Eastman: Communists playing party politics now in hope of revolt later
10,000 conspirators against U.S. government digging in now for future crisis
By Max Eastman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers
EDITOR’S NOTE: Max Eastman, at present roving editor of Reader’s Digest, is perhaps best known as translator of Leon Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution and author of a study of humor, Enjoyment of Laughter. He taught philosophy at Columbia University before leaving to edit The Masses and later The Liberator. Well known as a poet and philosopher, Mr. Eastman, after spending several years in the Soviet Union, published the first accounts of the internal fight within the Russian Communist Party which ultimately led to the famous Moscow trials and purges.
Cambridge, Massachusetts –
It sounds like horse sense to say: “What do 100,000 Communists amount to in a country of 140 million? As long as they are working for the things we want, why not use them?
People who talk this way think they are hardheaded. They think they are realists. They think they have had too much experience to get excited over a bogey.
The fact is they are provincial. They lack the experience which would enable them to form an intelligent judgment about this subject.
The Communist movement is not a propaganda league, an electoral party, an effort of persuasion, a campaign to win 140 million people to Communism.
The Communist movement is a conspiracy to seize power.
Care only for power
Its purpose is to destroy by force, and with a bloody purge, the democratic form of government and the system of free enterprise on which it rests. The Communists have only an incidental interest in propaganda or persuasion. They don’t care whether the American people are won to Communism or not. They are opposing Communism themselves now because they find this the easiest way to get their members, accomplices and dupes into key positions. They care only about power. They are a mafia, not a political party – least of all an “educational association.”
The thing should be stated this way: 100,000 American citizens have been organized into a compact, disciplined, fanatical league to destroy the American Republic by any means, moral or immoral, that may come to hand. If a person had a hard knowledge of that fact, he would not be so glib about “using” these conspirators where they can be helpful.
John Wilkes Booth was a brilliant actor, but you wouldn’t have advocated using him in Ford’s Theater, if you had known his underlying purpose. There’s as little reason why any man loyal to the American Republic should employ a Communist, or an accomplice of Communists (a fellow traveler) in any governmental position, or any position of power or influence anywhere in the land.
Planning for crisis
Another thing our soft, ignorant and provincial “realists” don’t understand: Communists are not conspiring to seize power now. They know as well as you do the juvenile folly of that. They are planning to seize power in a nationwide crisis.
Everybody knows that crises will come. There are enough unsolved problems – economic, social, racial – even if the Communists were not busily stirring them up. The world is in a turbulent condition, and the United States is not immune to turbulence, Some of us forget this, but the Communists never forget it. They inherited from Karl Marx a long-range view of history. And, according to that view, trouble is about all there is to history. Periods of tranquility are illusions – at best they are transitions from one violent crisis of social struggle to another.
Communism is a conspiracy to seize power when we are in trouble.
Confront that fact, and you will no longer be casual about “using the Communists” where they can be used. We have passed through crises and we can pass through others with our free institutions intact, if their personnel is loyal.
Enemies of democracy
But if those institutions are rotten-spotted with people who have crawled in there with the express purpose of helping them to crumble when a crisis comes, then we will not survive. That is the hard fact. That is realism. That is horse sense.
Another way of saying it is this: You can’t back democracy and Communism. If you are loyal to one, you spurn the other. Every trained Communist has in mind the day of armed war against democracy. Every believer in democracy, if he has political intelligence, takes an attitude of militant resistance to Communism.