Anti-communism
Anti-communism is a reactionary position which is opposed to the creation and spread of communism, revolution, and Marxist movements. Anti-communism is interlinked with support for the capitalist system, and has been a core aspect of anti-Semitic and fascist tendencies. Nominally "left-wing" opponents of communism are known as the non-communist left.
Anti-communism is not relegated to being an ideology. It emerges as a real governmental activity directed at the often violent suppression of communist and other working class organizations. When capitalist countries develop into fascist states and an offensive is waged against democratic forces, these regressions are often initiated with fervent anti-communist. Its extreme manifestation is the striving of aggressive imperialist circles toward war against socialist countries.
Anti-communism is as old as communism itself, and has taken many forms throughout the history of capitalism. Examples of anti-communism include Jewish Bolshevism, the Red Scares, McCarthyism, and in the present, cultural Marxism.
Beliefs and propaganda
"A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?" — Opening of the Communist Manifesto
Communism as a totalitarian movement
Opponents of communism claim that socialist states such as the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin were totalitarian and despotic with little or no democratic rule or freedoms. These accusations are proven false when considering the thriving Soviet democratic system in place which provided popular rule.[1] Additionally, freedoms such as the freedom of speech, assembly, voting rights, and equality for all regardless of nationality and other aspects were constitutionally ensured in the Soviet Union.[2]
Inferior quality of life under socialism
Socialist societies are often depicted as dreary, impoverished, and destitute with poor qualities of life compared to their capitalist counterparts. However, socialist planned economies have often been able to reach parity or exceed capitalist economies and many regards, an aspect made more considerable by the backwards economic conditions which often existed where socialism was developed.[3]
Communism being unnatural
It is argued by many anti-communists that communism contradicts human nature, and is thus unable to be realized or may introduce grave suffering if realized. Other arguments of this sort hold that people will grow unproductive under communism, due to humans naturally being self-interested and thus requiring wage labor to remain productive. This argument, long refuted, was addressed in the Communist Manifesto:
"It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital."
The notion of communism contradicting human nature (and thus capitalism or class society in general being "natural") is premised on a static, metaphysical view of history; only a few centuries ago, capitalism was non-existent and people operated in accord with entirely different conditions (feudalism), where it was believed that absolute monarchy and serfdom were entirely natural. Similarly, millennia ago, classes, commodities, and currency were non-existent and everyone lived under primitive communism.
Excess deaths in socialist states
Anti-communists frequently cite the supposedly massive death toll in socialist states, often asserted to be in the tens of millions, to discredit communist movements. Sources for these claims generally derive, directly or indirectly, from the Black Book of Communism, a notorious propaganda-piece which employs intellectually fraudulent methods to reach a total estimate of over 100 million deaths under communist states.[a][4] Anti-communists who make assertions about the death toll under communism care little about the extremely high death toll under capitalism.[5]
Notable figures
Academia
Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest was a notable anti-communist author who wrote multiple pseudo-historical and propaganda works such as The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow which chiefly attacked the Soviet Union under Stalin.[6] Conquest was known to collaborate with bourgeois governments during his writing of anti-communist propaganda, namely with the Information Research Department,[b] a British state agency which was created purposefully to hinder revolutionary movements and propagate falsehoods against communism. Many of his most well-known works were written under the supervision of state agents. Conquest's work was shown to employ fraudulent methods to reach its conclusions by historians such as Grover Furr, who described his and other anti-communist authors' books as "propaganda with footnotes."[7]
Literary
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a anti-Semitic and anti-communist author and Nazi collaborator from the Soviet Union who is most notable for releasing the fallacious work The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. Solzhenitsyn's was largely detached from historical fact and relied almost entirely on rumor and his personal interpretation of other's opinions. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn's works have been accepted in Western anti-communist academia as a source for the supposed crimes of the Soviet Union under Stalin.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ Samantha Lomb (2018). Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315194004
- ↑ Constitution (Fundamental law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1936). Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
- ↑ "The Nutrient Content of the Soviet Food Supply". Available on the Red Spectre Web Archive.
- ↑ Stephane Courtois, Karel Bartošek et al. (1997). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Available on the Internet Archive.
- ↑ Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore; et al. (May 4, 2021). "Anti-Communism and the Hundreds of Millions of Victims of Capitalism". Capitalism Nature Socialism.
- ↑ Ella Rule (January 14, 2017). "Lies concerning the History of the Soviet Union". The Stalin Society.
- ↑ Grover Furr (August 11, 2015). "Robert Conquest dies – but his lies live on!". The Communists. Archived from the original.
- ↑ Nikos Mottas (January 1, 2018). "'Gulag Archipelago': Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn". In Defense of Communism. Retrieved February 15, 2025.
Notes
- ↑ They include revisionist and non-communist states in the estimate, including the People's Republic of China under the leadership of both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
- ↑ Originally known as the "Communist Information Bureau".