p In the preceding chapters we analysed the reactionary class essence of anti-communism as the main ideological and political weapon of imperialism, examined its action programme, reviewed the arguments offered by its ideologists and apologists and showed how the anti-communists misrepresent the teaching of Marxism-Leninism and the practice of the socialist countries. However, a critique of anti- communism should not be confined to a conceptual analysis under which it is examined chiefly as a social theory, as a sum of definite propositions and dogmas formulated in voluminous tomes. In the latter case a critique boils down mainly to proving the anti-communist concepts to be unscientific and false.

p However, it must be acknowledged that anti-communist propaganda succeeds in influencing the ideology and social psychology of the capitalist countries. Anti-communist feeling and garbled, distorted notions about the substance of Marxism-Leninism, the practice of socialist construction and the political and ideological life of the socialist countries are fairly widespread. There is, thus, not only an “academic”, but also a mass, “commonplace” form of anticommunist ideas—anti-communism as a fragment of the social psychology and ideology of present-day bourgeois 287 society. In this situation a conceptual analysis of anti- communism alone is clearly inadequate. It is necessary to ascertain the socio-psychological roots of anti-communism, its internal links with various spheres of social life, with the contradictions and problems characterising social life, and the specific, “converted” forms in which it is mirrored in the minds of people. It is necessary to study the socio- psychological mechanism by which anti-communism is instilled in the mass consciousness of bourgeois society, which transfers anti-communism from the sphere of theoretical ideology to the sphere of social psychology.

At this point it is important to stress that for the rankand-file member of Western capitalist society anti-communist ideas do not represent (and are not adopted) as something divorced, isolated from his day-to-day experience, from his customary convictions and views. The ideologists of anticommunism peddle their ideas under the guise of protecting the traditional political and ideological values of the West. Anti-communism is linked with the crisis processes in the bourgeois consciousness and it is offered as a means of surmounting that crisis.