In view of the fact that the "enemy" in such a war is the Soviet Union, i.e. the fatherland of the international proletariat. . . .

The proletariat in the imperialist countries must not only fight for the defeat of their own governments in this war, but must actively strive to secure victory for the Soviet Union.

.. The Red Army is not an "enemy" army, but the army of the international proletariat. In the event of a war against the Soviet Union, the workers in capitalist countries must not allow themselves to be scared from supporting the Red Army. . . .133

Remembering the peculiar quality of the term "revolutionary" as the designation of everything that is progressive, courageous, principled, and praiseworthy, one can appreciate the appeal of the following passage:

A revolutionary is one who is ready to protect, to defend the U.S.S.R. without reservation, without qualification, openly and honestly . . . for the U.S.S.R. is the first proletarian, revolutionary state in the world. . . .134

The Soviet Union, however, is described by the ideology as more than the "fatherland of the world proletariat." It is the leader not only of proletarians, i.e. industrial workers, but of "all toilers," and, beyond that, of "all oppressed people." It is, in the ideology, considered to be in a kind of historically necessary alliance with even bourgeois elements, as, for instance, the bourgeois nationalistic movements of colonial countries. For all of them, the Soviet Union is held to be the inevitable rallying point.

The world political situation has now placed on the order of the day the dictatorship of the proletariat, and all events in world politics are inevitably concentrating around one central point, viz., the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic, which is inevitably grouping around itself the Soviet movement of the advanced workers of all countries, as well as all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities which have become convinced by their bitter experience that there is no salvation for them except the victory of the Soviet power over world imperialism.135

The Soviet Union as such is proclaimed the hope not only of workers but all kind of people in the world:

. . . The victory of socialism in the Soviet Union . . . strengthens the cause of peace among peoples. . . . It sets in motion throughout the

183 The Struggle Against Imperialist War and the Tasks of the Communists, Resolution of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, July-August 1928 (2d ed.; New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1934), p. 31.

134

Stalin, "Speech Delivered at Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U. (B.)" (Aug. 1, 1927), Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), vol. 10, p. 53.

135

Lenin, "Preliminary Draft of Theses on the National and Colonial Questions." For the Second Congress of the Communist International (June 1920), Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. X, p. 233.

whole world not only the workers, who are turning more and more to Communism, but also millions of peasants and farmers, of the hard-working petty townsfolk, a considerable proportion of the intellectuals, the enslaved peoples of the colonies. It inspires them to struggle, increases their attachment for the great fatherland of all the toilers, strengthens their determination to support and defend the proletarian state against all its enemies, 136

The Soviet Union and its Communist Party is assigned the role of undoubted authority in this camp:

The further consolidation of the Land of the Soviets, the rallying of the world proletariat around it, and the mighty growth of the international authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . are all accelerating and will continue to accelerate the development of the world socialist revolution.137

The Soviet Union and the "interests of mankind”

The Soviet Union thus is considered "advanced" in the same sense in which the Communist Party is "advanced." It is furthest along on the road which history is thought to prescribe inexorably to all mankind. All human development supposedly is moving forward in the direction marked by the "progress" of the Soviet Union, and all human hope is also alleged to lie in that same direction. On this basis, Communists look upon the interests of the Soviet Union as those of a nation that represents the best hope of all people and cannot have interests opposed to those of all men. This concept can, of course, not be proclaimed by Soviet leaders who are directly responsible for policymaking in Russia, but it has been voiced frequently by others who are in a position to say this without violating the exigencies of tact.

The U.S.S.R. has no interests which are at variance with the interests of the world revolution, and the international proletariat has no interests which are at variance with those of the Soviet Union.138

This is a concrete manifestation of the unity between the interests of the Soviet Union and those of the majority of mankind.

139

Georgi Dimitroff, "Speech Delivered at the Close of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International on August 20, 1935," Resolutions, Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Including the Closing Speech of G. Dimitroff (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935), pp. 5, 6.

187 "Resolution on the Report of Georgi Dimitroff, Adopted Aug. 20, 1935," Resolutions, Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Including the Closing Speech of G. Dimitroff (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935), p. 38. 138 V. Knorin, Fascism, Social-Democracy and the Communists: Speech to the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, December 1933 (Moscow: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934), p. 46. 180 Mao Tse-tung, "The Unity Between the Interests of the Soviet Union and the Interests of Mankind” (Sept. 28, 1939), Selected Works (New York: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1955), vol. III, p. 50.

Among the various Communist parties in the world, the Soviet Union and its party has consistently been conceded the place of authority, by virtue of having been the "first" socialist country. This was reconfirmed as recently as 1957:

The cause of peace is upheld by powerful forces of our times: the invincible camp of socialist states, headed by the Soviet Union. . . .

The working class, the democratic forces and the working people of all countries are interested in tirelessly strengthening fraternal contacts in the interests of the common cause, in defending, against all encroachments by the enemies of socialism, the historic political and social gains effected in the Soviet Union, the first and mightiest socialist power....140

On the grounds of this ultimate identity of the national interests of Soviet Russia with the hopes of mankind, support of the power of Russia is thus declared something that has universal moral significance and ought to be the bounden duty of every "right-minded" person in

the world:

... Assistance to the U.S.S.R., its defense, and cooperation in bringing about its victory over all its enemies must therefore determine the actions of every revolutionary organization of the proletariat of every genuine revolutionary, of every Socialist, Communist, non-party worker, toiling peasant, of every honest intellectual and democrat, of each and every one who desires the overthrow of exploitation, fascism, and imperialist oppression, deliverance from imperialist war, who desires that there should exist brotherhood and peace among nations, that socialism should triumph throughout the world.141

Communist ideology, in other words, so defines the role of the Soviet Union that it demands the detachment of people's loyalties from their own countries and governments and the betrayal of their civil and patriotic duties.

140 "Declaration of the conference of 12 Communist Parties," Moscow: Nov. 14-16, 1957, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. IX, No. 47 (Jan. 1, 1958), p. 4.

14 "Resolution on the Report of D. Z. Manuilsky, Adopted Aug. 20, 1935," Resolutions, Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Including the Closing Speech of G. Dimitroff (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935), p. 56.

Chapter V. Communist Philosophy

There is a widespread misconception that Marxism, elaborate though it is, has grown from the simple root of a sense of injustice and compassion for the sufferings of the poor. In reality, it was the strong impulse of a philosophical idea that drove Marx to develop his doctrine. Marx was powerfully influenced by two philosophers: G. F. W. Hegel, and L. Feuerbach. From them he derived concepts which made him feel that he had found the intellectual key to the future and, indeed, to all that happens in the world of history. Marx was not the first socialist. Other socialists before him (Babeuf, Fourier, Proudhon) had begun with the vision of an ideal world, a world without poverty and injustice. Even a superficial glance at Marx's writings shows that this kind of vision, which flows from a sense of indignation at present injustice, is not what prompted Marx's thoughts. Those who dream of perfection and then set out to correct the world earned but his scorn for their "utopianism." Marx was first and foremost concerned with what and who causes the development of society and the "laws of history." If he espoused the cause of working people, he did so because in working people he saw the force that would bring about the future, rather than a suffering part of humanity. Though he was not insensitive to human misery, he did not allow this sentiment to govern his ideas, which sprang above all from philosophical speculation about what moves history forward and what changes society. His program for social action came only as a second thought. He related that:

Frederick Engels, with whom . . . I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence, had by another road . . . arrived at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he also settled in Brussels, we resolved to work out in common the opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience.1

The Communist Manifesto was not written until after this work was done, and Capital was merely an attempt to prove through detailed studies the truth of the already stated philosophical principles.

Philosophy is thus the beginning, and, down to this day, the real basis of Communist ideology. In its present form it has, however, gone far beyond the scope of Marx's ideas and has expanded into a comprehen

'Karl Marx, Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (January 1859), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 364.

sive system which pretends to have answers for all questions and guiding principles for all fields of human action. Within the limits of this brief survey, one cannot do more than barely mention the main component parts of this system, and one cannot even begin to subject it to adequate criticism.

1. The Philosophical Basis of Communism

The first philosophical impulse of Marxism derived from Hegel. Hegel was influential above all as a philosopher of history. He lived at a time (1770-1831) when many thinkers tried to find a "scientific analysis" of history as a substitute for a religious approach to life. They were looking in the sequence of historical events for "laws" which, if discovered, could then be used as guides to human action. Hegel succeeded more than others in developing systematically a method of analyzing history, a philosophy of the meaning of history, and a comprehensive philosophical system tying his historical methods and findings to all other problems. History, according to Hegel, is the unfolding of Reason itself. In the sequence of events, he saw the movement of an "Absolute Mind" from less to more and ever more rational forms of existence.

Hegel

One of the results of this concept was the conclusion that philosophy as a mere intellectual activity had come to an end, and that, thanks to Hegel's discovery, the philosopher, instead of contemplating the world, should now become an active participant in history and discover truth in the process of the actual self-manifestation of Reason in events. In Marxist philosophy, this is called the principle of the "unity of theory and practice."

. . . As soon as we have once realized—and in the long run no one has helped us to realize it more than Hegel himself-that the task of philosophy thus stated means nothing but the task that a single philosopher should accomplish that which can only be accomplished by the entire human race in its progressive development—as soon as we realize that, there is an end to all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense of the word. . . . At any rate, with Hegel philosophy comes to an end: on the one hand, because in his system he summed up its whole development in the most splendid fashion; and on the other hand, because, even though unconsciously, he showed us the way out of the labyrinth of systems to real positive knowledge of the world.2

What Engels meant is that philosophy as abstract speculation about the absolute meaning of things has come to an end with Hegel. This

'Frederick Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (1886), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 364.