The New Strategy of International Communism

Communist international organizations and Communist parties the world over tend to follow a single strategy, which is always determined primarily by the needs of Soviet foreign policy paramount at the time. Corresponding to the requirements of the Soviet Union's “cold war” against the United States, a new strategy has gradually been adopted by international communism since 1947. Often non-Communist observers and sometimes even the Communists themselves seem unaware of the novelty of this strategy and they frequently obscure it by the use of terms more descriptive of older strategies, such as “united front” and “popular front.” It is the purpose of this essay to distinguish sharply between the various Communist strategies with a view to clarifying the characteristic features of the new strategy. It would, of course, be both easy and tempting to document and enliven such an attempt with innumerable examples from history and quotations from Communist literature. However, it would go beyond the intended scope of this brief analysis to do more than draw the broadest generalizations from the record of thirty-five years of international communism.