As do folks today–which is a key part of my question.
I said tens, if not hundreds, of millions, and I do think that tens of millions of people were drawn to communism. Mao’s movement was absolutely a mass movement, as was Trotsky’s, as were others around the world. And I dispute both Obama’s notion of folks clinging to guns and your notion of befuddled peasantry; in both cases, I think a better analysis considers that people are acting in a relatively reasonable way to further their own perceived self-interest.
That’s not exactly an accurate characterization of what folks thought Communism would achieve, but I’m sure you know that :).
That said, I think folks are right about the material success of capitalism. Communism was an attempt to level the playing field, and it pretty clearly failed at that. The playing field is still massively uneven, but folks no longer see a plausible means to level it; the goal is now to get to the upper end of the field.
Are you saying it is not true that labor unions purged Communists out of the leadership after WWII, and that moderate unions weren’t allowed into shops to decertify and displace radical unions present there?
Are you saying that Reuther and Meany and Reagan in fact weren’t anti-Communists?
Please find some cites saying so - because the one cite you have found said this very thing.
In the US? No. In much of the rest of the world? Yes.
There’s some interesting research (referenced in The BLank Slate, sorry I can’t be more specific) suggesting that folks’ happiness depends less on their absolute material wealth and more on their material wealth relative to the folks around them. A 12th-century king perceived less material suffering than a 21st-century kid in a Baltimore project, even though he might have experienced more objectively, because he was wealthier than the people that surrounded him.
I’m not disbelieving you, but I would love a link to this incident.
The Battle of the Overpass was in 1937. That in no way invalidates anything I said about what happened to Communists in the labor movement after WWII. And it must be said, those purges were largely confined to union leadership, not the rank and file.
You say your family was involved with the union. What leadership positions did they hold as open Communists?
Maybe we’re looking at the wrong demographic. Communism was mainly an urban workers movement, so let’s restrict our view to factory workers in cities around the world. Do you still think that’s true? I would agree that subsistence farmers aren’t all that different than they were long ago, but they weren’t the ones charmed by Communism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
You are right…Marx saw industrial workers as the agents of communism. The farmers/peasants always resisted communization-which is why Stalin killed 5 million of them (Ukraine). Mao did the same in China.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html We are the most active in war and intervention of any country. Lets at least be honest about ourselves before we condemn other for being aggressive. Our list of killed would be impressive.
It’d be interesting to look at said factory workers both in terms of absolute wealth (a category where I"m guessing things are a lot better) and relative wealth.
I really think that this thread has not taken a useful direction (surprise surprise). The posters who have attempted to go back to before WWII and earlier are on the right track, in my opinion.
Communism was scary to a lot of people very early on in its history (before Marx, even). It may have gotten more scary because of what happened later (totalitarianism, mass-killings, human rights abuses, nuclear weapons and miltary threat), but before all that it scared a lot of people. The red scare of the years following WWI happened when communism had barely taken hold in Russia.
A lot of the things cited as reasons for the fear of communism hadn’t clearly manifested themselves at that time (or for a number of years later for that matter). Many of the developments mentioned in this thread to explain the fear of communism came about within the environment of fear of communism. For example, the build up of the Soviet military and later their nuclear arsenal occurred in a climate of anti-communism in the west. They may have wanted to take over the world, by force if necessary, but they also felt legitimately threatened by the forces of anti-communism.
It is for this reason that I think it is useful to look further back before the obvious military threat presented by the Soviet Union and her satellites to a time when everything was still untested and yet there was still a fear of communism.
The Yearbook on International Communist Affairs was published by the Hoover Institution for years, and it was a great resource on what the durned commies were doing at any given time.
Since fear is an emotional thing and not always based on factual knowledge, I’ll explain a little from that perspective. As a kid and into my early teens I was somewhat afraid. As late as Junior High, (1987ish) I was still afraid there would be a nuclear war. I wasn’t around for the Vietnam War or McCarthyism or the Cuban Missile Crisis, so my perspective is on the fears that still lingered after all of that.
The original fear of Communism from my perspective is that the fearsome Communist enemies were known for aggressive expansionism and human rights violations and limited freedoms. None of these things obviously are inherently part of the Communist economic system, but for some reason those nations that were Communist tended to also have these problems.
The Soviet Union was the main fear. Other Communists seemed to either be leaving us alone for the most part or part of the Soviet Empire. I eventually figured out that the actual Russian people were not to be feared, but just the oppressive government.
There may have been fear of some kind of invasion at some point but eventually there was just the fear of nuclear war. There was a lot of things in the news about nuclear missiles, nuclear winter, movies such as War Games, etc. Schools had fallout shelters and emergency drills.
Eventually I started losing my fear of the USSR per se, and now just feared the possibility of nuclear war, which I came to see as just as easily being initiated by the US.
All those fears pretty much evaporated when the Berlin Wall fell. There were various fears but no overwhelming threat of the same magnitude until 9/11. Now the new boogeyman is Islamic terrorists.
But the big difference between Islamic terrorists and the Commie threat that was big when I was a kid is one of scale. We may lose a few thousand people now. But when I was a child, we were looking at MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. In fact, that was our very deliberate strategy, both the USSR and the US, and the big thing keeping us from war, was the fear that once the bombs started flying, they wouldn’t stop until everything was gone.
These days, the big question is, will some assholes decide to nuke Boise or Dallas, and will we determine they came from Some City I Can’t Spell and nuke the city or Afghanistan or Pakistan back to the Stone Age? There’s no question of the US or most of northern hemisphere humanity being destroyed. There are no classroom demonstrations of ‘duck and cover.’ We fear the randomness and the suddenness, but not the absoluteness. It’s like the fear of being hit by lightning - the chances are very small in any particular location. Back then it was more like living next to Mount St. Helens.