Changes in Communist Theory and Practice.

              Br. Frederic A. Doppelt,
Rabbi, The Temple,
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Fort Wayne Quest Club,
Chamber of Commerce,
Friday, March 5, 1965
CHANGES IN COMMUNIST THEORY AND PRACTICE
A.  As A World Force:
1. At the very outset it must be set down as an indispensable prerequisite that
even a cursory and certainly a more careful approach to "Changes in Communist Theory
and I  ctice" has to reckon with at least three hard and stubborn realities.  It is
apparent, first of all, that whatever our personal and collective judgment concerning
the validity of communism as a social ideology and its value as an economic and
political system, it is no longer just a contemporary movement but has become a world
force in our lifetime--so sweeping and penetrating a world force that it has divided
the entire human race into two parts.  Equally amazing and staggering is the rapidity
with which it has raced all around the world--racing across boundary lines, national
lines, racial lines and even religious lines in less than fifty years--outracing in
speed and impact even the spread of early Christianity across Europe and medieval
Islamism in the Near East and Africa. And thirdly—and perhaps most disturbing and
disquieting to the non-Communist world--is the evident vitality of its theory and
flexibility of its practices which enabled it to tempt different people, to appeal to
different needs and to adjust to different world vicissitudes—moving from Soviet Russia
to Yugoslavia, from Eastern Europe to the Asian continent, and yet retaining everywhere
the stamp and seal of Communism.  Wherein the life-force of this social-economic
phenomenon which has catapulted it into a world force in so brief a span of time—
appearing as the "Promised Land" especially to depressed masses in backward continents
and as only a new "Slave-System" to the free world?
2. An intelligent study of these problems and questions involves, of course, at
least a review of the history of world communism which is very complex and very difficult.  Historical truth in general is not easy to come by, and in the instance of
Communism it is infinitely less so.  For as Edward Hallet Carr--the eminent historian
end authority on the subject—who has made it his life-ambitibu to issue a ten-volume
history of Soviet Russia, of which seven have already appeared--soon learned that
"truth was buried ever more deeply under successive layers of legend....  Though we
are dealing with a contemporary civilization, those of us who would strive to write
the true history of Soviet Russia must use 'an archaeological method' analogous to
that which enabled Heinrich Schliemann to uncover four successive Troys to find the
Homeric city.... To be sure, as the overlay of propaganda myths grow in thickness and
the real documents are buried deeper, it becomes rather harder and harder to uncover
the 'real Troy1."
3.  As Marxian Philosophy:
1.  As I proceeded with my amateur dig into the "archaeology" of Communism and
shoveled my way through layers upon layers of explanations and interpretations and cut
through rocks of revisionist and deviationist emendations, I found indeed the "real
Troy" overlayed by four successive stages of change which evolved Communism into a world
force.  The "real Troy" is, of course, the monumental philosophy and program of
scientific socialism as set forth by the theoretician Karl Marx in the middle of the
nineteenth century.  Note the stress on the phrase "scientific socialism." He stressed
it to distinguish it from the various types of "utopian socialism" which had been
f1 siting around from ancient of days and were prevalent in his day but lost in a fog
of mere hopes and dreams and pretty sentiments.  There had always been in the tortuous
history of mankind the vision of the good communal society based on communal ownership