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| b. Communism |
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| The philosophy and sociopolitical ideology of Karl Marx (1818–83) provided the basis for the major ideological alternative to liberal democracy in the 20th century. Building on a materialist interpretation of history, Marxists developed a vision of a society in which production and distribution were controlled by the community in a collectivized economy. The working class was to be the major vehicle for achieving this goal, and class interests rather than national identities were seen as primary. When the member parties of the Second International supported their national governments in World War I, the International was dissolved. An explicitly communist alternative was defined by LENIN (Vladimir I. Ulianov), who led a radical faction of the Social Democratic Party that had been formed in Russia in 1898. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin's faction, the Bolsheviks, came to power and was reorganized as the Communist Party in 1918, which was the sole party in the emerging Soviet Union. Lenin created the THIRD INTERNATIONAL (Comintern) in 1919 as the structure for organizing global revolution and coordinating efforts of Communist parties around the world. Parties of the extreme left from 37 countries attended the second congress of the Comintern in 1920. During the 1920s, formal Communist parties were founded in many countries of Asia, including Turkey, Iran, India, China, and Japan, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in most European countries. Although no other countries became Communist systems in the interwar era, the Soviet Union emerged as a major world power. Leninist communism became a major alternative to and competitor with Wilsonian liberal democracy. | 1 |
| Communist-democratic conflicts quickly developed. Great Britain, France, and the U.S. intervened militarily in the Russian civil war in 1918–19 to prevent the consolidation of Bolshevik rule of Russia but failed. In the efforts to establish new states and create a new international system at the end of World War I, there were important but unsuccessful Communist efforts to gain control in many places. In Germany, the Spartacist group, which advocated a Communist state, led a series of uprisings in 1919–20 against the emerging Weimar Republic and was defeated. Communist attempts to gain power in the new republic of Austria (1919) and Bulgaria (1923–25) were unsuccessful. The Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun in Hungary lasted only a few months in 1919. In Iran (Persia), Persian nationalists and social democrats received support from the Bolshevik regime in establishing a short-lived Soviet Republic of Gilan in 1920. The new Communist Party in China cooperated with the Kuomintang regime until a major split in 1927, and the Communists went into revolutionary opposition. | 2 |
| Communist “threat.” Although Communist parties did not succeed in winning control of any countries in the interwar era, they represented the most visible global opposition to democratic liberal regimes. This led at times to periodic waves of fear of Communist revolutions in democratic countries. In the U.S. during the Red scare of 1919–20, thousands of people were arrested as suspected Communist revolutionaries. In Great Britain, the publication of the so-called Zinoviev letter in 1924, exposing an alleged Communist conspiracy, contributed to the overwhelming electoral victory of the Conservatives over the more socialist Labour Party. Fear of communism was an important reason why many people supported the emergence of the authoritarian regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. In 1933, Hitler charged the Communists with setting the Reichstag fire (See Feb. 27), which partly destroyed the German parliament building. The alleged danger of a Communist revolution was the rationale for the suspension of constitutional liberties and the granting of special powers to Hitler. The most effective response to Communist threats, real and imagined, was thought by many, even in the liberal democracies, to be more authoritarian policies. By the 1930s, the real ideological competition was frequently seen as being between communism and various forms of fascism, with liberal democracies believed to be in decline. This situation was strengthened by the economic conditions of the Great Depression. | 3 |
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