He cried that Americans were beginning to endorse the ideology of communism, and that it had started to creep into the education, government, and entertainment sectors. He believed that communist sympathizers might end up becoming Soviet spies, and it would endanger the lives of Americans.
During that time, Red Scare sympathizers in America underwent investigations, fired from their jobs, and had restrictions on their rights to freedom of speech. They are as follows:. In a communist system of government, individuals cannot voice out their ideas or opinions concerning government laws and policies, especially when it conflicts with the ideologies of the government. Most times, the only way to voice out your views in a communist setting is through violence.
Workers receive an equal amount of wages regardless of the input they put into their work. The practice, in turn, fosters laziness because an individual might decide to relax because he knows in the end; he would still receive the same wages as the one putting in all the work.
In a communist setting, an individual has no right to speak against or oppose the authorities. Communism is majorly a one-party system and only permits opposition if the central government allows it.
There are often severe consequences for anyone that breaks this law. Citizens have little or no rights over their lives. The government dictates how individuals should lead their lives, go about their businesses, and handle their resources. It, in turn, corrupts the attitudes of individuals to work, and many have to participate in labors they do not like.
In a communist system of government, the government determines the operations and production of goods and services. There is no issue of demand and supply to regulate the production of goods. As a result, it often leads to overproduction and scarcity of goods in the market. The government determines the level of income the citizens get, regardless of how much input they put into their businesses. The interest of the government is in seeing that you meet your basic needs.
Thus, it limits any form of extra income. Communism limits the growth of entrepreneurs and constrains them to a particular level as the government deems fit. In a communist setting, the government finds it hard to accommodate foreigners because they come in with their ideologies and beliefs. As a result, it leads to poor relations between nations, which, in turn, scare investors from investing their wealth in a communist system of government. America relies on values that seek to protect individual rights and liberty, while communism seems to be against this ideology.
This overwhelming fear of communism returned at the end of World War II. This was an undeclared war between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is called the Cold War because neither the Soviet Union nor the United States officially declared war on each other, although both sides clearly struggled to prevent the other side from spreading its economic and political systems around the globe.
In reality, the Cold War resulted from a failure to communicate between the two sides and preconceived notions that each side had of the other one. Americans feared that the Soviet Union hoped to spread communism all over the world, overthrowing both democratic and capitalist institutions as it went. Toggle navigation. 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. But this is to forget that even in England, the mother of parliaments, there were once in times long gone by some pretty raw doings behind palace walls and some unseemly and even bloody struggles for the throne.
But where other nations have worked gradually toward stable political institutions guaranteeing the integrity of their governments, Russia has remained in a state of arrested development. That state will continue until the Russian leaders have the courage to declare openly that the legal and political philosophy of Marx, Engles, and Lenin is fundamentally mistaken and must be abandoned.
How heavy the burden of the inherited Communist philosophy is becomes clear when the concept of law itself is under discussion. Throughout the ages, among men of all nations and creeds, law has generally been thought of as a curb on arbitrary power. It has been conceived as a way of substituting reason for force in the decision of disputes, thus liberating human energies for the pursuit of aims more worthy of man's destiny than brute survival or the domination of one's fellows.
No one has supposed that these ideals have ever been fully realized in any society. Like every human institution, law is capable of being exploited for selfish purposes and of losing its course through a confusion of purposes. But during most of the world's history, men have thought that the questions worthy of discussion were how the institutions of law could be shaped so that they might not be perverted into instruments of power or lose the sense of their high mission through sloth or ignorance.
What is the Communist attitude toward this intellectual enterprise in which so many great thinkers of so many past ages have joined? Communism consigns all of it to the ashcan of history as a fraud and delusion, beneath the contempt of Communist science. How, then, is law defined today in Russia? We have an authoritative answer. It is declared to be "the totality of the rules of conduct expressing the will of the dominant class, designed to promote those relationships that are advantageous and agreeable to the dominant class.
Law in the Soviet Union is not conceived as a check on power, it is openly and proudly an expression of power. In this conception surely, if anywhere, the bankruptcy of communism as a moral philosophy openly declares itself. It is vitally important to emphasize again that all of the truly imposing absurdities achieved by Communist thought - in whatever field: in economics, in politics, in law, in morality - that all of these trace back to a single common source.
That origin lies in a belief that nothing of universal validity can be said of human nature, that there are no principles, values, or moral truths that stand above a particular age or a particular phase in the evolution of society. This profound negation lies at the very heart of the Communist philosophy and gives to it both its motive force and its awesome capacity for destruction. It is this central negation that makes communism radically inconsistent with the ideal of human freedom.
As with other bourgeois virtues, once dismissed contemptuously, Soviet writers have now taken up the line that only under communism can men realize "true freedom. A Russian transplanted suddenly to American soil might well feel for a time "unfree" in the sense that he would be confronted with the burden of making choices that he was unaccustomed to making and that he would regard as onerous. But the problem of freedom goes deeper than the psychological conditioning of any particular individual.
It touches the very roots of man's fundamental conception of himself. The Communist philosophy is basically inconsistent with the ideal of freedom because it denies that there can be any standard of moral truth by which the actions of any given social order may be judged. If the individual says to government, "Thus far may you go, but no farther," he necessarily appeals to some principle of rightness that stands above his particular form of government.
It is precisely the possibility of any such standard that communism radically and uncomprisingly denies. Marx and Engels had nothing but sneers for the idea that there are "eternal truths, such as freedom, justice, etc. They contend that there are no eternal truths. All ideas of right and wrong come from the social system under which one lives. If that system requires tyranny and oppression, then tyranny and oppression must within that system be accepted; there can be no higher court of appeal.
Not only do the premises of Communist philosophy make any coherent theory of freedom impossible, but the actual structure of the Soviet regime is such that no true sense of freedom can ever develop under it. To see why this is so, it is useful to accept the Communist ideology provisionally and reason the matter out purely in terms of what may be called human engineering.
Postwar anti-Communism was rooted even more directly in the political culture of the s. During the Depression, many Americans became disillusioned with capitalism and some found communist ideology appealing. Others were attracted by the visible activism of American Communists on behalf of a wide range of social and economic causes, including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed.
This opposition ended abruptly, if temporarily, with the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in late August In , Joseph Stalin announced that he would allow Communists around the globe to ally with liberals and non-communist leftists in a broad anti-fascist coalition. All of these developments swelled the membership of the US Communist Party from some 7, at the start of the decade to an estimated 55, by its end.
More importantly, many Americans who did not join the party sympathized with what they saw as its goals. Many victims of the postwar Red Scare were hounded for activities they had engaged in a decade or more before. If the Depression decade boosted the profile of international communism in the United States, it also sparked an anti-Communist backlash. Ironically, anti-Communists were sometimes aided by liberals and leftists whose primary fear was fascist subversion.
In any case, nearly all of the tactics deployed by anti-Communists in the decade after World War II had a trial run in the late s. This period saw the renewal of FBI spying, the adoption of loyalty oaths for teachers and a political litmus test for federal employees, and passage of the first peacetime sedition law since But as the war ended and the alliance frayed, a series of events fanned the banked embers of anti-Communism into flames.
In the spring of , acting on orders from Moscow, US Communists reversed their policy of reconciliation with the West and adopted a militantly anti-capitalist stance. Meanwhile, authorities in the United States and Canada uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage, evidence that suggested Americans had been involved in passing classified secrets.
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