Morning Comrades.
A co-worker and I were talking the other the day about Communism, or rather, he asked me if I was a communist and if I was ok with him asking a number of questions out of curiosity. This is isn’t what this dispatch is about but my kick-off statement led to a broader an idea that I’ll touch on shortly.
Said co-worker is from the imperial core, Australia to be precise, and I told them off the bat that whatever they understand about communism is most likely distorted manipulated narrative that we all, all of us that grew up and live in the Global North West were and more importantly still are subjected to, daily. For those that are interested, the conversation went well and is ongoing but that statement led me down am interesting idea.
For a moment, or rather a day, I was tempted to formulate a proposal for a post-doc study but quickly kicked myself as there is no way in hell my psyche is ready for another 3-5 years of research and work. With that, you’re getting this today, an introduction to be sure as the subject is so vast that I truly could write several books about it: The History of Anti-Communism.
To be absolutely clear, there has always been a reaction by those with money against workers unionizing to fight for their interests. Across the world, throughout time. Marx wasn’t fooling around when he wrote:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” - The Communist Manifesto
Way before the idea and definition of communism was born there have always been struggles between these two forces, that is without a doubt and even within the historical context of the Global North West there had been organized labour in opposition to the capital class before said event. For the sake of clarity though, the following:
One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste ("communist author"). 1 In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property.2 Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government. John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840.3
Since the 1840s, communism has usually been distinguished from socialism. The modern definition and usage of the latter would be settled by the 1860s, becoming predominant over alternative terms associationist (Fourierism), co-operative, and mutualist, which had previously been used as synonyms; instead, communism fell out of use during this period.4
An early distinction between communism and socialism was that the latter aimed to only socialize production, whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of common access to final goods). This distinction can be observed in Marx's communism, where the distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his needs", in contrast to a socialist principle of "to each according to his contribution".5 Socialism has been described as a philosophy seeking distributive justice, and communism as a subset of socialism that prefers economic equality as its form of distributive justice.
By 1888, Marxists employed socialism in place of communism which had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for the former. It was not until 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution, that socialism came to refer to a distinct stage between capitalism and communism, introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution. A distinction between communist and socialist as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party renamed itself to the All-Russian Communist Party, where Communist came to specifically refer to socialists who supported the politics and theories of Bolshevism, Leninism, and later in the 1920s those of Marxism–Leninism,6 although Communist parties continued to describe themselves as socialists dedicated to socialism.
This is where we must start. Yes, the world “shook” upon hearing of the revolutions of 1871 in Paris where, briefly, a worker uprising took Communist ideas to heart and turned it into action, and even before, upon the release of the infamous Manifesto, the powers that were certainly took note but it wasn’t until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that “states”, the grand actors of the capitalist class not only took note but moved themselves into a concerted action that would last until today.
When I speak of Anti-Communism that is precisely what I mean. A State, or rather many states, in an organized war against an idea. Take your understanding of the War on Drugs and multiply the efforts by a power of 100, not just economically but in all our existing entirety. And of course, as the idea alone is the most dangerous of realities to the powers that have dominated the globe since the 15th Century, the Elite European Trading Companies that spanned the world in the utmost domination and exploitation of everything and everyone. Those in charge have always understood the danger of this idea, the most basic idea, that the workers of the world should unite and take the means of their production into their own hands and have thus embarked on a War that is so vast, and so costly, that defies imagination.
Since numbers are easier to understand, there are no actual accounts of what the U.S. government has spent in order to fight Communism, again, I am sure, a proper research grant and some high-level information access would be able to do so, but the total accounted expenditure of the Cold War of the U.S. today is calculated to be around 18-19 Trillion USD. That is an extremely conservative account, that does not take into account the time period between 1917-1948, let alone the costs incurred by Britain and the rest of the NATO allies. It is staggering.
As you can tell, attempting to account for the entire history of Anti-Communism would be a project akin to Sisyphus, starting from the U.S. Invasion of Russia in 19187, spanning all cultural, sub-cultural projects since then, examining money and subsequent ideological traces throughout the NATO empire since 1917 to this day and furthermore accounting for the global stage of the Cold War reaching far into current events. It’s juvenile to believe that despite the imperial claim that “we won the Cold War” that anti-communist budgets have stopped existing. They exist today and thus such a study would have to clearly define a time period.
Personally, I am extremely interested in the subversive cultural history pertaining to the U.S. and NATO governments starting after WW2. Plainly, what actions and what actors were involved in propagandising the entire world with an anti-communist rhetoric, who devised it and how was is executed. The subversion of “leftist” intellectual groups via the Congress for Cultural Freedom to today’s built-in ethical bias of all western AI that organizes our daily digital experience. This subject alone would be a vast undertaking but you can expect some attempts here over the next few months going forward.
The point is this: the idea of communism is alive and well and as far as I am concerned more current than it has been for longer than I have been around. The idea has been opposed and systematically fought by forces so incredibly large and wealthy that its battles defy most imaginable scopes. Deconstructing our highly propagandised perception of our reality, history and future requires an understanding of what was done by whom with what scope and why. Without the deconstruction of the Western Capitalist Class’ idea of what our existence should be like we cannot even fathom a future without them.
Here’s to that.
Yours, without compromise,
V.
Grandjonc, Jacques (1983). "Quelques dates à propos des termes communiste et communisme" [Some dates on the terms communist and communism].
Hodges, Donald C. (1 February 2014). Sandino's Communism: Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century. University of Texas Press.
Harper, Douglas (2020). "Communist". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 15 August 2021
The decisive distinction between socialist and communist, as in one sense these terms are now ordinarily used, came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) as the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism.
Under socialism, each individual would be expected to contribute according to capability, and rewards would be distributed in proportion to that contribution. Subsequently, under communism, the basis of reward would be need.
Busky, Donald F. (2000). Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. p. 9. “In a modern sense of the word, communism refers to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.”
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-troops-land-at-archangel