Communism

The use of political labels as terms of abuse is usually more intense at the extremes of the political spectrum. As the entry for political names shows, some are thrown up spontaneously by crises; others are generated systematically. Thus radical was a term of great animus in earlier times, as fascist has become more recently. In the rhetoric of the Communist Party, terms like capitalist and bourgeois had particular virulence, as can be seen on virtually any page of the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They were subsequently joined by imperialist and lackey . However, communist and its synonyms have had very different currencies in American and British English. In America communist , and especially the abbreviation commie , have for several decades been virulent terms, but have virtually no such currency in British English. The difference in the emotive quality in the two varieties is thus largely a reflection of the degree of the perceived threat of the political philosophy to the prevailing system. One of the first recorded uses (in 1849) is Ebenezer Elliott’s ironic rhyming definition: “What is a communist? One that yearnings / For equal division of unequal earnings” ( Poetical Works II, 202). Apart from red, the communist term with the greatest currency in British English has been bolshy , derived from the militant Bolshevik party in the Russian Revolution. While Bolshevist was used, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary as “a term of reproach for an out-and-out revolutionary” from 1917, bolshy rapidly gained currency from the following year in the more general sense of “uncooperative, recalcitrant or difficult” as well as “left wing.” It is now dated and obsolescent. The currency of communist itself has radically declined with the collapse of the soviet communist empire in the 1990s.

The American Communist Labor Party was founded in 1919 (two years after the Russian Revolution) and reached the zenith of its electoral strength in 1932 when its presidential candidate, William Z. Foster, polled almost 103,000 votes. Although Russia was technically on the side of the Allies in World War II, the federal government put in place a legislative program to destroy the party. This included the Smith Act (1940), the McCarran Act (1950), and the Communist Control Act (1954). However, the principal anti-Communist crusader was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who in 1950 gained the national spotlight when he made this sensational (but unsubstantiated) charge: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [people] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who are working and shaping policy of the State Department” ( Intelligencer , February 10, 1950). McCarthy’s campaign gathered force and ruthlessness, notably in the form of the House Un-American Activities Committee (originally instituted in 1938), which sought in public hearings from 1953 to 1955 to coerce from those subpoenaed the names of communists. Feelings of revulsion against these methods led to the term McCarthyism appearing contemporaneously in 1950. Two years later the American Historical Review wrote of “the McCarthyite ‘witch hunting’” (57, 386). In a memorable correction, the black singer and actor Paul Robeson simply denounced the committee, saying “You are un-American.”

At the time of the “red scare” or “communist threat,” the hysteria surrounding the Rosenberg trial and the consequent communist witch-hunt, communist and commie came to carry the senses in American English of “traitor,” “enemy,” “foreigner,” “outsider,” or “liberal.” But far earlier, in 1933, Jack Warner denounced leaders of the Hollywood Screen Writers Guild as “communists, radical bastards and soap-box sons of bitches.” His brother Harry went even further: “They want blood,” he screamed. “They want to take my goddamn studio…. You goddamn Communist bastards! You dirty sons of bitches! All you’ll get from me is shit!” (Behlmer 1985, 9-10). Quotations in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) show an eerie sense of stereotyping: “a bunch of Commie intellectuals” (1949); “a bunch of atheist commie professors” (1968); and “You’re all a bunch of … commie pinkos” (1972–1975). Reflecting the current sense of guilt by association, communist sympathizer, fellow traveler and card-carrying became terms of abuse. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, even coined the portmanteau form comsymp , generated from communist sympathizer . Yet both communist and commie underwent radical generalization of meaning, the original political sense being increasingly ignored. These semantic developments far outlived the communist threat. The New Dictionary of American Slang (1986) defines communist as, simply, “any despised person = bastard,” as in “some communist swiped my typewriter.” The word has no special currency in African-American English.

Communist and its derivatives have never acquired the same virulence in British English, largely because communism has never been taken seriously as a political threat, let alone a viable philosophy. In the apartheid era in South Africa the Communist Party was banned and Communist acquired a powerful sense of “traitor” similar to that in America, while in Australia commo has become a term of hostility but limited currency. Yet a comment like “the commo bastard!” would not have the same force there as in American English.