Why communists hate america

It may be well at this point to digress for the purpose of recalling the curious fact that the literature of communism contains so many praises for the achievements of capitalism.

The manifesto contains these words about the market economy of capitalism and its alleged overlords, the bourgeoisie:. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

Marx and Engels could afford this praise for capitalism because they supposed it would everywhere be succeeded by communism, a stage of society whose glories would in turn dwarf all the achievements of capitalism. Communism would build on capitalism and bring a new economy that would make the capitalist world look like a poorhouse.

Those who constituted the dominant class of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, would have performed their historic mission and would be dismissed from the scene - dismissed without thanks, of course, for after all they only accomplished what was foreordained by the forces of history, forces that were now to throw them into the discard like the husk of a sprouting seed.

One of the most startling gaps in the Communist theory is the lack of any clear notion of how a Communist economy would be organized.

In the writings of the great founders of communism there is virtually nothing on this subject. This gap was not an oversight, but was in fact a necessary consequence of the general theory of communism.

That theory taught, in effect, that as a society moves inevitably from one level of development to another, there is no way of knowing what the next stage will demand until in fact it has arrived.

Communism will supplant and destroy the market economy of capitalism. What will its own economy be like? That we cannot know until we are there and have a chance to see what the world looks like without any institution resembling an economic market. The manifesto, in fact, expresses a deep contempt for "utopian socialists" who propose "an organization of society specially contrived" by them, instead of waiting out the verdict of history and depending on the "spontaneous class organization of the proletariat.

Operating then, in this vacuum of guidance left behind by their prophets, how did the founders of the Soviet Union proceed to organize their new economy? The answer is that they applied as faithfully as they could the teachings of their masters. Since those teachings were essentially negative, their actions had to have the same quality.

They started by attempting to root out from the Russian scene every vestige of the market principle, even discouraging the use of money, which they hoped soon to abolish altogether. The production and distribution of goods were put under central direction, the theory being that the flow of goods would be directed by social need without reference to principles of profit and loss.

This experiment began in and came to an abrupt end in March of It was a catastrophic failure. It brought with it administrative chaos and an almost inconceivable disorder in economic affairs, culminating in appalling shortages of the most elementary necessities. Competent scholars estimate its cost in Russian lives at 5 million. The official Russian version of this experiment does not deny that it was an enormous failure.

It attributes that failure to inexperience and to a mythical continuation of military operations, which had in fact almost wholly ceased. Meanwhile the Russian economy has been moving steadily toward the market principle. The flow of labor is controlled by wages, so that the price of labor is itself largely set by market forces. The spread from top to bottom of industrial wages is in many cases wider than it is in this country. Managerial efficiency is promoted by substantial economic incentives in the form of bonuses and even more substantial perquisites of various kinds.

Enterprises are run on a profit and loss basis. Indeed, there are all the paraphernalia of an advanced commercial society, with lawyers, accountants, balance sheets, taxes of many kinds, direct and indirect, and finally even the pressures of a creeping inflation. The allocation of resources in Russia probably now comes about as close to being controlled by the market principle as is possible where the government owns all the instruments of production.

Russian economists speak learnedly of following the "Method of Balances. This impressive phrase stands for a very simple idea. It means that in directing production and establishing prices an effort is made to come out even, so that goods for which there is an insufficient demand will not pile up, while shortages will not develop in other fields where demand exceeds supply.

The "Method of Balances" turns out to be something a lot of us learned about in school as the law of supply and demand. All of this is not to say that the Russian economy has fully realized the market principle.

There are two obstacles that block such a development. The first lies in the fact that there is a painful tension between what has to be done to run the economy efficiently and what ought to be happening according to orthodox theory. The result is that the Russian economist has to be able to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. He has to be prepared at all times for sudden shifts of the party line. If today he is condemned as an "unprincipled revisionist" who apes capitalist methods, tomorrow he may be jerked from the scene for having fallen into a "sterile orthodoxy", not realizing that Marxism is a developing and creative science.

The other obstacle to the realization of a free market lies in the simple fact that the government owns the whole of industry.

This means, for one thing, that the industrial units are huge, so that all of steel, or all of cosmetics, for example, is under a single direction. This naturally creates the economic condition known as oligopoly and the imperfectly functioning market which attends that condition. Furthermore, a realization of the market principle would require the managers of the various units of industry to act as if they were doing something they are not, that is, as if they were directing independent enterprises.

Understandably there is a considerable reluctance to assume this fictitious role, since the manager's reward for an inconvenient independence may well be a trip to Siberia where he is likely nowadays, they say, to be made chief bookkeeper in a tiny power plant miles from the nearest town. Meanwhile, a constant theme of complaint by Moscow against the managers is that they are too "cousinly" with one another and that they are too addicted to "back scratching.

One of the most familiar refrains of Communist propaganda is that "capitalism is dying of its internal contradictions. It constantly has to preach one way and act another.

These inner tensions and perplexities help to explain the startling "shifts in the party line" that characterize all of the Communist countries. It is true that these shifts sometimes reflect the outcome of a subterranean personal power struggle within the party. But we must remember that they also at times result from the struggles of conscientious men trying to fit an inconvenient text to the facts of reality. The yawning gap in Communist theory, by which it says nothing about how the economy shall be run except that it shall not be by the market principle, will continue to create tensions, probably of mounting intensity, within and among the Communist nations.

The most painful compromise that it has so far necessitated occurred when it was decided that trade among the satellite countries should be governed by the prices set on the world market.

This embarrassing concession to necessity recognized, on the one hand, that a price cannot be meaningful unless it is set by something like a market, and, on the other, the inability of the Communist system to develop a reliable pricing system within its own government-managed economy. The Communist theory has now had a chance to prove itself by an experience extending over two generations in a great nation of huge human and material resources.

What can we learn from this experience? We can learn, first of all, that it is impossible to run an advanced economy successfully without resort to some variant of the market principle. In time of war, when costs are largely immaterial and all human efforts converge on a single goal, the market principle can be subordinated. In a primitive society, where men live on the verge of extinction and all must be content with the same meager ration, the market principle largely loses its relevance.

But when society's aim is to satisfy divers human wants and to deploy its productive facilities in such a way as to satisfy those wants in accordance with their intensity - their intensity as felt by those who have the wants - there is and can be no substitute for the market principle.

This the Russian experience proves abundantly. That experience also raises serious doubt whether the market principle can be realized within an economy wholly owned by the government. The second great lesson of the Russian experience is of deeper import. It is that communism is utterly wrong about its most basic premise, the premise that underlies everything it has to say about economics, law, philosophy, morality, and religion. Communism starts with the proposition that there are no universal truths or general truths of human nature.

According to its teachings there is nothing one human age can say to another about the proper ordering of society or about such subjects as justice, freedom, and equality. Everything depends on the stage of society and the economic class that is in power at a particular time.

In the light of this fundamental belief - or rather, this unbending and all-pervasive disbelief - it is clear why communism had to insist that what was true for capitalism could not be true for communism. Among the truths scheduled to die with capitalism was the notion that economic life could be usefully ordered by a market.

If this truth seems still to be alive, orthodox Communist doctrine has to label it as an illusion, a ghost left behind by an age now being surpassed.

At the present time this particular capitalist ghost seems to have moved in on the Russian economy and threatens to become a permanent guest at the Communist banquet. Let us hope it will soon be joined by some other ghosts, such as freedom, political equality, religion, and constitutionalism. This brings me to the Communist view of law and politics. Of the Communist legal and political philosophy, we can almost say that there is none.

This lack is, again, not an accident, but is an integral part of the systematic negations which make up the Communist philosophy. According to Marx and Engels, the whole life of any society is fundamentally determined by the organization of its economy.

What men will believe; what gods, if any, they will worship; how they will choose their leaders or let their leaders choose themselves; how they will interpret the world about them - all of these are basically determined by economic interests and relations. In the jargon of communism: religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law constitute a superstructure which reflects the underlying economic organization of a particular society.

It follows that subjects which fall within the superstructure permit of no general truths; for example, what is true for law and political science under capitalism cannot be true under communism. I have said we can almost assert that there is no Communist philosophy of law and political science. The little there is can be briefly stated. It consists in the assumption that after the revolution there will be a dictatorship called the dictatorship of the proletariat and that this dictatorship will for a while find it necessary to utilize some of the familiar political and legal institutions, such as courts.

There is an incredibly tortured literature about just how these institutions are to be utilized and with what modifications. When, however, mature communism is achieved, law and the state, in the consecrated phrase, "will wither away. There will simply be factories and fields and a happy populace peacefully reveling in the abundance of their output.

As with economic theory, there was a time in the history of the Soviet regime when an attempt was made to take seriously the absurdities of this Communist theory of law and state. For about a decade during the thirties an influential doctrine was called the commodity exchange theory of law. According to this theory, the fundamental fact about capitalism is that it is built on the economic institution of exchange.

In accordance with the doctrine of the superstructure, all political and legal institutions under capitalism must therefore be permeated and shaped by the concept of exchange. Indeed, the theory went further. Even the rules of morality are based on exchange, for is there not a kind of tacit deal implied even in the Golden Rule, "Do unto others, as you would be done by"?

Now the realization of communism, which is the negation of capitalism, requires the utter rooting out of any notion of exchange in the Communist economy. But when exchange has disappeared, the political, legal, and moral superstructure that was built on it will also disappear. Therefore, under mature communism there will not only be no capitalistic legal and political institutions, there will be no law whatever, no state, no morality - for all of these in some measure reflect the underlying notion of an exchange or deal among men.

The high priest of this doctrine was Eugene Pashukanis. His reign came to an abrupt end in as the inconvenience of his teachings began to become apparent. With an irony befitting the career of one who predicted that communism would bring an end to law and legal processes, Pashukanis was quietly taken off and shot without even the semblance of a trial.

As in the case of economics, since Pashukanis' liquidation there has developed in Russian intellectual life a substantial gray market for capitalistic legal and political theories.

But where Russian economists seem ashamed of their concessions to the market principle, Russian lawyers openly boast of their legal and political system, claiming for it that it does everything that equivalent bourgeois institutions do, only better. This boast has to be muted somewhat, because it still remains a matter of dogma that under mature communism, law and the state will disappear.

This embarrassing aspect of their inherited doctrine the Soviet theorists try to keep as much as possible under the table. They cannot, however, openly renounce it without heresy, and heresy in the Soviet Union, be it remembered, still requires a very active taste for extinction. One of the leading books on Soviet legal and political theory is edited by a lawyer who is well known in this country, the late Andrei Vyshinsky.

In the table-pounding manner he made famous in the U. He points out, for example, that in Russia the voting age is 18, while in many capitalist countries it is The capitalists thus disenfranchise millions of young men and women because, says Vyshinsky, it is feared they may not yet have acquired a properly safe bourgeois mentality. As one reads arguments like this spelled out with the greatest solemnity, and learns all about the "safeguards" of the Soviet Constitution, it comes as a curious shock to find it openly declared that in the Soviet Union only one political party can legally exist and that the Soviet Constitution is "the only constitution in the world which frankly declares the directing role of the party in the state.

One wonders what all the fuss about voting qualifications is about if the voters are in the end permitted only to vote for the candidates chosen by the only political party permitted to exist. The plain fact is, of course, that everything in the Soviet Constitution relating to public participation in political decisions is a facade concealing the real instrument of power that lies in the Communist Party. It has been said that hypocrisy is vice's tribute to virtue. The holding of elections in which the electorate is given no choice may similarly be described as an attempt by communism to salve its uneasy conscience.

Knowing that it cannot achieve representative democracy, it seems to feel better if it adopts its empty forms. When one reflects on it, it is an astounding thing that a great and powerful nation in the second half of the 20th century should still leave its destinies to be determined by intraparty intrigue, that it should have developed no political institutions capable of giving to its people a really effective voice in their Government, that it should lack any openly declared and lawful procedure by which the succession of one ruler to another could be determined.

Some are inclined to seek an explanation for this condition in Russian history with its bloody and irregular successions of czars. As the Committee had intended, the first set of hearings made the front page of newspapers across the state in January and February The Committee began by taking testimony from several ex-CP members who had become professional anti-communist witnesses.

The Committee paid these witnesses for testifying that the American CP was subservient to Moscow, that communists' participation in seemingly reformist "front" groups was simply a ruse to attract soft-headed liberals the CP wanted to convert, and that the ultimate aim of the CP was the violent overthrow of the US government. See document 8 for an example of this testimony. The Committee then heard a large number of local ex-communists who swore they saw WPU officials at closed meetings of the CP where only "comrades" were allowed.

See documents 7 , 13 , and These local witnesses offered fairly convincing proof that most WPU leaders were communists and that the WPU had consistently supported Soviet foreign policy through all its twists and turns. The hearings, however, fell far short of proving that the WPU received frequent instructions from Moscow or that the group was really unconcerned with helping the elderly. The hearings weakened but did not destroy the WPU.

Membership in the WPU dropped somewhat after the hearings, but the organization still had little trouble gathering enough signatures to place on the ballot a measure to provide free health care to impoverished Washingtonians.

The Canwell Committee held a second set of public hearings in July about "Communist activities at the University of Washington. Unlike the first hearings, the Committee also subpoenaed people suspected to be communists or former communists. The second professor to take the stand, ex-communist Garland Ethel, set a courageous example by testifying about his own activities in the Party, but refusing to give the names of people he had seen at communist meetings.

Ethel's testimony is document All the subsequent professors followed Ethel's lead and refused to name names. All in all, six professors, including Ethel, admitted they had once been members of the CP. Professors Melvin Rader and Joseph Cohen vehemently denied they had ever been communists; they proclaimed that the witnesses who had said otherwise were lying.

Three professors and Florence and Burton James, the directors of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, declined to answer any questions about their political affiliations. The Jameses explain their decision not to testify in document The Seattle Repertory Playhouse never recovered from the negative publicity generated by the Canwell hearings.

During the hearings, several witnesses alleged that the Playhouse produced "communist plays" and served as a "recruiting ground" for the CP. The witnesses supplied little evidence to corroborate their charges, except for the fact that some members of the Playhouse had occasionally provided entertainment at CP fund-raisers. Nevertheless, attendance at the theater declined precipitously after the July hearings, and the Playhouse's income fell by two-thirds the following year.

In early the Playhouse filed for bankruptcy. The UW tenure code required the Faculty Senate to create a Tenure Committee to try the administration's charges against the professors. The Tenure Committee had to find the professors guilty of "incompetency, neglect of duty, incapacity, dishonesty, or immorality" before the administration could fire them. The Tenure Committee's rules are described in document The tenure hearings stretched from October to December The administration contended that Butterworth, Phillips, and Gundlach were all present members of the CP and that their unswerving devotion to communist dogma rendered them incapable of fulfilling their scholarly duty to "seek the truth wherever it may lead.

The administration also argued these three professors were immoral because they belonged to an organization dedicated to overthrowing the government. Ethel, Eby, and Jacobs—all former communists—were charged with having committed these offenses in the past. All six were also accused of having been dishonest with UW President Raymond Allen when he questioned them about their political affiliations.

Each professor offered a different defense, but all six introduced abundant evidence that their colleagues and students found them to be objective and thoroughly competent scholars whose teaching did not reveal pro-communist biases.

See document Rather than attempting to refute this testimony, the administration insisted it was irrelevant. The administration asserted that regardless of how qualified the professors appeared to be, the fact that they were or had been members of the CP rendered them inherently unfit. The professors' lawyers argued that the since the administration could not prove their clients' individual guilt and incompetence, it had fallen back on the unsound doctrine of "guilt by association.

The Tenure Committee voted to dismiss Ralph Gundlach and retain the other five professors. These professors had proved their competence by leaving the CP.

The most controversial cases were those of Phillips and Butterworth, who admitted they were still active members of the CP. Of the 11 members of the Tenure Committee, three thought Phillips and Butterworth should be immediately dismissed, three asserted communists had every right to be part of the faculty, and five contended the UW should amend the tenure code to ban communists from teaching in the future but could not fire Phillips and Butterworth because existing rules did not allow it.

The Committee's recommendations regarding Phillips and Butterworth can be found in document The Committee recommended dismissing Ralph Gundlach even though he was the only defendant to claim he had never been a communist.

The vast majority of the Committee admitted the evidence was insufficient for them to determine whether or not Gundlach had participated in the CP, but they voted to dismiss Gundlach for being dishonest with President Allen.

They saw this dishonesty as part of a larger pattern of unsatisfactory relations with the UW: Gundlach had sponsored numerous controversial speakers, had clashed repeatedly with some administrators, and had leaked data from UW-sponsored public opinion surveys to Hugh DeLacy's campaign in The UW Regents, the seven gubernatorial appointees who supervised University affairs, made the final decision about the professors in January While UW administrators were bound by the tenure code, the Regents were not.

Some state legislators pressured the Regents to remove all six professors. Indeed, conservatives in the legislature blocked hearings on the UW budget until after the Regents made their decision. That Teamster leader Dave Beck was a Regent did not help the professors' cause. At the Regents' meeting, Beck moved for the dismissal of all six professors; his motion was narrowly defeated, The Regents then unanimously decided to discharge Butterworth, Phillips, and Gundlach and place Eby, Ethel, and Jacobs on probation for two years.

The dismissals set a national precedent. Newspapers throughout the US praised the Regents for their "bold, forceful, but fair decision. A large number of college administrators looked to the UW cases as a model and echoed Allen's claim that communists were not fit to teach because they were not intellectually independent. Nearly American professors were dismissed for being communist or "subversive" in the s. A much larger number of liberal or ex-communist academics, fearing for their jobs, cut their ties to left-wing groups, toned down their lectures, and generally concealed their political views.

With the tide of public opinion running against communism, liberals often acquiesced in the dismissals. As the anti-communist wave convulsed academia, Gundlach, Phillips, and Butterworth soon found they had been effectively blacklisted. None of them found another job in higher education. See document 39 for an account of what happened to the professors after the tenure hearings. Professor Melvin Rader, on the other hand, successfully fought back against the Canwell Committee.

During the July hearings professional anti-communist witness George Hewitt swore he had seen Rader at a secret CP training school in New York in the late s. Hewitt's testimony is document 15 ; see also documents 16 and The Canwell Committee did not give Rader a chance to cross-examine Hewitt before Hewitt left the state.

Shortly after the hearings were over, Rader filed perjury charges against Hewitt. Canwell and other conservatives pressured the King County prosecutor to drop the case. Although they failed in this effort, they did convince a New York judge in a highly irregular legal proceeding to refuse to extradite Hewitt back to Seattle.

When it became clear the courts would not address the issue, the Seattle Times assigned reporter Ed Guthman to investigate the case. In September the Seattle Times began running a series of Guthman's articles about Rader's mistreatment at the hands of the Canwell Committee. Guthman described how Committee investigators had taken a hotel register which seemed to vindicate Rader and how this register was later "lost" in the Committee's files. Guthman won a Pulitzer Prize for these articles.

Rader describes his ordeal in document The Canwell forces suffered another setback in the November election: four of the six members of the Committee, including Canwell, failed to win reelection.

The defeat of Canwell and his allies had little to do with the Rader affair which had not yet grabbed front-page headlines or with the WPU's campaign against the Committee. The coattails of Harry Truman's surprising reelection victory wiped out many inexperienced Republican legislators and helped Washington Democrats recover much of the ground they had lost in Control of the legislative session was thus divided. When the Republican-controlled state house passed a bill renewing the Canwell Committee, the Democratic-controlled state senate enacted a counterproposal that would create a less powerful investigative committee.

The Democrats' committee would hold hearings closed to the public and would give alleged subversives a chance to cross-examine their accusers and to call witnesses in their defense. Both parties refused to compromise, and neither bill became law. This impasse occurred again in the legislature with the same result.

The Canwell Committee was never revived. Liberals in the US Congress held up Initiative as a possible model for a national health care law. Ironically, the passage of Initiative did not lead to further extensions in the social "safety net," but instead set the stage for the demise of the WPU. Seeking to maximize political support, the WPU did not include a funding mechanism in Initiative ; the measure simply ordered the state legislature to find a way to pay for the new programs.

Republican Governor Arthur Langlie urged the legislature to raise taxes, but legislators refused, triggering a fiscal crisis. Washington's budget surplus turned into a rapidly growing deficit in a matter of months. In late Governor Langlie gave up trying to cajole new taxes out of the legislature, and resorted to red-baiting to destroy public support for the popular measure. In a series of radio addresses, Langlie proclaimed Initiative was a "communist plot to bankrupt our state.

Pundits initially thought both measures would fail. The WPU's communist leaders had placed their foolish commitment to Soviet foreign policy above their commitment to their health care program. Langlie intensified his attack on the WPU, and his measure won a smashing victory at the polls in November. The membership of the WPU plummeted precipitously after The organization was never again able to collect enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot. After the demise of the WPU and the legislature's failure to renew the Canwell Committee, the locus of the anti-communist crusade in Washington moved from the state government to the federal government.

The state legislature did outlaw the Communist Party and pass laws requiring state employees to sign loyalty oaths in the early s, but these laws were tied up in the courts and not enforced. The federal government, on the other hand, had entered its period of unrestrained McCarthyism and deployed its considerable power against the remnants of the CP in Washington state.

The defendants, known as the "Seattle Seven," produced proof they had never openly advocated the overthrow of the government. The prosecutor argued, and the judge concurred, that such evidence was irrelevant because the defendants participated in an organization that conspired to attack the government at some unspecified point in the future.

They served roughly a year of the sentence before they were released pending appeal. Their convictions were finally overturned on appeal in Hartle listed literally hundreds of people she had seen at CP meetings, including minor WPU functionaries and people who had only attended three or four communist gatherings before dropping out of the Party.

Many of the people Hartle named had left the CP over 15 years earlier, and some vehemently denied they ever had anything to do with the CP. Although very few of those named during the HUAC hearings lost their jobs, many of them found their friends and colleagues suddenly unwilling to talk to them or be seen with them.

Professor Melvin Rader became head of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and toured the state speaking against the excesses of the fight against communism. In late , the majority of the UW faculty vigorously protested when administrators canceled a one-week series of lectures about nuclear physics to be given by left-wing physicist J.

Robert Oppenheimer, who was widely seen as the "father of the atomic bomb. The "ban on Oppenheimer" generated terrible publicity as newspapers across the nation charged that "thought control" and political orthodoxy were turning the UW into a second-rate college. After the Oppenheimer incident, the UW became more willing to hire controversial professors.

In addition, in the late s a group of UW professors challenged the legality of the loyalty oaths required by Washington law. This case, Baggitt v Bullitt , languished in the courts for several years, but in the US Supreme Court declared Washington's oaths unconstitutional.

Indeed, the Supreme Court's decision went even further and proclaimed that no public institution except those directly related to national security could require a loyalty oath as a condition of employment.

Just as the UW's dismissal of pro-communist professors in had helped trigger a nationwide Red Scare in academia, the UW professors' victory against loyalty oaths in helped end the persecution of political dissenters in American universities.

Documents 41 and 42 relate to loyalty oaths. Thus, by the late s and early s, the Red Scare was fading. The Supreme Court helped this process with a string of decisions like Baggitt v Bullitt. However, a more important factor in the decline of the anti-communist crusade was simply Americans' increased sense of security in this period. After the Korean War ended in , America's policy of containment appeared to be working and communists seemed less of a military threat.

In addition, the American CP had already been virtually destroyed by the early s; hunting the remnant bands of communists hardly seemed worth the effort. It was a scene straight out of the s, but the year was Travis Allen, a Republican from southern California , took to the floor of the state assembly on 8 May to denounce communism. Allen was speaking out against a move to remove language from the California code that that bars members of the Communist party from holding government jobs in the state.

With intrigue about Russia driving the daily news cycle, cold war sentiments are bubbling up again, despite the fact that our erstwhile adversary is decidedly capitalist these days. Bonta is not the first legislator to fail in an attempt to drag state laws into the 21st century. A similar effort was made in California in , when a bill passed only to be vetoed by the then governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Maybe they can talk to their Russian friends about that. Lest there be any misunderstanding: members of the Communist party are currently allowed to hold government jobs in every American state.