International Communism

There Is Nothing Mysterious About Its Core of Belief or About What It Is Trying to Do

GENTLEMEN. Tonight I propose to discuss the ideology of international communism. The term ideology is often regarded as rather esoteric, suggesting all sorts of complicated theoretical notions. You will be in a position to judge how theoretical they are. What I shall try to show tonight is that we are living in an age in which theoretical ideas are of fundamental importance. Perhaps the most practical thing in the world today is theory. In a very real sense, theory affects the lives and destinies of every one of. us. Whether you are planning to build a house or raise a family or prepare for a career, what the future holds in store for you will be determined not so much by your own intent but by the success or failure of the ideology which I am going to discuss.

What do we mean by ideology? By an ideology I understand the fundamental beliefs about the nature of man and society which any group offers in justification of the direction and goal of its political activity. Now not all conflicts in the world are ideological. And not all ideological conflicts threaten peace. As a matter of fact, as you" probably know from your studies, some of the most disastrous wars in history—for example, wars of royal succession—have been fought among people who have shared the same ideology, sometimes even the same religious ideology, whereas some ideological oppositions like those, for example, between Czarist Russia and the United States never led to armed conflict. One might go so far as to say that it is questionable whether any conflict or any war has been purely ideological. The nearest to purely ideological wars, as you may recall, have been the Crusades and the Thirty Years War. But these also involved other kinds of opposition as well; in the first case, the internecine struggles among the Christian crusaders, and during the Thirty Years War, the alliance of Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austria.

Nonetheless, ideological conflicts are of tremendous importance. Although by themselves they are rarely sufficient to cause armed outbreaks among nations, their presence may make the decisive difference in transforming the smoldering frictions which arise from difficulties about trade, frontiers and natural resources, into the raging fires of war. That is why a correct understanding of the ideology of the major powers in the present world struggle, what we might call the geography of their minds, is just as important—perhaps even more important—than a study of their physical geography.

What I propose to show tonight is that the communist ideology, like the Nazi ideology, but for different reasons, impels those who hold this ideology to embark upon a program of world conflict and conquest. In order to make the significance of the communist ideology clearer, I am going to contrast it at key points with the democratic ideology. I take for granted that we, as Americans, are familiar in a broad way with the ideology of American democracy, especially with its focal con- cept of freely given consent, and with the institutional devices registered in a functioning bill of rights for expressing this consent by a majority of the adult population.

Now one of the central assumptions of our ideology, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human adults are better judges of their own interests, whenever they have free access to information which bears on those interests, than are others. The operating maxim of a democratic ideology is that whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches. From this, all other attributes of democracy follow, most notably the legal right of opposition and the power of popular m ajorities to change political shoes in the light of experience. This doesn't mean that popular majorities are always right. But it does entail a faith that so long as the processes of free enquiry and political discussion remain intact, a democratic community is more likely to reach a mutually satisfactory adjustment of the common and conflicting interests of its citizens than is possible either by despotism or anarchism.

But it is much more difficult when speaking before an American audience to take for granted familiarity with the communist ideology of the Soviet Union. There is little evidence that most American or English statesmen, not to mention most writers on foreign policy, understand it. And I am convinced that until public opinion in the West understands communist ideology, its foreign policy will be misguided, that it will be more a matter of nerves than of intelligence. After all, it wasn't so very long ago that even Winston Churchill declared of Soviet foreign policy that it was "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." And this opinion was echoed by Senator Vandenberg, by General Marshall and even by President Truman who discovered that "dear old Joe" was a prisoner in the hands of the Politbureau of the Communist Party. This summer in Berlin I had the opportunity to talk to General Clay, General Hays, Ambassador Murphy and Mr. Riddlberger of the State Department. All of them said they didn't understand the Russians. They just couldn't make sense out of the pattern of broken promises and foolish intractabilities.

We shall see that there is nothing mysterious about Soviet ideology and foreign policy. Nor is there much of a mystery why Americans have such difficulty in understanding it. It's simply something which has been beyond their political experience. And my great fear tonight is that the things I say will appear to be just literally incredible.

Before discussing communist ideology in detail, there are a few methodological cautions that must be borne in mind. Since there are other people who have views on the subject different from mine, the first question you should ask is, "How do we find out what the communist ideology is? What are the sources?" And here there is a certain number of elementary truths that are often ignored. We shall not find out what this ideology is from Soviet diplomatic notes and from its official letters. In the most recent of these letters Stalin, for example, expressed his willingness "to insure democracy and extend civil rights" in all countries. That must have been an occasion for Homeric laughter on the part of the Politbureau.

And we shall not find out what that ideology is from interviews with or letters to foreign correspondents. They indicate primarily what the Soviet spokesmen would like us to believe. But I think we can find out what that ideology is by reading what the communist leaders of theSoviet Union say to their own party members and which they require them to learnin order to prepare them for action.

Some of you here may recall, and those of you who are too young to recall may have read, that a few short years before the war Hitler gave an interview to George Lansbury, the great English pacifist and a very lovable man. Hitler convinced Lansbury that the Nazi regime and he himself sincerely desired peace. And as some of you may remember, peace was Hitler's unwearied note in all his communications to other governments. But only political cretins took this as evidence of Hitler's actual intentions. What Hitler really believed could be found out much more reliably by analyzing his Mein Kampf and his addresses to the Nazi Party and its Parteitagen. Similarly what Stalin and the Soviet regime really believe can be discovered not so much by reading propagandist defenses of Soviet policy written for foreign consumption but by a study of the writings which constitute Stalin's Mein Kampf for example, his Problems ofLeninism and his speeches before the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. Where the texts are ambiguous and on fundamental matters they are not—the acid test of meaning, here as elsewhere, is to be found in Soviet practice.

There is another gross error which is an obstacle to understanding the ideology of contemporary communism. That is to identify it with the principles of Marxism on the strength of references to Marx as a kind of a minor deity in the communist pantheon. This is as uncritical as to identify the clerical fascism of Salazar and Franco with the principles of Christianity on the ground that they often speak of the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. The communists, to be sure, make use of the Marxist critique of capitalism. But the democratic socialists, who are the most principled and consistent opponents of communism, do so, too. Consequently, what is distinctive about the ideology of contemporary communism cannot be the corpus of Marxist doctrines which are pervaded by a passion for freedom and human dignity. And the greatest of the latter-day Marxists, men like Kautsky and Plechanov and Hilferding, regarded the communists as the ideological heirs of Bakunin and Nechayev. This is an oversimplification, too. But it should warn us against a too easy identification of the characteristic principles of Marxism, which taught that socialism could be successfully introduced only in the most highly industrialized and cultured countries, with the communist doctrine which justified its introduction at any cost and by any means into one of the most backward countries in the world.

I haven't the time to discuss the philosophy of Marx tonight. J wish I had. Essentially it represents, whether you regard it as correct or as mistaken, a Western point of view. But contemporary communism is not Marxism as much as it is Bolshevik-Leninism. Its ideology is authentically presented in the writings and teachings and practices of Lenin and Stalin, two of the most event-making men of all times, whose activity, we may note in passing, is difficult to explain in terms of their professed philosophy of history.

I come now to the basic propositions of contemporary communist ideology. Its first proposition is that the welfare of humanity, its assurance of ultimate peace, continuous prosperity and final freedom, rests on the victory of the proletariat, nationally and internationally, in its inevitable class struggle with the bourgeoisie. This first proposition is a conclusion which depends upon a number of other premises. Among them, for example, we find the notion that no type of system of capitalist production, no matter how modified or reformed, can function without periodic crises of increasing intensity culminating in mass misery and war. Another premise is that only the proletariat as a class, because of its strategic place in the process of production and because it has no vested interest in production, can become the mass base of the movement which seeks, not to reform the existing order, but its revolutionary overthrow. And another key premise in this connection is that the proletariat constitutes the overwhelming majority of the population, so that to the extent that there is a struggle between the proletariat and other classes, the victory of the proletariat is morally justified. In this view the victory of the proletariat spells the end of all private ownership of the instruments of production and the introduction of complete state ownership and absolute state control of the productive plant of society. Those are the premises on which the first proposition is based.

A number of comments is in order here. Strictly speaking, the proletariat is the industrial worker. Nowhere does the industrial worker constitute a clear majority of the population except possibly in England and Germany. The consequence is that in communist literature the term proletariat is indefinitely extensible. It embraces any category of workers, including clerks, professionals, farm workers, who associate themselves with the political program of the Communist Party and in whose name the Communist Party speaks for the entire proletariat. Similarly the term bourgeoisie, particularly the term petty-bourgeoisie, is used with amazing elasticity, so that if any group, and especially among the categories we have just mentioned, does not at crucial moments follow the political line of the Communist Party, it is thrust into the outer darkness. It is even denied proletarian status. It is sometimes referred to as "the counter-revolutionary pettybourgeoisie, " even if its members in fact earn their living by the sale of their labor power. The importance of the fluidity of the concept of the proletariat and the concept of the worker in Communist theory will be apparent later on.

I come now to the second proposition of communist ideology which teaches that left to itself the proletariat—or the working class—despite its instinctive militancy, cannot find its way to a collectivist society in which all classes and all class struggles by definition disappear. Only in so far as the proletariat submit themselves to the leadership of professional revolutionists banded together in the Communist Party, can the existing state power be seized and shattered and a new society be built. In other words, and this is important, the Communist Party, according to this theory, by its superior scientific insight into the processes of history, economics and politics knows better than the working class whatthe real interests of the working class are. The working class is the darling child of history but it is still only a blundering child, not knowing the communist goal by which it can save itself and the rest of humanity until it is put under the tutelage of the Communist Party, whose leaders, by the way, are themselves not necessarily of working class origin. The writings and practices of Lenin and Stalin both leave no doubt on this point. The working class, for example, is never right if it sets itself against the program and the strategy which the Communist Party in its superior wisdom has laid down for its liberation. For example, let us examine a slogan like "All power to the Soviet" as used by the Bolsheviks. That's a mandatory slogan, say the communists, when the Soviets or any other legislative body agrees with the communist program. But if, without changing their working class composition in the least, the soviets disagree with or oppose the communist line, then the slogan "All power to the Soviets" must be discarded. For such disagreement, if serious enough, is counter-revolutionary and the workers become the enemies of the idealized, even if non-existent, proletariat whose interests the Communist Party and the Communist Party alone knows best. That is why, according to Lenin and Stalin (I am quoting now), "the dictatorship of the proletariat is substantially thedictatorship of the Communist Party." Someday this dictatorship is going to wither away. The date isn't specified but the conditions are, namely, when the last vestiges of capitalism, democratic and nondemocratic, have been destroyed throughout the world, and communism is safe from its enemies within and without. Meanwhile the communist state and dictatorship withers away by growing stronger with every passing year, a fact that cannot be grasped by ordinary logic but by the logic of dialectics which was devised to enable one to swallow contradictions. (I haven't time to go into that tonight.)

In practice this means that the dictatorship of the proletariat is really a dictatorship over the proletariat. Although this dictatorship is enforced by perhaps the most ruthless system of terror in human history, those who execute it are convinced that they are doing the work of (I had almost said God) History or The Historical Process. It is important to re member this connection in their minds between the political task they perform and the so-called logic of History.

There is a third main proposition of communist ideology which is that no Communist Party can succeed in leading the working class unless it itself is hierarchically organized, unless it is a dedicated group of professional revolutionists, free of factions, bound discipline and trained to subordinate itself to the will of the leadership. It was this conception of the nature of revolutionary organizations that differentiated Lenin most clearly from Western Marxism. For, according to that conception, the dictatorship of the party (which, you remember, has been identified substantially with the dictatorship of the proletariat) is the dictatorship of the political bureau of the party, and at times the dictatorship of one man. Here is a characteristic passage from Lenin on this theme. Lenin is speaking. He is talking to his fellow communists and he says to them, "Classes are led by parties and parties are led by individuals who are called leaders. This is A, B, C. The will of the class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator. Soviet socialist democracy is not in the least incompatible with individual rule and dictatorship What is necessary is individual rule, the recognition of the dictatorial powers of one man. All phrases about equal rights of man are nonsense. The function of the leaders of the Communist Party is to see that both the purity of its theory and the discipline of its political organization is preserved against all deviations in theory and practice. Theory and practice here includes the whole field of human knowledge, to which the philosophy of dialectical materialism possesses the seven seals. The key to these seals is entrusted only to the most politically reliable communists. This explains why there is a party line in all disciplines from art and astronomy to music and zoology, deviations from which incur serious penalties.

Some of you have been reading about the suppression of the geneticists of the Mendelian-Morgan school in Russia. Many people are puzzled about it. This is only a crass illustration of what's been going on for a long time. The explanation of it—the total explanation—requires my going afield briefly into the philosophy of dialectical materialism.

According to this philosophy, all things in the world are interrelated—politics, physics, sociology, and art. Consequently, no matter what theory you have in any field, sooner or later, if you trace its implications, you will find it has political repercussions. Logically, of course, this would make the scientists as much of a judge of politics as it would make the politician a judge of science. But since the communists have political power, they assume that because of their insight into the nature of the historical process and into the nature of the dialectical laws of the cosmos of which history is a special application, they can determine what is true and false in any field of knowledge. They believe they can do this because they use a method, the dialectic method, which corrects the one-sidedness of scientific method, so that the leadership of the CommunistParty is the final authority on what constitutes a deviation in any field. And there is no appeal from its judgment either to the membership or to public opinion, because there is no independent public opinion. The Pope claims to be infallible only in matters of faith and morals. The leadership of the Communist Party doesn't exactly claim infallibility but it claims to have superior knowledge to anyone else in all fields, not only in faith and morals, but in physical and social science.

Let us now, to return to the argument, state these three propositions formally, and see what follows from them. The first proposition: the welfare of humanity depends upon the victory of the proletariat. Second: the victory of the proletariat depends upon the dictatorship of the Communist Party (sometimes this is called working class democracy). Third: the dictatorship of the Communist Party can function only through the dictatorship of the leaders, whether it be the Politbureau or Stalin. Now it follows with implacable logic, and we are dealing with men who are proud of their logical consistency, that anyone who opposes the program of world change set forth by the Politbureau or by Stalin is opposed to the welfare of humanity. He is, to use the favorite Soviet phrase, "an enemy of mankind."

There is little reason to doubt the sincerity with which this conclusion is held and the ruthlessness with which it is employed, whether against the so-called kulaks or independent farmers as a class who refused to enter collective farms, whether against a group of workers or soldiers and sailors like the Kronstadt Soviets, whether against a faction within the Communist Party like the workers' opposition, whether against a galaxy of Lenin's early lieutenants—all who oppose decisions of the ruling hierarchy of the Communist Party are objectively enemies "of mankind. Unless they capitulate, they must be punished as enemies of mankind, the leaders usually by liquidation, the followers usually by sentences to the slave labor camps. In principle, even a majorityof mankind can be regarded as enemies ofmankind if it persistently refuses to acceptthe political salvation offered by the communist program.

Now the fact that we are dealing with political thought ways which are foreign to the secular political mind of the West should not make us incredulous about their existence. Nor should we imagine that the communist leaders are unaware of the fantastic discrepancy between their expressed ideals and the sad realities of communism in practice. But for them, these are the transitional costs of progress to be redeemed by the felicities of the higher stage of communism in the future.

Marx once said that no ruling class ever voluntarily surrendered its power. We might apply that maxim to the ruling class of the U.S.S.R. and maintain that unconsciously it seeks a justification in historic necessity for the social privileges it enjoys through political tyranny. That may be. But nonetheless it is important to realize that we are dealing here neither with frightened men nor with unintelligent men but rather with determined men fortified by absolute assurance in their program and its messianic significance for the entire world. So much so that they cannot conceive that anyone who understands their program could reject it except on the following three grounds: self-interest—that's why the bourgeoisie doesn't accept it, because their social position is threatened by the state monopoly of production; stupidity or ignorance-that explains the workers who remain insensitive to the communist methods; and finally dishonesty for example all intellectuals who are critical of communism. If you truly understand this view, they maintain, you have to agree with it unless you fall into one of these three categories.

Now whether we are dealing here with a fanaticism of virtue or a fanaticism of vice is again not so important as to recognize it for what it is, a fanaticism of program, which subordinates everything to a pre-determined end. And this end justifies the use of any means in the struggle for power—literally any means—and explains why communist practice is marked by the extremest kind of opportunism and deceit in its slogans and its strategy and its tactics. No communist feels bound by any code of honor or any principle of morality or integrity if the slightest practical advantage can be derived from violating it. And this is important—communists deny, specifically Lenin denies, that this is tantamount to immoralism. In their own eyes they are still moral when they do this. "We say,' declared Lenin, "that our morality is entirely [note entirely], subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat", which means, as we have seen, subordinated to what furthers the victory of the Communist Party.

Lenin's career as well as Stalin's has clearly shown that Smerdyakov's formula in the Brothers Karamozov, "all things are permissible," no matter how they outrage our moral sensibilities, is their own, if only it helps in the conquest of power. That is why communists throughout the world who are very vehement about their civil rights do not regard it as inconsistent in the slightest to deny civil rights to all who disagree with them when they come to power. That is why those who must negotiate agreements with Soviet representatives, if unacquainted with communist ideology, live a life of continual surprises at what words can be made to mean. That is why communists cannot utilize the normal processes of democracy, especially parliamentary institutions, to achieve their goal. If they did they would have to run the risk of having their program repudiated by popular majority or of helping existing society improve conditions to a point where their own program would have no appeal. "That is why," writes Lenin, "no parliament in any circumstancescan be for communists an arena ofstruggle for reforms for betterment of thesituation of the working class. The onlyquestion can be that of utilizing bourgeoisstate institutions for their own destructionor of using them as a forum for makingpropaganda." The behavior of the communist deputies in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic, and in the French and the Italian Chambers today, illustrates what Lenin means. Gromyko and Vishinsky in the U.N. are fulfilling Lenin's injunction to the letter. Finally, this explains the communist belief that power can be taken only by violent overthrow, and Lenin's specific and emphatic denial of Marx's contentions that in democratic countries like England and the United States, socialism could be achieved peacefully.

At this juncture we are sure to hear from someone to the effect that all this is surely not so much the ideology of international communism as the ideology of only Russian communism which reflects the peculiar traits of Russian history. We hear that the Czech communists are different, that French communists are different, that Italian communists, Chinese communists, American communists are presumably all different. They are either agrarian democrats, misunderstood workers or what not. Now it is undeniable that the ideology of communism bears the stigmata of centuries of Russian absolutism. But, even granting that, it is completely false to suppose that there is any essential difference between Soviet communism, no matter what its origin, and the ideology of official Communist Parties elsewhere. Certain variations in tactics are permitted but on no fundamental issue of any kind are the Communist Parties of the world permitted to deviate even a hair's breadth, particularly on the strategy laid down for the conquest of power. Tito is an illustration. Any fundamental deviation is a ground for complete excommunication. Indeed, affiliation with the Communist International, which was recently rebaptized under the name of the Cominform without ever having really been abolished, depended upon the acceptance of 21 conditions which universalized the Russian pattern. And if anyone entertains a doubt as to how closely the Communist Parties of the world follow the ideological directives of the Kremlin, let me quote a characteristic passage from one of our own American communists, William Z. Foster. It is from his book Towards Soviet America (page 275) where he says, "Even before the seizure of power"—note the language—"Even before the seizure of power, the workers will organize the Red Guard. The leader of the revolution in all its stages is the Communist Party. Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties, Republican, Democratic, Progressive (this was before Henry Wallace's party was founded), Socialist etc., will be liquidated, the Communist Party alone functioning as the party of the toiling masses. Likewise will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of all bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers' associations, Rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A. (what they had against the Y.M.C.A. I can't imagine) and such fraternal orders as the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, etc."

This is presented as the 20th century version of Jeffersonian democracy.

All this is only part of the story. One may say, granted that the foregoing expresses the ideological bases of Soviet communism, what bearing has it on international relations? After all, each country can solve its own domestic communist problem as it sees fit. Why cannot it then work out a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union, which, after all, declares itself interested in building "socialism in only one country"?

Here, too, we must distinguish between the Soviet goal which remains constant and the diplomatic offenses that are turned on and off to meet some particular situation. There is a myth currently prevalent that after Lenin's death, Stalin espoused socialism in one country and turned his back on international revolutionary communism, which Trotsky had sought to continue as part of Lenin's legacy. Now the truth is that for all their differences, which were largely tactical and personal, both Stalin and Trotsky were out of the same Leninist mold. And when Western Europe failed to imitate Russia, Lenin's problem was to build as much socialism as possible in Russia while encouraging revolutionary activities against capitalism in other countries. Stalin emphasized building up the socialist economy but did not neglect revolutionary action abroad. Trotsky emphasized revolutionary action abroad but called for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. What Stalin meant by socialism in one country was that, if the Soviet Union were left alone to work out her own destiny, she could achieve socialism out of her own resources. But he never made any bones of the fact that the Soviet Union would not and could not be left alone, and that the final victory of socialism in one country can only be assured when the communist revolution had triumphed in the main countries of the world.

To quote Stalin [I am quoting now from Stalin's Problems of Leninism] "We are living not only in a state but in a system of states and existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before the end comes, a series of frightful dashes between the Soviet Republic and 'he bourgeois states is inevitable." And writing on his own shortly before the Second World War in his famous letter to Ivanov, he said, "The aid of the international proletariat appears to be a force without which the final victory of socialism in one country is not to be decided." And in February, 1946 he indicated once more that capitalism in the nature of the case must lead to war against the Soviet Union.

There are several reasons why the communist ideologists are convinced that the Soviet Union cannot survive alone in a world of capitalist states, but, as I have already indicated, the chief reason is the nature of the capitalist system. According to their analysis every capitalist system must expand or die. And before it dies it must attempt to expand by war unless it is overthrown from within. So fundamental is the belief that capitalist systems of every variety lead ultimately to economic breakdown and war, that even during the Second World War when some capitalist countries were helping the Soviet Union resist an invasion by another capitalist country, instead of making common cause with the invader, as communist analysis would have led us to expect, this belief was still being fostered in official communist textbooks, although absent from government proclamations. To admit that anything but a socialist economy could possibly stabilize itself under the conditions of modern technology and provide full employment and general prosperity would pull one of the chief props from under the argument for the soviet system itself. The Soviet leaders cannot sincerely abandon this belief without having the whole structure of communist ideology come crashing to the ground.

Now, given the dogma that all major countries not in the Soviet sphere are impelled to war by the very processes of their economic life, then, with characteristic Bolshevik realism, the logical consequences are drawn. Until the final conflict is won

the communist economy must be a war economy and all measures, domestic or in respect to foreign policy, must enhance its military potential as well as its military geographical position. Since the final denouement can be avoided only if communist regimes are established in other countries, communist parties in those countries must function as fifth columns, disorganizing them by propaganda, infiltration, intensification of class struggles, and finally strike for power if a favorable revolutionary situation develops. At the very least, once hostilities break out, they must sabotage to the death the cause of their own country for the sake of the workers' true fatherland, the Soviet Union.

I want to underscore the fact that this follows logically from Bolshevik premises. Try imaginatively to put yourself in their place. If you believe that the salvation of mankind can come only through the Russian system, and if you believe that the nature of other economies is such that sooner or later an attack on that system is inevitable, how would you act towards those other countries? That's the way the Bolshevik leaders are acting and have been acting since they took power.

At this point I should like to say something about the strategy and tactics of international communism based upon the belief that such war is inevitable, and the problems they create. I haven't the time to go into it in detail tonight. I just want to list the four generic lines of strategy, aside from military action, in which the communists engage, and in which they logically must engage, if they believe what I have asserted they believe. And it solves all "the mysteries."

The first line of strategy is infiltration into all key positions in non-communist countries, especially governmental services, in order to relay information on vital matters to the Soviet regime, through a network of interlocking secret agents drawn from the ranks of local communists. For example, on the Central Executive Committee of every Communist Party in the world there is one man who acts as a liaison officer with the foreign branch of the N.K.V.D. or the M.V.D. His function is to recruit from among the members of the Communist Party those who can function most adequately for purposes of secret work or espionage. And remember, these are not ordinary men whom he recruits. They are not people who can be bought and sold. They are people who regard themselves as idealists, as dedicated to a cause. They owe allegiance, moral allegiance, only to that cause as interpreted by the rulers of the Soviet Union. No nation in the history of the world has ever been able to command such a loyal devoted fifth column in other countries. Hitler's fifth column consisted of a handful of unassimilated and easily recognizable Germans in different countries. Stalin's fifth column consists of people who are native to their own countries and who, accepting the Soviet myth or Soviet "truth," have dedicated themselves to its universal triumph. Perjury in their eyes is holy because it is justified by an end which justifies everything.

The second line of strategy is penetration of all mass organizations and the creation of factions in these mass organizations, especially trade unions, to get control of the leadership. Since grievances always abound in every country, their function is to inflame these grievances to a point where they paralyze either the economies of these countries or their striking power in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union.

The third line of strategy is the creation of "innocent" false fronts. Communists begin by taking some slogan like peace, or democracy, or civil rights, or help for antifascist refugees, or even free milk for babies, and then appeal to all well-intentioned people to join these organizations on the basis of some "big" names that have been acquired in various dubious ways. The purpose is to consolidate public opinion behind these organizations, not to achieve the declared objectives but in behalf of the political aims of the moment. So, for example, if you belong to an organization for free milk for underprivi- ledged children you'll discover that some Friday night when the meeting is not too well attended, the secretary of the organization will introduce a resolution condemning American policy in China. You may ask, "What's that got to do with free milk for underprivileged children?" The Communists will discredit you as a reactionary opposed to free milk for babies. Many liberals say, "Well, in these cases even if we work with the communists, we are using the communists. We are getting free milk for babies anyhow. We are making them work for us." The truth of the matter is that it never works out that way. For just as soon as it is discovered that the communists are using the organization for their purposes, the whole cause of free milk for babies is compromised. If the communists can't control the organization they spike it. Liberal causes always suffer setbacks when they are tied to a communist kite. There is a certain type of liberal, unfortunately, who just loves to be fooled, and who is always taken in by communist slogans.

The history of the American liberal movement in the last few years is a tragic story of communist infiltration and sabotage. Another function of the false front is to recruit members for the Communist Party. And there is still a third function of the strategy of the false front. This is to raise funds and siphon them off for communist political purposes. I could document this at length but at the moment the details are not important. The important thing to remember is that genuine liberals always get bilked when they join any organization which communists organize or control.

The fourth line of strategy is perhaps the most important and the most difficult to combat. It is the attempt, so to speak, to subvert within our own minds our attachments to, and our understanding of, the nature of democracy, by taking over all the symbols and the terms of the democratic tradition and pretending that communism is a species of democracy, a kind of a "new" democracy, at the very least an economic or a social democracy as contrasted with our own political democracy. I shall say more about this in the few minutes that I have left.

Unpalatable as it may seem to us, the sobering truth is that from the very founding of the Communist International, whose organization was called for by communist ideology even before the October revolution of 1917, the Soviet regime has been in a state of undeclared war against the West. This war was launched on the basis of strictly ideological considerations, long before the foolish and fruitless efforts of some Western states to overthrow the Soviet Union by invasion in its early years.

Now, whether one approves or disapproves, it must be admitted that communist ideology is an impressive body of integrated doctrine. Although sometimes overladen with transitory slogans and obscured by diplomatic notes, it is always possible to discern its iron features in any serious document issued by the Politbureau. To dismiss this ideology as a kind of quaint ritualism, as so many super-sophisticated sociologists do, is foolhardy in the face of the unwearied insistence of the communist leaders that theory is a guide to practice, and that emphasis upon the re-training and re-education of their own cadres is essential to victory. And that is why I want to repeat again that they, at least, understand that theory is the most practical thing in the world today.

Of course, one might raise the question whether communist political behavior is in fact determined by such ideological considerations, even though the communists make the official claim that it is. One might enquire whether or not it is determined by simpler factors like geography, control of raw materials, and considerations of the balance of power. You may remember that Mr. Molotov at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact suddenly told us that ideologies were a matter of taste and that they had no influence. He changed his tune, however, about the importance of such matters of taste after Hitler invaded Russia. But, as I have already indicated, it isn't necessary to maintain that Soviet political behavior is exclusively determined by this professed ideology. It is sufficient to maintain only that this ideology explains many things in the expansionist drives of the Soviet Union, and that under certain circumstances it may tip the scales in the direc- tion of overt war, since any act of the Soviet Union, no matter how aggressive, can always be justified as a defensive measure against the inevitable encirclement of war-breeding capitalist countries. In politics, it is not only the facts that count but what makers of policy believe those facts to be. A man in the grip of delusions may be cured by knowledge of the fact but he must first be restrained for our own sakes, if not for his, before he can be cured.

I want to return for a moment to the ideology of democracy. Its points of conflict with the ideology of the Soviet Union have been apparent, I hope, all along the line. This conflict is epitomized in the opposition between what we may call the fanaticism of communist program on the one hand, and the democratic principle of process on the other. No opposition can be .more fundamental since all other oppositions flow from it. The democratic faith in process does not rest on any official theology or metaphysics. It involves the belief that all social institutions must justify themselves by their work as interpreted not by any elite of professional revolutionists but by the great mass of the non-elite here and now. It takes as its point of departure the needs and wishes of persons who lead their own lives, make their own choices and pursue their own happiness, and not the perfections of social blueprints laid up in heaven or derived from the laws of dialectics.

The ideology of democracy, it seems to me, is not committed to any fixed economic system but only to those processes of freely given consent which enable human beings to determine what kind of an economy they want. Those who identify democracy necessarily with free enterprise or capitalism are false to the spirit of democracy and are doing it a great disservice. For democracy is compatible with any economic ystem, even with collectivism, provided only that human beings are free not only to choose it but also to abandon it if they wish to do so after savoring its fruits. The democratic philosophy recognizes that human beings may be exploited not only by private employers but by the state, and that state exploitation, when it takes place, is perhaps the more fearsome, because it is backed by total police power. It is experimental in its outlook and sees many more possible economic systems than that given by the doctrinaires in a narrow choice between unrestrained laissez faire and complete state monopoly of the instruments of production. That is why it seems to me to be a complete mistake, fraught with the most terrible consequences, to reduce the ideological conflict between communism and democracy today to a conflict between free economic enterprise on the one hand and collectivist economy on the other. After all, it is questionable to what extent the United States really has a free enterprise system in the classic sense. And certainly democratic England and France have gone pretty far on the road to a planned socialist economy. Yet the ideological opposition between English democracy and the Soviet Union is no less than that between the United States and the U.S.S.R. If anything, communist leaders would rather deal with reactionary, short-sighted capitalists, more concerned with the balance sheets of profit and loss who are convinced they can do business with Stalin (just as they were convinced they could do business with Hitler), than deal with principled democrats or socialists who are more concerned with human freedom.

No, the basic issue of our time today isnot economic but political and moral. And that basic issue, one cannot repeat it too often, is whether human beings are to be entrusted with the freedom of choice to determine their own government, their own cultural outlook and their own economic system, or whether it is to be chosen for them. And despite their campaigns of semantic corruption with terms like democracy and freedom, partisans of communist ideology have resolutely denied genuine liberty of choice to the people, first by the methods by which they seized power and even more by the methods by which they keep it. One can openly admit a multitude of evils, some of them shameful, in any existing democratic state, but so long as the processes of criticism, opposition and education are not monopolized by a minority political party and supervised by a secret police, which is the case in every communist state in the world, these evils are remediable. It is for this reason that, according to democratic ideology, political democracy is the basis of all other forms of democracy, no matter what its sphere of life. That is why it is absurd to contrast, as is sometimes done, political democracy in western countries with economic democracy or ethnic democracy in communist countries, for it is easily demonstrable that the latter are impossible without the former.

I shall take a minute or two to clinch this point. You may recall that Henry Wallace at a communist rally once said: "They have economic and social democracy in Russia; we have political democracy in this country; we ought to have both in both countries."

Let us analyze this. What does economic democracy mean? How can an economic democracy exist unless the individuals affected by the economic process have the right freely to determine the direction of economic policy, the distribution of the fruits of economic work, and the conditions under which they work? Obviously, without these rights economic democracy has no meaning. But these rights of participation, in turn, are completely dependent upon freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of assembly. And these freedoms are precisely the things which constitute the essence of political democracy. Without these freedoms you cannot have economic democracy. They are the sine qua non of any type of democracy. Any attempt to juxtapose a "democracy" which denies these freedoms, with political democracy, as if they were two species of a common class, seems to me to be either a piece of fantastic confusion or a calculated attempt to corrupt basic usage. It is a violation of the elementary principles of logical and ethical hygiene.

Within the national perspective, the problems of coping with communism as an ideology are difficult enough but I think they are soluble in part by techniques which have been suggested by the President's Committee on Civil Rights. But on the international scene I don't think that the problem is soluble by the same techniques. On the international scene the only thing we can say (I must "bring my remarks to a close) is that no matter how fanatical an ideology, there is only one force which can tame it and that is the fear of failure. The history of the Bolshevik regime shows that communists make strategic retreats only when they feel they will fail. The implication is clear. We can contain their threat by developing through the concert of democratic powers an overwhelming preponderance of force so that if the communist state undertakes a hostile act against the West, it will know it risks destruction. At the same time we have got to do our best to clean up those sore spots in our own economy which are the breeding grounds of agitation.

But more important still, I think the time has come today for the Western democracies to take the ideological offensive. People are enamored of the Soviet myth in inverse proportion to their distance from Soviet Russia. On the Western European continent today the time has come for the United States—this can best be done independently of the governmentto take the democratic offensive in terms of ideology.

After all, in any honest competition between these two ideologies, democrats have nothing to fear. The Russians are terribly fearful of permitting their own people to confront the democratic ideology and practice. They refuse to permit them to leave their country. Their nationals jump from windows to prevent themselves from being taken back to Russia. They desert by thousands. In Berlin this summer I was told that thousands of Russians were deserting every month. But I also was told that about eight or nine months ago when Russians deserted they were handed back by the Americans to the Russian Army. The M.V.D. lined them up before the assembled battalions and shot them as an example to others.

Most American military men and most American statesmen have never really understood the fundamental nature of communist ideology, the things that make sense of the actions of the Soviet Union. I submit that if you take what I have said tonight only as an hypothesis, just an hypothesis, and ask yourself whether it accounts for what you have read and what you can observe, that it makes considerable sense. That doesn't mean that the hypothesis is necessarily true because there may be alternative hypotheses which will explain things just as satisfactorily. But if you continue your studies on this question, as you should, I predict that you will find no other hypothesis that will explain past, present and future Soviet conduct equally well. Test it by its power to predict.

If my hypothesis is valid, then the counter-directives to the threat of a worldwide Soviet slave state seem to me to be indicated. First, an adequate military defense which the Soviet rulers will respect with a healthy fear. Second, the progressive elimination of the plague spots in our own democratic culture. Third, a worldwide ideological offensive—by organizations of principled democrats to tell the truth to the peoples of the earth, especially those behind the Iron Curtain, about the basic differences between Democracy and Soviet Communism as ways of life.

THE AUTHOR: Sidney Hook, Professor of Philosophy and chairman of that department at Washington Square College, New York University, is one of the country's leading authorities on Marxism. A Columbia Ph.D., he has written a great many articles and eight books on subjects as varied as pragmatism, planned society, American philosophy, democracy, and education for modern man.

MEMBER OF THE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE, U. S. Congressman Richard M. Nixon (Rep.) of California, left, talks with Prof. William W. Ballard '28, associate director of the Great Issues Course, during his two-day visit to the College, January 17-18, to lecture on Testing Political Loyalties.

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM VERMONT, Ralph E. Flanders (right), shown chatting with John Sargent '49 of Hanover during his January visit to Dartmouth to lecture in the Great Issues Course. Member of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, Senator Flanders discussed "Is Liberalism Socialism?"

AN EXTRACURRICULAR POSE by Richard W. Morin '24, executive officer of the College and executive secretary of the Great Issues Course. It shows him hunting ducks, in season, along the Connecticut.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Perhaps the greatest of today's great issues is the world-wide struggle between Democracy and Communism. For an intelligent understanding of this "cold war" the citizens of the United States need precisely what they seem to lack—a comprehension of the ideology and strategy of international communism. Professor Hook's lecture, prepared for Dartmouth seniors in the Great Issues course and printed here in its entirety, is "must" reading for every Dartmouth man, in the opinion of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE'S editors. American foreign policy, the news from abroad, and Russia's "baffling" conduct will lie seen in better perspective by anyone who has had the benefit of Professor Hook's enlightening analysis.

VOX.CLAMANTIS.IN.DESER TO.