Communism

About 3 pages (960 words)

Communism Summary

Communism

Originally outlined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848), Communism is a social and political system in which all property is owned communally and all wealth distributed among citizens according to need. Although it was a product of large-scale industrialization in the nineteenth century, Communism has had a profound influence on the global politics and economics of the twentieth century. In the United States, Communism became popular among American industrial workers during the Depression, and played a more public role in politics during the 1930s. In the 1940s and during the Cold War, the treatment of Communist groups and individuals within the United States sometimes raised questions about the fairness not only of the American justice system, but of the Constitution itself.

Communism is most often associated with the revolution which took place in Russia in November 1917, and the establishment of the federalist Soviet Union (USSR) in 1922. Its first leader was Vladimir Ilich Lenin, whose version of Marxism, known as Marxism-Leninism, became the dominant political and economic theory for communist groups the world over. Under Joseph Stalin after World War II, the USSR succeeded in gaining military and political control over much of Eastern Europe, placing it in direct opposition to the capitalist economies of the United States and Western Europe. When Stalin died in 1953, many of his more brutal policies were renounced by the new regime; but Communism had become a byword for threats to personal freedom and for imperialist aggression. A climate of distrust between the USSR and Western governments, backed by the threat of global nuclear war, prevailed until the late 1980s.

The history of Communism in the United States begins long before the Cold War, however. Left-wing activists and socialist parties had been at work from before the beginning of the century, but communist parties first appeared in the United States in 1919, partly in response to the political developments in Russia. Communism hasunsettled American governments from the beginning, and after a series of raids sanctioned by the Attorney General in 1919, left-wing organizations were forced to become more secretive. It was another ten years before the parties merged to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The CPUSA's goal of regaining support from union members was certainly helped by the onset of the Depression, and Communism was popular among those who suffered most, such as African American workers and Eastern European immigrants.

Despite dire warnings from the political right, and although large crowds turned out for rallies against unemployment, communists remained a small faction within the trade union movement, and thus were isolated in politics. Only in the 1930s, bravely fielding a black vice-presidential candidate in 1932, opposing fascism in Europe, and openly supporting Roosevelt in some of his New Deal policies, did the CPUSA gain credibility with significant numbers of American voters. Besides industrial workers and the unemployed, communist or socialist principles also proved attractive to America's intelligentsia. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and John Dos Passos all declared themselves as Communist Party voters in 1932, while the radical playwrights Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman were among many left-wing intellectuals to emerge from 1920s literary New York to work in Hollywood.

In 1940, the Smith Act made membership in revolutionary parties and organizations whose aim was to overthrow the U.S. government illegal, and in 1950, under the McCarran Act, communists had to register with the U.S. Department of Justice. In the same period, Senator Joseph McCarthy began Senate investigations into communists in government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) challenged the political views of individuals in other areas. Many prominent people in government, the arts, and science were denounced to HUAC as dangerous revolutionaries. Because of the moral tone of the investigations and the presentation of Communism as "Un-American," many promising careers ended through mere association with individuals called to explain themselves to the committee. One widely held myth was that the CPUSA was spying for the Soviet government, a fear that, among other things, resulted in the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953. In most cases there was no evidence for McCarthy's accusations of "un-American activity," and his own career was to end abruptly when he was censured by the Senate in 1954.

Perhaps because of the USSR's imperialist ambitions after World War II, Communism has frequently been presented to the American people since then as a moral threat to "American" values such as individualism and enterprise. U.S. involvement in wars in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1964-72), and military and political actions elsewhere, such as South America and Cuba, have been justified as attempts to prevent the spread of Communism, with anti-war protesters often being branded as "Reds." The Cold War continued until the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan, who had previously referred to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire," began talks with Mikhail Gorbachev over arms reduction and greater political cooperation. In the late 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, few communist regimes remained in place, and although Communism remains popular in Eastern Europe, communists in the West form a tiny minority of voters. Their continuing optimism is fuelled by Lenin's claim that true Communism will only become possible after the collapse of a global form of Capitalism.