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RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
in India, Africa, and Latin America. Large Communist parties exist in
France and Italy and small Communist parties in the United States and
most other western countries. No census, however, has been taken of people
who believe in communism.
The United States has no official relations with communism in this sense,
anymore than it has with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, science, liberalism,
conservatism, or other ideologies. But the government’s opinion about these
beliefs may, of course, influence United States policy making.
The people of the United States generally dislike communism and many
fear it. This opinion influences government policy; in fact it is behind the
major United States policy of “containing communism,” initiated by George
Kennen in 1947, officially declared in the Truman doctrine of 1949 con-
cerning Greece and Turkey, reasserted by President Eisenhower in connec-
tion with the Middle East and Taiwan and by President Johnson in connec-
tion with Vietnam. This dislike and fear of communism generally flows less
from communism as a theory than from the nature of the activities of Com-
munist states, parties, and persons. Americans tend to identify these violent
and subversive activities in international relations and within the country
with communism as a theory. It is significant that the article on “Commu-
nism” in the Encyclopaedia Briiannica (1967) deals with the strategy and
tactics of the Russian communist government and party utilizing Lenin’s
analysis of the proper strategy and tactics of violent revolution. In this
article communism is differentiated from socialism, which also professes the
Marxist ideology, but seeks to realize it, not by violent revolution, but grad-
ually by the strategy and tactics of parliamentary democracy. For discussion
of communism as a theory one must look in the Britannica to the article on
“Socialism,” which presents a historical survey of socialist writers, including
Marx, and of socialist movements. Although the Communist Manifesto of
1848 suggested that violent revolution was necessary to realize communism,
this has not been the opinion of all Marxists. Communism should not, there-
fore, be identified with the revolutionary activities of the Soviets any more
than Catholicism should be identified with the Spanish inquisition, Islam
with the persecutions of Aurungzebe, or democracy (liberty, equality, and
fraternity) with the guillotine and the activities of Robespierre. Neverthe-
less the dislike of communism in some western countries, especially in the
United States, often springs from this identification. They fear revolution,
not communism. To India and other nonaligned countries, less apprehensive
of revolution, communism is usually looked upon as a form of social organ-
ization which deserves study and perhaps application.
What is the theory of communism? It is a theory of the actual and the
desirable relations of man to society. Historically and geographically there
have been great variations in these relations manifested by both the degree