Communist parties could once, if at a considerable stretch, have been seen as a realistic threat to capitalism. That is no longer the case. The political theorist Jodi Dean has a point when she argues that anti-communism is a pervasive ideology of capitalism, as it serves to demarcate what is acceptable and what is off the table. Free healthcare and public ownership of broadband, for example, have been stigmatised as “communist”. However, the systematically violent anti-communism of the right has an emotional depth-charge, expedited by the sinophobic fearmongering about China defeating the US and taking American jobs. It is the latter which has become a campaigning issue in 2020.
A clue may lie in the spread of the antisemitic trope of “cultural Marxism”. Invented on the Nazi fringe and launched into the public sphere in the “manifesto” of Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik, this meme has gained ground across the right, including in the modern Conservative party. It has incited “lone wolf” killers, such as the Poway synagogue shooter. In India, an equivalent term, “urban naxals”, is used to stigmatise dissent.
As Paul Hanebrink’s bracing history of the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” demonstrates, 20th-century anti-communism rarely engaged with the reality of communism. It was, instead, driven by racial and nationalist myths. The idea that there was something inherently “Jewish” about communism, that it was a threat to national existence, extended well beyond the fascist right. In 1917, the chief Russia correspondent of the Times blamed the Russian Revolution on the “seething mass of Jewish pauperdom”. Winston Churchill blamed communism on the “International Jew”, who had no loyalty to the nation.
In the US, race theorists such as Lothrop Stoddard regarded Bolshevism as a “traitor at the gate”, subverting racial hierarchies. Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, fancied that the Russian Revolution proved the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Lusk Committee argued that all traditions of socialism were of German-Jewish extraction. Such tropes were commonplace in the battle against civil rights led by White Citizens’ Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Why should anti-communism be so amenable to such racist, conspiracist, and apocalyptic thinking? Perhaps because it works in a similar way. In “black-hole anti-communism”, as Joel Kovel dubbed it, everything that is perceived as threatening can be compressed into a single, treasonous, diabolical enemy: just different tentacles of the same communist kraken. Rather like a racial stereotype, “communism” figuratively represents systemic crises as something external, a demonic plot. It works through what Freud called dreamwork, wherein a single dream image comes to stand for thoughts that cannot otherwise be acknowledged. Those labelled “communists” are thus blamed, not just for the reforms that they demand, but for the crises that call for reform.