The New Manifesto

August 21, 1961

The new 50,000-word Communist Manifesto is just one more missile in an uninterrupted war, blowing hot and cold, against the West. It is intended at least as much for U.S. consumption as for home consumption. And what it says has no necessary relation to what the Communist rulers seriously believe or intend.

It says, moreover, contradictory things. Some commentators attach great significance to Khrushchev’s abandonment of the dogma of the inevitability of war between Communism and capitalism. Yet this has the obvious propagandistic advantage of inducing us to relax our guard. Throughout the document, war is alternately threatened and disavowed. “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . will continue to oppose all wars of conquest” (no mention of Tibet, Hungary, etc.) but “consider it their duty to support the sacred struggle of the oppressed peoples and their just anti-imperialist wars of liberation.” In plainer words, any wars that the Russian Communists want to start (e.g., over Berlin) will be “anti-imperialist wars of liberation.”

When Khrushchev says “We will bury you,” and then talks of “peaceful coexistence,” we in the West may regard it as double-speak. But for Khrushchev’s propaganda purposes there is no contradiction. The threats to bury us are intended to scare some of us into appeasing him; the peaceful coexistence slogans are intended to lull and lure the rest of us into appeasing him. The “peaceful coexistence” will be obtainable—as long as we surrender to his terms, on Berlin, a divided Germany, Laos, Cuba, until we have lost the will or power to resist. The new manifesto aims at sapping our moral resolution and our faith in our own cause and system.

HOMAGE TO PROFIT

The manifesto is for the most part a rehash of practically all the stale Marxist dogmas about the inevitable triumph of socialism and Communism and the equally inevitable disintegration and defeat of capitalism. As part of the double-speak, there are attacks on “dogmatism” but even stronger attacks on “revisionism.” Yet revisionism occasionally raises its ugly head. We are suddenly surprised to discover, for example, that: “Prices must, to a growing extent . . . insure . . . a certain profit for each normally operating enterprise.” In the older literature of Communism, “profit” was a dirty word; it existed under capitalism only because employers “exploited” the workers by “withholding” from them the full product of their labor. If profit is now normal and necessary even under Communism, why is it so reprehensible under capitalism?

Here are the pie-in-the-sky promises for 1980 which the manifesto makes: “The people’s standard of living and their cultural and technical standards will improve substantially; everyone will live in easy circumstances; all collective and state farms will become highly productive and profitable enterprises; the demand of the Soviet people for well-appointed housing will in the main be satisfied; hard physical work will disappear; the U.S.S.R. will become the country with the shortest working day.”

PROMISE VS. REALITY

People like Senator Fulbright take this sort of pipe dream in deadly earnest. He tells us that Russia can achieve these goals, that “the big question is the maturity of our response,” and that “we must also develop our economy.” Such people, bewitched by the phony statistics that Russia is constantly publishing, ignore the miserable conditions that still exist there after 44 years of Communist rule—slave-labor camps, people packed six to a room in huge slums with communal kitchens and bathrooms, women working like beasts of burden, lands ravaged by chronic crop shortages, and recurrent famine.

The Soviet economic achievement, except in the few things on which they have concentrated their resources and their efforts—armament, missiles, and spectacular space stunts—has been wretched. Though they are still far behind us (and even most countries of Europe), they are always going to pass us in the sweet by-and-by—this time twenty years from now, when the people who are making these extravagant promises will not be around to be held responsible for their non-fulfillment.