Leninism Unbound?: The U.S. Celebrates "Anti-Communism Week 2025" [2-8 November]: A Reverie on President Trump's Proclamation

 

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 The United States observes "Anti-Communism Week" this week. To that end, President Trump has issued a Proclamation: Anti-Communism Week, 2025 (7 November) the text of which follows below. The Proclamation ought not to be dismissed lightly. There were other commemorations at the state level (eg, Governor DeSantis (Fla) Victims of Communism Day).

Proclamation: Anti-Communism Week, 2025 contains within it a substantial and profound insight into the ways in which "Communism" is understood within at least one portion of the American elite, and with that, the way in which this understanding can then be effectively projected to define and discipline the terrains of solidarity enhancing debates within liberal democracy. Here one does not inhabit the realms of theoretical insight or of a strong alignment between words and their meanings beyond that for which they are constructed in the popular imagination. That popular imagination, in turn, and in many places, might have drifted into new understandings that become the means of encasing ideas, fears, and incarnations of those "things" which distinguish the community of believers from non-believers, and more importantly, as a means of measuring and identifying apostasy and heresy among the community of believers. It is to that extent, and within that contextual framework, that one might useful read and consider carefully the language of the Proclamation, not just for what it says, but for what it intends to mean. At the same time, the Proclamation creates a curious veiling of Leninism as a normative system of operational structuring, within and beneath the normative premises of the political economic model in whose service one can write a number of histories of "Communism" from the late 19th to the 21st centuries. That veiling, in turn, creates a space within within liberal democratic and markets Leninism  (and certainly its sensibilities) may be applied within the normative contexts of liberal democracy while distancing those practices (managerialism for example) from the oppositions, threats and challenges of incompatible and oppositional normative systems. That produces the fundamental contradiction that the Proclamation both alludes to and avoids--how does one combat oppositional systems and their normative frameworks, how does one create the means to measure taboo deviation (heresy) or apostasy (systemic rejection beyond the name of the thing rejected), how does one engage in those actions (a key thrust of the Proclamation) without making it impossible to adopt (and adapt) its attached methodological normative structures (perhaps usefully shorthanded as vanguardism) to the manifestation and development of liberal democracy itself. That is, is it possible to recognize Leninism as a critical element of the critique of the destructive element in "communism" without at the same time foreclosing the instrumentalization of Leninist sensibilities and techniques in the service of liberal democratic institutions and norms?

1. Destructive ideologies. Communism, or rather what is ascribed to its manifestation by those purporting to be "Communists" as they established dictatorships of the proletariat and then reconstituted them as the apparatus through which they would remake the world in their own image. 

Across continents and generations, communism has wrought devastation upon nations and souls.  More than 100 million lives have been taken by regimes that sought to erase faith, suppress freedom, and destroy prosperity earned through hard work, violating the God-given rights and dignity of those they oppressed. (Anti-Communism Week, 2025 )

In the process, Communism bears the burdens of its Leninist application. And by shifting the "blame" for the implementation of destruction in the name of an ideological goal it both excuses and masks the central role of Leninism, rather than the construct "Communism" in the anthologies of the 20th century.  Freed of its connection to destruct, though very much its architect (both ideological and as an operationalizing ideology constructing possibilities for progressing along a socialist path toward a "Communist" society, Leninism could be transposed into any political ideology as an ideology of management and control, as opposed to a means of managing a realization of communism in a society far from ready for it, and thus  ready for Leninist management (guidance and leadership). 

To be clear, Communism might be usefully understood as a very specific way of seeing the world and social organization, It starts from a series of premises built around the (1) nature and exploitation of productive forces (capital) (2) around which human society is both inevitably formed (and understood), and (3) through which in the course of an inevitable progression of human development, enhanced and accelerated by tech innovation (the industrial revolution in the 19th century was the available baseline) (4) that will produce the conditions within which equality (the end of class distinctions and the need for welfare to be driven by relations between people and capital) one in which people are all workers and work is de-centered as the way in which social organization is understood and elaborated. There are lots of lacunae, of course, and people have been arguing about them for some time. Among these are the invisibility of difference other than class, and more importantly, the extent that violence driven by the identified leading forces of social progress (eg, the "workers of the world;" whatever that means and it means different things to different groups at different times).

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But Communism is meant to describe a quite specific lebenswelt (lifeworld), a means of understanding the premises around which human reality can be rationalized, and then taking those premises and applying them in a linear sequential time line (like block chain, but here constructed out of stages of historical development) that points to an "ends." Leninism, on the other hand, might be understood as providing the way in which one can create normative structures for producing "right" pathways for the "best" way of realizing "Communism" and for policing and protecting those determinations.  Those normative structures do not deal with the normative premises of "Communism" as such, but rather to the value and justification for the means of realizing communism.  When attached to Communism (now perhaps better or at least more commonly labelled Marxism), Leninism might be understood to be built on the fundamental premises that any society, even one that is not yet ready to progress can be lead and guided toward a faster and more efficient realization of its inevitable end goal through the leadership and guidance  of the vanguard of social forces whose consciousness (and commitment) are already developed farther along the path toward the goal (in this case the establishment of a communist society).  To those ends, the means, virtually any means, may be understood (or the negative impacts of which may be valued or judged)) as the (individual) costs of the efficient and properly directed apparatus of transformation toward the perfection of alignment between society and the normative vision of itself which gives (in its own mind at least) legitimacy and authority to a Leninist "party" ad the justification of the employment of its means. From Soviet Marxism, one then encounters the progression (everything is always a progression) from professional revolutionaries to revolutionaries in power, to the overseers of an apparatus that both defines the normative regulatory path for society and directs people along it. 

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Reconsidered in this way one understands both the power of labeling the destruction as "Communism" (one attacks two distinct ideological bird with one stone) and also the way it misdirects that labeling, one that permits Leninism--re-imagined for any ideological political-economic system--to take hold anywhere.  More specifically, one might be forgiven for rethinking the operative first part of the Proclamation spoke to  the view that, in the name of communism, socialist Leninist parties have invoked the imperatives of necessary and inevitable change to justify a century or more of actions that are horrifying to those who claim solidarity with other political-economic models.  For liberal democracy, of course, both the normative framework and the ideology of its mechanics are to be condemned, and thus condemned, amalgamated into a single "thing". 

And that is both the promise and tragedy of and embedded in Leninism. It is both a means towards an ends and an ends in itself in terms of the normative basis of its own organization, purpose, means, and methods. Its normative schema  can be applied to any ideological project or collective enterprise--the fundamental operative premise that any system can be perfected through the leadership and guidance of an organized collective, a "brain trust," an "elite", a social, intellectual, or other group, that is dedicated to whatever objective around which it exists.  Its two critical elements have seeped into many forms of governance well beyond the "Communist universe"though it has been central to that development since 1917. The first  is that all social collectives have an ultimate ideal form and purpose that must be realized; second that this realization can be more efficiently attained or accelerated where a n organized group can take the lead and manage the process of progress.  

2. The Ruination of and that is "Communism." The Anti-Communism Week, 2025 Proclamation notes 

For more than a century, communism has brought nothing but ruin.  Wherever it spreads, it silences dissent, punishes beliefs, and demands that generations kneel before the power of the state instead of standing for freedom.  Its story is written in blood and sorrow, a grim reminder that communism is nothing more than another word for servitude. (Anti-Communism Week, 2025 Proclamation)

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What, then, has brought ruin? The question becomes more complicated.  From the perspective of liberal democracy and its fundamental norms, the alignment between the ultimate goals of Marxism, and the means used to accelerate fulfillment of those goals (expressed on and through their impacts on the bodies of individuals),  is impossible to break. 

Communism (or Marxism) is a conceptual challenge for liberal democracy (and with it, its approach to the relationship between people and productive forces). The two may aspire to similar goals, but their cognitive frameworks are incompatible, especially with respect to the nature and role of the individual and the purpose of social organization. That is important, and indeed central to competition among distinct visions for organizing and valuing political frameworks--and thus the point of that paragraph. 

Leninism, on the other hand, is an operational threat.  That operational threat emerges from the autonomous normative  structures of Leninism, one that permits the Leninist cognitive  model to be transposed virtually anywhere social collectives seek to "perfect" or at least engage in conversations about the "best" ways (there are no best ways only choices that produce benefits within a context of risk, risk mitigation, and threat to systemic integrity and solidarity) to manage their organizational and conceptual choices.  

3.  From "Communism" (Marxist-Leninism) to Heresy to Leninism Unbound. That distinction and that understanding produces the bridge to what may be the critical paragraph of the Proclamation:   

New voices now repeat old lies, cloaking them in the language of “social justice” and “democratic socialism,” yet their message remains the same:  give up your freedom, place your trust in the power of the government, and trade the promise of prosperity for the empty comfort of control.  America rejects this evil doctrine.  We remain a Nation founded on the eternal truth that liberty and opportunity are the birthrights of every person, and that no ideology, whether foreign or domestic, can extinguish them. (Anti-Communism Week, 2025 Proclamation).

This is where the Proclamation becomes interesting.  One is not focused here on "Communism" as such, though that has become the avatar within which it is possible to speak about Leninism (again because in the American imaginary the terms are either indistinguishable or the idea is that one is impossible without the other).  

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The Leninist impulse, the vocation of Lenin's "professional revolutionaries" (however one defines revolution from historical stage of development to another, and therefore however one can define revolutionary), is necessarily always looking for a cause through which it may develop itself within a meta-normative context (though in the original Lenin assumed that mass movements would produce from out of their own ranks their own vanguards to who, as professional revolutionaries, leadership would be delegated (What is to be Done,§ 4.2)). Here, the Proclamation uses old tropes (the "Red Scare" fears of 1919-23 and the early 1950s) to project onto contemporary spaces.  Here the Proclamation suggests, those new foundations of revolutionary agitation can be embedded within their own normative avatars, “social justice” and “democratic socialism," the last a reference to the recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City (discussed HERE). That is neither unexpected nor new. And again, that conjoins what some might be tempted to aggregate as the "Marxist" normative impulse, with its Leninist operational principles, making them indistinguishable and suggesting that the synergies of that melding augments the horrors of its product. 

The objection, of course, is to both. Both suggest a core orienting set of social collective premises that, to put it politely, challenges the core orienting premises of both liberal democracy of as a political ideology and markets as its individual autonomy affirming transactional element. And both are vanguardist (and thus inviting a Leninist solution to the problem of its implementation) in the sense that they require substantial "consciousness raising and mandatory measures to ensure that the population "grows into" the new social "basic line."

This reasoning suggests two quite interesting ideas (perhaps just ideas not rising even to the level of insight). The first is an oldie but goodie: that external challenges always have a way of either strengthening or corrupting the articulation and understanding of the core premises from out of which it is possible both to develop the conceptual cage of a reality ordering system (through the second order generation and application of its derivative values). That dialectical process is essential for the disciplining of a political-economic model within its own ordering cages. That applies with equal force to liberal democratic (market) systems as it does to Marxist-Leninist systems. To those ends it is always necessary to develop the means (and the measure) for  distinguishing between "within the system" debates and heresy.  And then also to distinguish between heresy (the changing of elements of the normative cage) and apostasy (the abandonment of that cognitive universe in favor of another. The Trump Administration views both "social justice" and "socialist democracy" as heretical within the umbrella of liberal democracy, and implies that their vanguardism (Leninism) pushes them not just into apostasy but recasts them as the professional revolutionaries that are meant to be the death of the system itself. 

The second may be the more interesting:  it is that, even assuming that "social justice" and "democratic socialism" are not part of some sort of revived "Communist International" in modern form, Leninism itself can be a force in its own right, one that might be threatening when tied to opposing normative systems, but one that may be compatible within the operational modalities of liberal democracy and its markets. This goes beyond the usual discussions in intellectual circles between liberal democratic representative democracy and co-called Marxist vanguard democracy (eg here). It goes to the essence of "brain trust" or "expert" governance--the governance, for example of technocrats as clusters of expert vanguards, on the one hand, and the adoption by these elites of the techniques and normative sensibilities of Leninist professional revolutionaries on the other (consider here; its appeal to political conservatives here). In this sense techno-democracy (and its compliance based modalities of management) might be understood as a form of techno-Leninism; but so can the imposition of mandatory consciousness raising sensibilities of certain social justice approaches (cf., here). More radically, one wonders whether the Leninist impulse can be embedded more generally within the normative foundational premises of liberal democracy (my earlier reflections here: 

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Liberal Democratic Leninism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Tech Driven Social Progress: Remarks by Director Kratsios at the Endless Frontiers Retreat and "The Golden Age of American Innovation"). More radically still, the embedding of some of the core norm-techniques of Leninism within private life--sometimes euphemistically labelled mangerialism, and adopting variations of democratic centralism within a hierarchically arranged vanguardist mileu focusing on objectives based leadership (consider eg here, and in its germinate contemporary form in The Managerial Revolution (1941)). These might suggest that the future of capitalism cannot escape some form or another of Leninism; perhaps neither can liberal democracy. And there is the magic of this Proclamation--one continues to focus on normative oppositions; instruments to realize these normative idealized end points, however, including the measure against which they may operate on a social collective and its body politic, can vary with the circumstance. 

 And so the fundamental question that describing the tragedy that was Marxist-Leninism's tragic century implies but avoids answering. Leninism, and its vaguer forms of vanguardism, are constructed within a normative structure that knows no limits in the service of the ideology of which they are an instrument except this: in that service the only limitation is fidelity to that ideology's ideals and objectives; just how ruthless can such an instrumental system be permitted to be in that role? History suggests one answer; perhaps there are others. 

 

 

ANTI-COMMUNISM WEEK, 2025

Proclamations

November 7, 2025

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

This week, our Nation observes Anti-Communism Week, a solemn remembrance of the devastation caused by one of history’s most destructive ideologies.  Across continents and generations, communism has wrought devastation upon nations and souls.  More than 100 million lives have been taken by regimes that sought to erase faith, suppress freedom, and destroy prosperity earned through hard work, violating the God-given rights and dignity of those they oppressed.  As we honor their memory, we renew our national promise to stand firm against communism, to uphold the cause of liberty and human worth, and to affirm once more that no system of government can ever replace the will and conscience of a free people.

For more than a century, communism has brought nothing but ruin.  Wherever it spreads, it silences dissent, punishes beliefs, and demands that generations kneel before the power of the state instead of standing for freedom.  Its story is written in blood and sorrow, a grim reminder that communism is nothing more than another word for servitude.

In the 34 years since the end of the Cold War, the world has witnessed both the triumph of democracy and the persistence of tyranny in new forms.  New voices now repeat old lies, cloaking them in the language of “social justice” and “democratic socialism,” yet their message remains the same:  give up your freedom, place your trust in the power of the government, and trade the promise of prosperity for the empty comfort of control.  America rejects this evil doctrine.  We remain a Nation founded on the eternal truth that liberty and opportunity are the birthrights of every person, and that no ideology, whether foreign or domestic, can extinguish them.

As we mark Anti-Communism Week, we stand united in defense of the values that define us as a free people.  We honor the victims of oppression by keeping their cause alive and by ensuring that communism and every system that denies the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will find their place, once and for all, on the ash heap of history.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim the week of November 2 through November 8, 2025, as Anti-Communism Week. 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this seventh day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

                             DONALD J. TRUMP