p The study of communism is one of the principal functions of the ramified system of imperialist anti-communist organisations and institutions. Imperialism’s need to adapt itself to the new conditions has influenced bourgeois studies of communism basically in two respects: 

p first, communism studies are still required to evolve diverse and more flexible concepts of anti-communist ideology; 

p second, they must contribute to the elaboration of diverse forms, methods, strategies and tactics of the imperialist struggle against socialism.

p Until the 1950s imperialist ideology had been extolling capitalist society without subjecting it to any criticism. It denied its obvious social vices and antagonistic contradictions and lauded formal, bourgeois parliamentary democracy. At the same time, it utterly rejected socialism, reviling it as anti-humane, unnatural social system, fraught with fatal consequences, and slandering socialist society as the outcome of mankind’s fatal delusion.

p Today imperialist ideology has to reckon with the fact that the existence of socialist society is a constant factor. Moreover, the imperialist policy of open military confrontation on the “brink of war”, military encirclement, attempts at political blackmail and foreign policy isolation, and its economic sanctions under the slogans of “containing” and “rolling back” socialism have unquestionably proved to be abortive. The new situation in which imperialism has found itself is characterised as follows by the US political scientist William W. Kaufman: “We are flung into a straitjacket of rationality which prevents us from lashing out at the enemy.”^^2^^

p Imperialist students of communism are now more closely studying the political, economic and ideological links in the world socialist community, its policies toward capitalist and developing nations, and the political, economic, social and ideological processes in individual socialist states. This conforms to the increasing adaptation of politology as a whole, and US politology in particular, to the requirements of imperialist foreign policy.

p Imperialist students of communism attach paramount significance to their study of the internal processes of development in the world socialist system chiefly for two reasons.

p First, they look for real and probable possibilities of weakening and gradually breaking up the socialist community. Franz-Josef Strauss, a leading representative of the Right-wing conservative forces in West Germany, declared: “We have to analyse the state of East-West relations in order to work out the best form of rapprochement by means of which it will be possible to weaken the international organisation of the world communist empire and destroy it from within by peaceful means.”^^3^^

p Second, they need more flexible anti-communist ideological concepts and doctrines. The champions of traditional anti-communism, which predominated in the 1950s and conformed to the unrealistic imperialist policy of “ 95 containing” and “rolling back” communism, had attached much too little significance to studying the processes actually taking place in the socialist countries.

p Today, instead of denying and crudely falsifying facts and the actual state of affairs, anti-communist ideology has begun to give preference to differentiated means of mendaciously interpreting the processes taking place in socialist society, of distorting them in the spirit of bourgeois social theories and concepts of development. The various ideological concepts of anti-communism not only determine the main content of imperialism’s ideological struggle against socialism but also play a major role in working out and substantiating strategy.

p In the 1960s there was a considerable expansion of the organisational base of communism studies, and also of political, strategic and foreign policy research generally. Columbia University’s Institute on Communist Affairs, headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, was founded in 1961. The Institute on East Central Europe was set up at the same university in 1965. Similar research centres were formed at almost all other American universities.

p Since the early 1960s various monopoly foundations (in particular, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations) have been showing a heightened interest in communism studies and allocating huge funds for this purpose. Since then the leading research centres studying communism and also questions of strategy and foreign policy have been enlisted on a growing scale by leading state-monopoly agencies directly into the quests for and charting of political decisions. An example is Brzezinski’s official capacity as a political adviser to the White House.

p Other imperialist states, too (for instance, Britain, France, Italy and West Germany), have enlarged the centres studying communism, strategy and foreign policy and, moreover, set up new analogous institutions, albeit on a more modest scale than in the United States. In 1967 the British students of communism united in the National 96 Association ior Soviet and East European Studies, which holds annual symposiums on major issues of communism. The London Institute for Strategic Studies, founded in 1958, has likewise joined in the study of individual issues of communism. Research centres in West Germany have been drawn into the struggle against socialism in order to reinforce anti-communism and work out a more flexible strategy for this struggle. The Federal Institute for the Study of MarxismLeninism (Institute of Sovietology) was founded in Cologne in 1961; in 1966, for tactical reasons, it was renamed the Federal Institute for the Study of Eastern and International Policy. This institute is the most influential centre for communism studies in West Germany.

p In 1969, on instructions from the Minister of German Affairs, the Federal Department on German Problems, which has the same tasks as the Cologne Federal Institute but specialises in the study of the GDR, was formed through the merging of various organisations and institutions engaged in subversion against the GDR. In West Germany today there are over 100 institutions studying socialism and the world communist movement, elaborating and disseminating anti-communist ideology and evolving strategy and tactics for the struggle against socialism. These institutions are financed by the state budget, by monopoly foundations (for instance, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation) or by various monopoly associations.

p The Federal Government’s heightened interest in communism studies is also shown by the fact that it is financing the publication of an encyclopedia entitled The Soviet System and Democratic Society (Sowjctsystem und demokratische Gesellschaft).

p Western communism studies have borrowed heavily from the ideological foundations, schools and methods of bourgeois politology and sociology, becoming a branch of politology and constituting an attempt to answer the challenge of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice in the debate with socialism. In the 1950s, in keeping with the anti- 97 communist doctrine of totalitarianism that had taken shape at the time, the students of communism in the West regarded socialism as a static society destroyable by a powerful strike from without. However, the change in the world balance of forces showed that the hope that socialism would be destroyed by force was an illusion of the anti-communist day dreamers, and brought into prominence the aim of eroding it from within.

p The more flexible characteristic of the socialist system, a characteristic that no longer asserts that it is unviable and unnatural only because it is socialist, retains its anti- communist substance, denying that socialism plays a historic role as a higher socio-economic formation naturally replacing capitalism; it distorts the character of the modern epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism on a global scale; it denies that the working class and its militant revolutionary Party have the historic mission of building the new, socialist society; it panegyrises capitalism as a society that has a future and is superior to socialism.

p Modified concepts of socialism continue the speculations founded on the “convergence” theory. Early in the 1960s notions about socialism automatically converging with capitalism exercised no little influence on politics, although they never had the unanimous support of the imperialist ideologists and strategists. Socialist society’s successful development, particularly its economic progress and scientific and technological achievements linked with the consolidation of socialist state power and the further accentuation of the social system’s socialist character, gradually moved the naive “convergence” theory into the background as being clearly illusory.

In the same way as bourgeois sociology, communism studies have had to reconsider and modify the views about the future development of socialism. This retreat gave rise to the evolutionary theory.