Is Coexistence With Communism Impractical?

• Date: 01 September 1953
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295300600301
• Author: D.F. Fleming
• Published date: 01 September 1953
• Subject Matter: Articles

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VOL. VI
SEPTEMBER, 1953
No. 3
IS COEXISTENCE WITH COMMUNISM IMPRACTICAL?
D. F. FLEMING
Vanderbilt University
N
CONSIDERING the question whether the West can coexist with
t world communism we should be hardheaded, but not unyielding to the
point of defeating ourselves.
There cannot be any doubt that communism is a threat to private-
enterprise capitalism. It destroys it root and branch, permitting only what
private property an individual can accumulate with his own labor. His
gains, too, are held down by changeable work norms which prevent ac-
cumulation, and if it still takes place, as in wartime, it is channeled away
by currency reform. Only the few Stakhanovites who push themselves
unmercifully to earn high piece-work wages, some artists, bureaucrats, and
army officers can have high standards of living. Everything else goes into
the building of more heavy industry, with which to balance the superior
power of the West.
When we also remember that communism liquidates all capitalists
as it takes over a country -
by killing some, by terrifying many into exile,
and by laws which take away their wealth -
it is abundantly plain that
private capitalists everywhere must fear and hate communism above all
things. Its coming means the end of their world.
It is equally clear, too, that communism is the foe of individual free-
dom, as we have developed it in the West during the past thousand years.
Not only is the individual denied the property base which gives him
economic independence, or the hope of it: he is unable to choose his own
rulers, to criticize either the men at the top or their acts and policies. If he
does not like them he can only wait until they die or liquidate each other.
There is no freedom of association, of speech, or of press -
precious liberties
which have always meant freedom to us, at least until we began to suppress
them here in the name of anti-communism.
Worst of all, communism is enforced by a police-state machine which
can and does snatch dissenters from their homes and send them to slave-
421

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422
labor camps, or to death. Secret police and their informers are everywhere
to enforce conformity.
These are the reasons why communism would be worse than death
to any Western man who has ever enjoyed the personal liberties which
are his breath of life. It is not only the rich conservatives who suffer, but
the comfortable liberals and poor radicals, all of whom lose something
much more precious than material wealth -
human dignity itself.
The antagonism between communism and democratic capitalism is
evident enough, from our standpoint, and it is just as apparent from the
communist viewpoint. Private capitalism is the enemy of communist state
capitalism. Our civil liberties, when honored, are a mortal threat to com-
munist secret-police rule. Our way of life is a permanent, standing threat
and menace to communism.
This patent antagonism of the two systems leads many people to the
quick conclusion that there must be a mortal struggle to the death, and
the sooner we get it over with, the better. It is typically American to &dquo;do
something&dquo; when confronted with an unpleasant situation. Yet an atomic
world war would mean the destruction of much of the already sadly
diminished West, a certainty which compels us to examine several ques-
tions before proceeding to an &dquo;either-or&dquo; conclusion.
DO THE COMMUNISTS REJECT COEXISTENCE?
We are obliged to inquire whether the Communists will accept co-
existence. Early in the Cold War Western writers began to quote fre-
quently the statement of Lenin: &dquo;We are living not merely in a state, but
in a system of states; and it is inconceivable that the Soviet republic should
continue to exist side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately one or the
other must conquer. Meanwhile a number of terrible clashes between the
Soviet republic and the bourgeois states is inevitable.&dquo; ~
1
On the basis of this statement, frequently referred to over a period of
seven years, the American public has been told that it is not possible to live
with the Reds because they do not believe in this possibility. Their chief
prophet says so.
On December 24, 1952, Stalin replied to a question from James Reston
of the New York Times, &dquo;Is it still your conviction that the U.S.S.R. and
the United States can live peacefully in the coming years?&dquo; as follows: &dquo;I
still believe that war between the United States of America and the Soviet
Union cannot be considered inevitable, and that our countries can continue
to live in peace.&dquo;
To this statement the general reply was that Stalin was merely pulling
the wool over our eyes to veil his plans to conquer us. The New York
1
Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 66.

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423
Times commented on December 27 that the new Eisenhower administra-
tion &dquo;fully shares the universal skepticism that has greeted Mr. Stalin’s
statement.&dquo;
When a communist leader points toward war with us we accept
his authority as oracular without question. When he looks toward peace
with us we know instantly that he is practising the inevitable communist
deception.
This ambivalence on our part prevents us from recognizing that all
Red leaders have been living in a swiftly changing world, and that they
are forced to change their own minds with events. Lenin himself said, on
December 22, 1920, that the peace just made on Russia’s western frontiers
&dquo;has every chance of being far more durable than the capitalists and
certain of the West European states would like.&dquo; A year later, on Decem-
ber 29, 1921, he said: &dquo;It must be remembered that we are always a
hair’s breadth removed from invasion.&dquo; 2
On July 27, 1930, Stalin said: &dquo;We shall continue this policy of
peace in the future with all our might and with all seriousness and re-
sources. We
don’t want a single foot of foreign territory; but we will not
surrender a single inch of our territory to anyone.&dquo; 3 At that time Stalin
was in the midst of his first Five-Year Plan and the last thing he wanted
was any foreign trouble. In 1939 he made an agreement with Hitler which
returned to Russia most of the Western lands she had lost after World
War I. Yet there is no reason to believe that Stalin could have anticipated
his 1939 action when he made his 1930 statement.
There is widespread recognition now that Foreign Minister Maxim
Litvinov was personally sincere in his many pacific utterances at Geneva,
and it is equally clear that he truly reflected the need of his government
for peace. It was engaged in a literal race between swift industrialization
and extinction, a race so critical that Litvinov could sign non-aggression
treaties with the Baltic States as late as April 4, 1934, deprecating disputes
over territory and saying: &dquo;The Soviet Union is a stranger to such disputes;
it has never demanded the revision of existing treaties and never intends
to demand it.&dquo; 4 Five years later Russia took over the Baltic States.
It is quite impossible to settle the issue of coexistence by quoting the
words of Soviet oracles. A
long list can be assembled on each side, but all
that any of them does is reflect a momentary estimate of what was good
for the Soviet Union.
Communists World Conquest. At this point one runs against the stone
wall of belief in this country that war is inevitable because the Communists
2 Nikolai Lenin, The Soviet Union and the Cause of Peace (New York: International Publishers, 1936),
pp. 15, 16-19.
3
Ibid., p. 25.
4
Maxim Litvinov, Against Aggression (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 17.

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424
are out to conquer the world. It may be granted that it is difficult to see
how the Soviet Union as a state could profit from another and worse world
war, with searing memories still fresh in Soviet minds of how horribly
mangled she was in World War I, the Western interventions of 1918-20,
and World War II. But, it is said, they mean to impose their system on
the whole world, either by force or guile.
The record is clear also that the early Red leaders did believe pas-
sionately in world revolution. They were so intoxicated by their success
in leading the revolution in Russia that they thought they could spread
it back into Europe. They realized the primitive weakness of Russia’s
economy, ruined as it was by war and intervention, so keenly that they
did not believe they could survive unless the revolution did abolish some
hostile capitalist states and create some friendly communist allies. If, too,
we have only a dim understanding of the magnitude of the Western inter-
ventions in the Russian civil war, from 1918 to 1920, we can see that the
Reds were bound to believe that the West would not permit them to exist.
They survived Western assaults from all four sides only by the narrowest
of margins, and they were certain to believe that the capitalist West would
be back again.
Ideas born of such bitter experience die hard. Yet it gradually became
apparent that the communist revolts in Hungary and Germany had failed
and that no others could be expected. This led to a fierce internal struggle
in the Soviet Union, which came to a head after Lenin’s death in 1924, and
led to the triumph of Stalin’s view that communism could be built in one
country of the magnitude of the U.S.S.R.
This was the outcome of Stalin’s famous fight with Trotsky and other
leading Bolsheviks. From the mid-twenties to the German attack on Russia...