained. From the beginning of the communist regime in Russia, every major political and economic turn has been carried through by terror. The liquidation of the opposition parties, the reintegration of the independent state of Georgia (both these under Lenin), the institution of the first Five Year Plan, the collectivization of agriculture, the liquidation of the old “specialists” inherited from the Tsarist regime and the later liquidation of the “Red Specialists,” the turn to the popular front policy after the victory of Hitler in Germany, the introduction of “single responsibility” in the factories, the ending of the independence of the trade unions, the liquidation of factions within the Communist Party itself, the turn to the Hitler Pact, the early turn toward exaggerated nationalism in the constituent republics as well as the subsequent reverse of that turn, the mobilization for the war, and now, as I write, the attempt to re-consolidate politically after the partial demoralization left by the war: in every case, the basic reliance for the achievement of the objective has been put, not upon a law or a decree or education or appeals to loyalty or even self-interest, but upon terror. Each step has been driven through by its correlated purges, imprisonments, exilings, tortures and assassinations.⁵

The tens of thousands of fellow-travelers of the communists in this country, the hundreds of thousands of innocents who serve the communists by working on the magazines and committees and fronts and appeals which the communists daily construct, the workers who follow their trade-union leadership, even the outer fringe of the Communist Party members, do not, most of them, understand in the least the meaning of the terror, though by their actions they support and defend it. They have no idea that it operates, though as yet on a small, guarded scale, within their own country. Much less have they any imagining of what it would mean if transferred intact, a possibility by no means too remote for imagining. During the years 1940-41 the United States made the political “turn” to the war. The method of terror would have meant: the arrest—in the middle of the night, without court warrant—of every person who had expressed “anti-war sentiments,” and, under the convenient pretext, of every actual or potential “opponent of the regime” as well as those against whom any high official or low informer happened to have a grudge; months of sleepless grillings, tortures, beatings of the “accused,” along with more informal miscellaneous beatings and grillings throughout the country; confessions, prison sentences, slave-labor camps, starvation, death for hundreds of thousands. So, also, not only for so crucial an issue as war, but for the beginning (and end) of N.R.A., the start or stop of rationing, the arrival of an economic depression or a change in foreign alignments. The “enemies of the people”—that is, all who oppose, or once opposed, or might possibly sometime oppose, the party in power—are “scum,” “offal,” “mad dogs,” and are rightly thrust into the outer darkness.

***

The positive supplement to terror, as the second pillar of communism, is the deliberate deception of the masses. Truth, too, is “a weapon in the class struggle.” This deception takes two forms. One is the direct lie: to deny that millions are starving when millions are dying of starvation; to affirm that a political opponent has met with Hitler or Trotsky or Churchill or the Mikado in Stockholm or Paris or Berlin or Denmark or Tokyo, when he had never been within a hundred miles of the place or the person; to destroy the records of a census (as in 1937) and kill the statisticians who made them, when the results are “not according to plan”; to confess to crimes not committed and often not even possible; to falsify, month by month, the records of industry, agriculture, wages, finance; to corrupt quotations and fake up photographs; to re-write every three years the history of Russia and the world, so that history itself will always be a confirmation of the immediate line of the Party. In London, a communist trade-unionist frames a non-communist official of his union; in New York a communist teacher ⁶ at City College, for years the Party leader of a large communist fraction of fellow-teachers, denies in court that there is any other communist on the faculty. They exhibit the same communist consistency with which an editor of Pravda denies Soviet interference in Iran, or Stalin at Yalta promises freedom for Poland or Rumania, or Molotov signs a non-aggression pact with Finland or Esthonia.

The second form of deception is the manufacture of abstract formulas which distort the comprehension of reality. According to this method, the terrorist dictatorship of the Communist Party becomes “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat”; the expropriation of the lands, livestock and tools of the peasantry by terror and mass starvation becomes “voluntary collectivization”; the extreme inequality of income and living conditions within the Soviet Union becomes “a triumph for socialist realism”; the killing of potential opponents becomes “the liquidation of fascist agents of world imperialism”; lies, sabotage, and terror directed, anywhere, against non-communists become “self-defense of the proletariat against its enemies”; the immeasurable suffering and misery of the Russian people become “the self-reliant happiness of the people of the land of socialism.”

3

All political parties seek power. That is the object for which political parties exist. The peculiar characteristic of communism is that, wherever it operates, it seeks an absolute monopoly of all power.

When, say, the Republican Party in the United States wins a national election, it temporarily gains thereby more power within a certain limited field of the national life than any other party or organization. It distributes to its own members a large number of official posts in the Administration and the bureaucracy. It passes certain laws, assigns revenues and readjusts taxes at least partly in accordance with what it takes to be its own special interests. It takes advantage of the control of the governmental agencies to present itself favorably to the public, and to pick up, for its members and friends, some of the informal fruits of office—juicy contracts and expense accounts, privileges in housing or transportation that can be charged to the government, an occasional bit of graft.

At the same time, however, it does not seek literally to destroy all rival political organizations. Doubtless it tries to weaken them, and to provide the best chance for its own continuance in office; but it accepts as a practical axiom the right of its rivals to continuing social existence, and it takes for granted that some day one of the rivals may have its turn at the government, while Republicans retire to the oppositional sidelines. Moreover, the Republican Party in office, or any such parliamentary party, recognizes in practice limits to the range of its power extension. Political parties are not the only power organizations in non-totalitarian society. Churches, trade unions, armies, farms, industries, banks, fraternal and other associations, all are, in at least one aspect of their functioning, concentrations of social power. The Republican Party will consider it legitimate that this should be so, and that these organizations should continue to hold their independent share of the total power, even if, as will often be the case, their power is directed counter to the power interests of the Republican Party itself.

What is in question here is a fundamental premise or rule not only of parliamentary parties, but of democratic society. In a free society, there must be a multiplicity of relatively independent interests, there must be a fragmentation of power. According to the rules of a democratic society, it is proper for a political party or other organization to try to gain for itself more power than it already has, or even more power than any other single organization. But the rules provide that it must always grant the right of other organizations to make the same try, that it accept the principle of the plurality of power.

Historical experience has shown that the relation of communism to power is of a totally different kind, that communism operates according to a different set of rules, a different principle. The communist party aims not merely at securing for itself more power than that possessed by any other political party or movement; its object is the possession of all power, not only all direct political power but all social power whatsoever. Therefore, negatively, it aims to destroy all rival, independent foci of power in society as a whole.

That this is the aim (indeed, the supreme aim) of communism is proved by the fact that communists act in accordance with it wherever, and to the extent that, it becomes technically possible. It is exemplified just as plainly in the conduct of a communist fraction on a magazine’s editorial board or in an American trade union as it is by communist behavior when they take charge of a nation.

The necessity for the communist monopoly of power receives the customary distorted expression in the abstract formulas of communist theory. The nominal ultimate goal of communism is “the free, classless communist society.” Communist society can be reached, however, only by the interim stage of the “proletarian dictatorship.” Lenin is careful to remind us ⁷ that “the transition from capitalism to communism represents an entire historical epoch,” in which is carried on “a long, stubborn and desperate war of life and death, a war which requires perseverance, discipline, firmness, inflexibility, and unity of will.” ⁸ But the proletariat is ignorant, corrupted by centuries of capitalist rule, and therefore cannot itself exercise “its own” dictatorship. This can be done only by the “conscious vanguard” of “professional revolutionists”—namely, the Communist Party—whose integrity is guaranteed by its adherence to the correct “ideology.” The communists, and only the communists, have this ideology; and therefore they and only they can be the dictators. Everyone else, every other movement, is and must be an open or disguised agent of the counter-revolution, and must therefore be deprived of all power, if the revolution is to succeed. “The only choice is: Either bourgeois, or Socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle Socialist ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology.” ⁹

While communists remain a small and weak sect, operating within a society controlled by others, this principle has to remain submerged. But as soon as, and to the degree that, they get material power, it is put literally into operation. Thus, after the Revolution in Russia, we note: first, the destruction of all Tsarist, “bourgeois” and liberal parties (1918-19); then the destruction of all non-communist peasant or working-class parties (1918-21); then the smashing of the independent power of the Orthodox Church (1918 on) ; then the reduction to impotence of the Soviets, co-operatives, trade unions, etc. (1925-29); then the suppression of opposition factions within the Communist Party itself (1927-29); then the liquidation of all individual actual, former, or potential dissidents (in the Purges, especially those during the years following the assassination of Kirov in 1934); and along with all these steps, the reduction of all social agencies whatsoever, from the most trivial to the greatest, to the single control.

However, it is not necessary to look inside the Soviet borders to observe the principle operating. It operates, wherever there are communists, to the limit that is materially possible. It is operating today, on national scales, in Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, eastern Germany and Austria, northern Korea and Iran. It operates in the Chinese territories controlled by the communists, as it operated in the Spanish Loyalist armies. It operates within every trade union where communists are active or in control—in the American Communications Association; the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians; Harry Bridges’ Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union or Michael Quill’s Transport Workers’ Union; the United Public Workers of America; the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers; the Fur and Leather Workers’ Union; and so on. It operated, very effectively, and to success, in New York’s American Labor Party. It operates, though here still for the time being restrained by “unripe conditions,” on the Political Action Committee; or the Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, behind its changing façade of a Harold Ickes, Claude Pepper or James Roosevelt; in the Democratic State Committees of California and Washington; in the New York City Council; and at a still earlier level in Congress or the State Department. Always and everywhere, the principle is the same: the conquest, for the communists, of an absolute monopoly of all power.

From this principle, which is the central fact of communism, the essential and sufficient key to the basic understanding of the nature of communism, a conclusion follows: After communism has grown beyond the limits of a narrow sect, it is impossible for any other power grouping to coexist for any length of time with communism. A plurality of power is incompatible with communism. Communism must conquer, or perish.

4

There is one communist tactic, so important at every level of communist activity, and so fundamentally misunderstood by most non-communists, that it is advisable to explain it briefly from the point of view of the analysis of the nature of communism. This tactic is what communists call “the united front.”

Whenever communists support or engage in an activity, or set up an organization, jointly with non-communist individuals, groups or organizations, this constitutes what can be called in general a “united front.” Thus, a magazine like Science and Society is a united front; or a Committee to Save the OPA; or a League for Constitutional Liberties; or a Council for Soviet-American Friendship; or a League for a Free Africa; or a Political Action Committee; or a Federation of Atomic Scientists; or a Hollywood Screen Writers’ Guild; or the lists of signers to some petition or open letter; or, at much higher stages, a popular front such as that formed before the war in France; or coalition governments which include communists, like those at present in France, Italy, and the East European nations; or the Allied coalition in the Second World War; or the United Nations; or even, in the Soviet Union itself, the electoral front of the “union of the Party and the non-Party masses.”

If we examine the individuals and organizations that belong to these various fronts—of which there have been tens of thousands during the past generation—we discover that some of the fronts are altogether counterfeit. They are limited to communists and close sympathizers, and are created for the sake of a nominal masquerade through which the communists can hide their hand, manipulate finances, or gain legal immunities. Of this sort are, for example, the International Labor Defense, or the magazine New Masses. Other united fronts, however—such as the Political Action Committee or the Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions—include a maximum ideological range, from anti-scommunists to non-communists to innocents to fellow-travelers to communist party members to, in many cases, the N.K.V.D. itself.

Entry into a united front presents itself to a communist in a way altogether incommensurate with the motives of a non-communist. The non-communist sees a certain task to be done—an arrested Negro to be defended, Chinese children to feed, trade unions to organize, colonial independence to further, a nation with no clear majority to be got somehow through a difficult period, a war to be won. He is willing, even eager, to join with everyone, including communists, who will promise to work jointly with him to accomplish the task in which he is interested. Or, on some occasions, he sees no way to carry through the task alone, and feels compelled to join with others of different views and organizations, including communists. Nothing could, apparently, be more natural.

But this is not the way the communist reasons. He may or may not be interested in the specific task for which the united front is ostensibly organized—very often he is indifferent to it, or even anxious that it fail. As always, he is interested centrally in advancing the monopoly of communist power. The primary purpose for which he enters into the united front is to get a chance to weaken the non-communist individuals and organizations that belong, with him, to the united front, and to destroy their political influence. The innocent or morally worthy ostensible purpose of the front is the bait to a trap. The communist, able to work from the inside through the device of the united front, can undermine the non-communist organizations, win over their members, and either capture or “expose” and crush politically the leading individual non-communists.

It is a law of modern politics without exception that non-communists always lose by entering into a united front, for any purpose whatsoever, with communists. They lose no matter what happens to the supposed specific purpose of the united front. As a rule, that purpose gradually evaporates after a few rounds of activity, when the communist line takes a new turn, or the communists feel that they have exploited the situation as far as is profitable. Very often the supposed purpose is quietly perverted, as when funds raised to provide medical relief to Spanish loyalists or Yugoslavian children go to provide jobs for deserving communists and finances for the Spanish and Yugoslavian sections of the Party and the N.K.V.D. But in every case, whatever else happens, the primary purpose of the communists is to use the united front as a vantage ground; to acquire a useful and respectable disguise for themselves; to recruit new members and fellow-travelers; to gain a platform through which they can speak to an audience not otherwise accessible or so favorably accessible to them; and, finally, to destroy the independent power of the other constituent organizations (or individuals) either by capturing them, or, if this proves impossible, by crushing them.

When Byrnes and Cadogan and the others sit with Gromyko at the sessions of the Security Council, they are constantly puzzled by Gromyko’s behavior; they find it “incomprehensible.” It is, however, far more rational than their own. They are not aware that Gromyko sits there not because he has the slightest interest in solving fruitfully any problems of peace or prosperity, but precisely to aggravate those problems; not because he has any wish to make genuine agreements with his fellow Council members, but because he is instructed to use the United Nations as a helpful wedge for weakening and destroying the other members and the nations they represent. When the Communist Party enters into a French coalition government, it is not because it proposes to aid in the reconstruction of France as a strong and prosperous power, but just the opposite: because it wants an inside post from which to make certain that independent French power will never be revived, that France will live again only as a communist-controlled state. Claude Pepper and Joseph Davies and Elliott Roosevelt and Henry Wallace and all the ministers and actors and writers and busy journalists are, I suppose, quite unconscious of the contempt with which they are regarded by the communists for the light-hearted way in which they make their speeches before united front meetings in Madison Square Garden, and permit their names to grace the imposing letterheads of united front committees.

During 1946, as I write, there is being carried through a classic example of the united front tactic in Eastern Germany. First there are the separate socialist and communist parties. Then, stimulated by the Red Army and the N.K.V.D., there is a united front of the two parties. Then, in the late Spring of 1946, there is the culmination of the united front tactic—which is, of course, “unity.” The Socialist Unity Party comes into being. Now, the completion of the process will take place. The socialists in the Socialist Unity Party will either cease being socialists, or will cease to be. And the Socialist Unity Party will become, “not accidentally,” as communists would say, the German Communist Party at a “higher stage of development.”

For communists, the only admissible form of unity is, in all things, total communist domination.

footnotes:

1. I am well aware that this definition may be applied almost without change to fascism also. This is not surprising because the two, fascism and communism, are variants of the same fundamental kind of socio-political movement. Their differences are primarily in the always secondary factor of the ideology or myth through which their activities are rationalized, and in the special circumstances of their origins. In their historical evolution, they have demonstrably approached a common norm. They are rivals only in the sense that, say, two candidates for the heavyweight boxing championship are rivals; their aim and methods are identical. The communist claim to be “the world leader in the struggle against fascism” is, from the point of view of those who are neither fascists nor communists, one of the most ironic jokes in history.

2. In an attack on Ramsay MacDonald, written in 1919.

3. Lenin, loc. cit. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is the circumlocution whereby communists refer to the “monopoly dictatorship of the communists.”

4. This organization, formerly referred to as the “G.P.U.,” and still earlier as the “Cheka,” has recently changed its label to “M.V.D.” I retain what I take to be the most familiar title.

5. Apart from direct experience in the revolutionary movement, which is the only source for adequate knowledge of some aspects of communist operations, there is extensive first-hand documentation for these generalizations about communist terror, in the writings of the following: Boris Souvarine, Anton Ciliga, Vladimir and Tatiana Tchernavin, Victor Serge, W. G. Krivitsky, Markoosha Fischer, Alexander Barmine, Victor Kravchenko, Jan Valtin, and the Poles who were Soviet prisoners during 1939-41, as well as many journalists, including pro-Stalinist journalists. Much can also be directly learned and easily inferred from official Soviet publications on the various purges and trials, the records of Party meetings and Congresses dealing with these problems, and the theoretical justifications of terror which have been written by nearly all leading communist writers. What has been understood by only a very few, however, is that terror is an integral part of communism as a functioning movement. Official communists defend terror as a legitimate and necessary temporary defense of the revolution against its class enemies. Opposition communists accept terror in principle, but say that Stalin has gone to excess. Non-communists who have become acquainted with the facts are too horrified to be able to grasp its general significance.

6. Morris U. Schappes, convicted and sent to prison for this perjury.

7. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

8. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

9. Ibid. Lenin writes “Socialist” in this passage because, at the time, the Bolsheviks were operating as a faction in the Social-Democratic Party. He means, of course, “Bolshevik” or “communist,” not “socialist” in today’s sense. The italics, which are decisive for the meaning, are Lenin’s.