A rough and dirty translation from an article "Gespensterjagd -- Zur Ideengeschichte des Antikommunismus" from Gruppen Gegen Kapital Und Nation (Groups Against Capital and Nation).
Original can be found here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/gespensterjagd-zur-ideengeschichte-des-antikommunismus/
“A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."“ All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy hunt against this specter,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto — and that, contrary to other claims in that work, is a pretty true statement. Hatred and fear of radical change in civil society is as old as its revolutionary implementation itself.
At the latest with the French Revolution, which did not operate in a religious disguise like the Dutch and English revolutions, and which was much more radical in its theoretical justification than the American one, the fear of the “Red Terror” arose (before “La Grande, by the way. “Terreur” really started in 1793).
The following text is about a reconstruction of images and ideas and a representation of the changes in anti-communism.
Anti-communism here means first of all the rejection and hostility towards the fundamental changes in the modern world - be it through the abolition of rule or through changing the purposes of rule.
In the following, we want to show that this rejection is not a scientific criticism but rather resentment that constantly creates contradictions and double standards.
The fact that anti-communists were hostile to left-wing movements or theories doesn't necessarily mean that these movements actually aimed at or amounted to communism. There were only a few movements with such fundamental demands - because those movements that were assumed to have such an intention shared many of the resentments of their opponents: the criticism of, say, the USSR or the German Social Democrats, that they were anti-national, cosmopolitan, and wanted to destroy the family and morality in favor of free love and to introduce a society with as little work as possible were rejected with indignation by the protagonists of the workers' movement.
So anti-communism tells us a lot about the anti-communists, but little about the real socialist, social democratic, left-wing socialist, communist, anarchist, etc. movements, parties and organizations against which anti-communism was directed.
Anti-communism is an integral part of the national consciousness and immunization strategy against criticism of the existing society. Every now and then it becomes the dominant topic in the national public (1) and is always assumed as a defense against radical criticism. “Humans are not like that” may always be the same motto used to reject any criticism. The following is intended to be a sketch of the historical development of this idea.
Changing images of communism
The qualitative jumps in this picture mostly result from changes in the political situation. Nevertheless, these leaps are part of a development, and the various stages described here build on one another and overlap one another. Anti-communism is not concerned with coherence; A way of thinking that has become rigid in defending what exists is indiscriminate in its arguments because it sees itself as being justified in any case by the existence of the society it defends. The anti-communisms of earlier stages exist happily alongside the more recent ones, and modes of argument are adopted and newly adapted to the now valid forms of defense of the existing situation.
In the first phase of anti-communism, in the course of the bourgeois revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, “communism” became a relatively vague synonym for overthrow, rebellion and destruction of the God-ordained order. The Jacobin cap and the burning church become symbols for the revaluation of all values, the destruction of the tradition that alone gives people support. "Communism", as far as the word is already in use, is treated as a crazy delusion of distributing all goods and murdering the rich; In communism it is man who rises up against God who is at work. At the same time, 'socialism' as a remedy for the social ills of the mixture of capitalist development and pre-bourgeois rule that prevailed in Europe at the time is being discussed in bourgeois and other circles.
With the Paris Commune and the rise of the socialist workers' movement, communism is portrayed as a movement of the primitive, unenlightened masses incited by malicious agitators (see first point). Since culture and civilization would be based on private property, the “dangerous classes” would destroy them if they got their way with their crazy ideas. The lower classes are the losers of that 'life struggle' which alone would force the efforts on which all great cultural achievements and all civilization would be based. The 'faceless mass' is never in a position to lead society; if necessary, it must be held down by force; their inferiority is shown by their social position. The ideologists proceeded tautologically: People are “inferior” because they are “below” – and they are “below” because they are “inferior”. This racist derivation of the essence of a person or a group of people functions as a defensive ideology of the bourgeoisie.
With the transition to the colonial-imperialist era, the idea of communism as an international movement that weakens and destroys one's own nation is emphasized. At the same time, socialism is seen as part of the degeneration of the Western world, as a pathological symptom of modern urban development.
On the one hand, socialism as a pacifist movement, which takes the weapon out of the hands of its own people in a world of enemies, precisely because it does not recognize the truth of the eternal struggle for living space and power. On the other hand, there is the fear that socialism as the abolition of competition will bring about the collapse of civilization and the promotion of the 'inferior' over the 'healthy'. Thirdly, the idea: The socialist workers' movement preaches class hatred and thus divides the people and makes them unable to act. It is not only in Germany that this anti-communism is combined with anti-Semitism: "hostile powers that work in secret want to attack the fatherland"-- here anti-communism acts as a national integration ideology.
With the October Revolution and the establishment of the USSR, communism becomes the image of brutal terror, the Asian threat (whether it is the Huns, Mongols or the Yellow Peril) to Europe through bestiality and the revaluation of all values. Communism becomes a murderous, threatening force that is in the service of evil, of world Jewry, or is simply the worst thing itself. Directed by Moscow, world communism is digging and rummaging everywhere and is trying to bring about a world of terror through the world revolution. Fascist anti-communism is not just an instrument of “the rulers” to prevent a socialist revolution, although that may have been the reason for financial support for some capitalists or large landowners, it is part of an ideology of a world crusade, which legitimizes a world war for one's own power, that is, here it functions as a justification for imperialism. (For the German Nazis, however, the fight against 'Bolshevism' was only part of their fight against 'world Jewry'.)
After the Second World War, communism became a synonym for Soviet striving for world power - usually without a Jewish world conspiracy. As part of the “totalitarian threat” to Western democracy, communism is equated with fascism, although of course it is also the more dangerous because it still exists and operates worldwide. Former fascists and the C parties still emphasized the threat to the West in the 1950s. Here anti-communism functions as an ideology of integration for fascists and as a justification for the Cold War.
With the détente policy and the '68 movement, communism becomes a "failed project" that only "totalitarian dreamers" can fall in love with. The renaissance of Marxism (Leninism) is permitted as an expression of youthful idealism, but at the same time it is equated as an irrational protest attitude with youth cults and drugs, where even well-meaning naive people are used for sinister purposes. At the same time, however, the social liberals who preach this new, somewhat more relaxed anti-communism are accused of a gradual transition to socialism; Democratization, emancipation and sexual revolution are denounced as tactics of the communists in the destruction of the Western world. At the beginning of the 1970s, the bourgeois state (in Germany) took an ambivalent course: on the one hand, projects, who certainly had a socially critical self-image, were promoted - on the other hand, there were professional bans for left-wing radical civil servants, and not just for teachers. Tolerance has been over since the mid-1970s at the latest, when the most left-wing reform idealism was no longer in demand, and when the RAF's last “offensive” (2) failed in 1977.
In 1986-89, anti-communism disguised itself as a concern about whether Gorbachev's reforms would succeed, be effective, etc. The response to the self-criticism (perestroika) of the Warsaw Pact leader was entirely positive, and should not be confused with the stupid reform idealism of the left hoped that with a transformed Soviet Union they would now be able to move forward towards socialism in the West.
After 1989 there are hardly any communists left, because many of those who previously called themselves that took the practical self-abandonment of Soviet-style real socialism as an opportunity to bury their theoretical criticism of capitalism at the same time.
The fact that anti-communism is still popular today despite this triumph of the market economy is reflected on the one hand in the political campaigns of the right and the political self-hygiene of the left, which always strives to nip any communist tones in their own ranks as early as possible. On the other hand, the topicality of anti-communism is reflected in the commitment of the leaders of the political media public, who regularly see themselves called upon to lead the ideological fight against communism - against a communism that showed an
Ambivalence of the worker
From today's perspective, reading earlier anti-communist works may be astonishing: in earlier times, the equation of workers and communism was by no means just an elaborate theory of leftists who wanted to ignore reality, but also a reality accepted by opponents. Even if it never worked out that way - no consciousness arises from a situation, but only from the interpretation of a situation - it can still be observed that the defenders of bourgeois society saw enemies in the lower classes. Schooled by this experience, communists and socialists saw the Nazis' praise of the German worker as just a case of social demagogy, that is, a new, particularly insidious tactic of their old enemy, capital.
The left equated “people” with “left” because they were committed to the rights of the people. Their idea was: We are for the people, so the people must be for the left. This equation became fragile with the emergence of counter-revolutionary mass movements in which people took to the streets against their own emancipation. Without historical optimism ala “Socialism will win,” the strange blindness of the left, which doesn't recognize nationalists, racists and anti-Semites as such, cannot be understood. Anyone who, like many people in their 20s and 30s, sees fascism as only a temporary uprising of those left behind against the future does not take fascism into account and therefore cannot fight it properly.
The political right's reassessment of the people should have set alarm bells ringing on the left. With the image of the socialist agitator and even more so of the Jewish backer who incites the actually good workers, the image of the worker begins to split into that of the "good productive worker" and that of the "evil striking proletarian".
This ambivalent view of the working class certainly has a deeper meaning: workers are both a necessity and a problem in the production process. They are the class that creates the wealth that also produces their poverty, and that's what the fascists love about them: the selfless sacrifice, the service to the people in the battle of production, the frugal pride in the products of their own efforts, without themselves getting something from these efforts. That “secret” quality of labor as a commodity is to create more value; the necessary willingness of the owners of labor to make themselves the means without having too much of it; and finally those psychological achievements that give one's own unpleasant life its higher-meaning: the pride of being poor but honest, the hatred of luxury, the quasi-military discipline of factory work at the time.
But the other side of the worker is the power that arises from his role - “Man of work-- awaken and recognize your power!" “All wheels stand still when your strong arm wants it,” wrote the workers’ movement at the time. Added to this was the widespread contempt for the hostile bourgeois world, its morals and its culture; the hatred of those conditions that withhold everything that is really interesting from the working class. Under capitalism, the workers are tied to an opposing interest, and the splitting of the worker image reflects exactly this: the dependence on the conditions as the affirmative image of the blonde, muscular worker of the fist.
Anti-communism is the salvation of the German workers' honor and allows this class to be forgiven for its socialist form of movement.
Hitler put it almost exactly the same way when he saw the reason for the success of the socialist workers' movement in the exploitation of the misery of the workers by Jewish agitators. This is what makes National Socialism and Fascism so powerful in contrast to the conservatives, young conservatives and popular conservatives of the time: The fascists do not consider the people to be inferior per se; their concept of a master race of subjects is based on a very serious praise of "the people". The hostility towards the people has given way to distrust in their ability to see through the red seducers. In the long term, civil society cannot be based on one class oppressing the other. It needs the national integration of everyone, because civil conditions are based on the rule of the people over the people, on the subjection of people to the conditions they have created themselves.
A democratic society and its successful combination of capital and labor is politically more stable and economically effective than the open class rule of the 19th century. It gives everyone equal freedom to participate in the competition and thus subjects them to its results. on the subjection of people to the conditions they have created themselves. This historical step, the modernization of anti-communism, is the actual qualitative leap: the discovery of "the people" by the political right and its integration into the national project.
Destruction of the world
The social-Darwinist idea of competition between individuals, peoples, and races as a natural selection, as a prerequisite for the development of important virtues, as a prevention of degeneration, was a pseudo-scientific counter-position to the evolutionary socialism concept of the workers' movement. Such ideas are popular, for example, through ideas such as: “Then no one will work anymore if everyone owns everything”; “then no one will make any effort anymore”; “if everyone just strives for enjoyment, everything will be spoiled”. These ideas project the social reality of capitalism onto the “essence of man.” however, the power of such ideas should not be underestimated, simply because they are based on real experiences that seem to confirm them.
In fact, students try to work as little as possible, public property is handled ruthlessly, and people behave unreasonably. Often it may even seem as if the rationality of the market and the severe threat of poverty and ruin alone force the actually quite unreasonable person to reason. Of course, it is a strange processing of social reality that is happening, because neither the demolished telephone booth, the sick at work, or the crazy lover can be seen as human beings, but only the way bourgeois competitive subjects deal with the very world in which they live.
In addition, against the simple question of why people should not be able to organize their society sensibly, there is the argument that it is the eternal scarcity of goods that forces people to be against each other - or more advanced: because the finite amount of goods is opposed to the supposedly infinite needs of people. There is also the warning that everything sinks into excess. You don't have to think about this belief for long before you believe it. So: people aren't like that, the world isn't like that anyway, and that's a good thing because otherwise the world would end. Even if the following small selection of quotes seems a bit old-fashioned - it is not:
monarchist-conservative
“Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one, and war is an integral part of God's divine order of things. In war the noblest human virtues unfold: courage and renunciation, loyalty to duty and willingness to sacrifice with the sacrifice of life. Without war the world would be mired in materialism.”
(Helmuth Graf von Moltke: Letter to Bluntschli. In: Pross, Harry (ed.): The destruction of German politics. Documents 1871-1933. FaM: Fischer 1959, p.29)
liberal
“There is no peace even in the economic struggle for existence: only those who take this appearance of peace as the truth can believe that peace and enjoyment of life will arise for our descendants from the womb of the future. We know it: to the vulgar view, economic policy is a reflection on recipes for the happiness of the world - for them, improving the "pleasure balance" of human existence is the only understandable goal of our work. However, the dark seriousness of the population problem alone prevents us from being eudaemonists, from believing that peace and human happiness are hidden in the womb of the future, and from believing that, unlike in the hard fight between man and man, the elbow room in earthly existence will be won. ... for the dream of peace and human happiness stands over the gate of the unknown future of human history: Lasciate ogni speranza. ... It is not the well-being of people that we want to breed in them [the descendants], with which we associate the feeling that they constitute human greatness and the nobility of our nature.... It is not peace and human happiness that we have not only to give descendants along the way, but also the eternal struggle to preserve and enhance our national species.”
(Weber, Max: Nation state and economic policy. Academic inaugural speech (1895.) In: Collected political writings. Tübingen: JCB Mohr 1958)
fascist
“But no one can doubt that this world will one day be exposed to the most difficult struggles for the existence of humanity. In the end, only the addiction to self-preservation always wins. Under her, so-called humanity melts as an expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice and conceited knowing-it-all, like snow in the March sun. Humanity has grown up in eternal struggle - in eternal peace it perishes."
(Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf. Vol. I. Munich: Franz Eher Nachf. 1933, p.148/149)
socialist
“...qualities such as loyalty, generosity, etc., would not only be meaningless but probably unimaginable in a world where nothing went wrong. In truth, many of the qualities we admire in people can only be real in the face of some kind of misfortune, pain, or difficulty; the tendency of technological progress is to eliminate misfortune, pain and difficulty. ... By binding oneself to the ideal of technical efficiency, one binds oneself to the ideal of effeminacy. But effeminacy is repulsive, and so all progress is seen as a mad struggle towards a goal which, one hopes and prays, will never be achieved."
(George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier. Zurich: Diogenes 1982, p.188-190)
What the positions listed here assume is the biological ideology of a “wolfish” human nature and thus the conclusion that cooperative forms of society are dangerous proposals for the degeneration of the human world. By eliminating competition and struggle, the world will become unnatural, weak and degenerate. Moltke, Weber, Hitler and Orwell could probably have agreed on this lowest common denominator. This is the factual connection between biologism on the one hand and anti-communism on the other. Furthermore, this fear, shared by many contemporaries at the time, is the first step towards the anti-Semitic-paranoid extension of seeing efforts towards a communist society as a particular strategy for Judaism to seize world power.
Anyone who now leans back and smiles wearily at this outdated ideology may remember the following: The “criticism” of living in a “consumer”, “prosperous” or “affordable” society, that “we” all have to make sacrifices and “the good years are over” was not the first thing that Helmut Kohl brought into national politics. The idea that under communism people who are naturally short-sighted and selfish will quickly consume their wealth is constantly present as a fearful warning in capitalism. Things are going too well for 'us', 'we' have lived beyond 'our' means, we can no longer 'afford' this or that - the world is simply not a pony farm. Lack and deprivation are good for people. Not only because man is a wolf to man - and therefore envy of food corresponds to man's nature - only the wolf in the funny yet somehow effective, democratic-parliamentary sheep's clothing keeps him from too practical of consequences. Or: “When things are going too well for the donkey, he ventures onto the ice.” “Abundance breeds excess, indolence, decay, and all great geniuses were hungry.”
In all of these ideas, people lie to themselves that the suffering they experience is unchangeable. They transfigure it by attributing it to human nature in general - instead of explaining it through the capitalist division of the world. If the suffering is understood as "natural", then people have also perfectly justified why it is of no use to advocate for fundamental social change. Anti-communism thus proves to be a useful part of everyday bourgeois consciousness.
Footnotes:
1. In Germany: for example the “Hottentot election” in 1907, the suppression of the January Uprising in 1917, the rise to power of the NSDAP in 1933 - in the USA: for example “Red Scare” in 1917, McCarthy era in 1947.
2. The quite defensive goal was to free the prisoners.
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