Hans F. Sennholz, “How Communistic Are We?” (1961)

Sennholz’s essay compares United States policy with the ten transitional measures listed in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The editorial foreword distinguishes economic communism from “Communism” as organized subversion; Sennholz’s own method is more specific. He asks not whether the United States is formally Soviet, but how far its policies have moved toward Marx’s ten transitional measures. His central thesis is that American capitalism has been progressively limited by taxation, regulation, credit control, federal ownership, and social planning.

"to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie and centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state."

This phrase supplies the essay’s measuring rod. Sennholz treats “centralization” not only as outright nationalization but also as effective control: when government regulates land, credit, transport, education, inheritance, labor, and production, private title becomes increasingly nominal. The structure follows Marx’s ten points one by one, asking how closely American policy in 1961 approximates each.

The early sections emphasize land, taxation, and inheritance. Federal land ownership, agricultural regimentation, estate taxes, and progressive income taxation are presented as partial realizations of Marx’s program. Sennholz’s argument depends on translating reforms normally defended as democratic or egalitarian into steps toward expropriation.

“a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”

For him, the income tax is the clearest example of incremental collectivism: first sold as a light burden on the rich, then expanded through depression and war until it reaches confiscatory levels. Estate taxation receives the same interpretation, not as fiscal policy but as practical abolition of inheritance. Even Kennedy’s proposed taxation of Americans abroad is read as approaching the Manifesto’s confiscation of emigrants’ property.

The most important conceptual move comes in the discussion of the Federal Reserve. Sennholz sees centralized credit as already achieved in substance, because monetary policy enables deficits, inflation, redistribution, and dependence on government. The state need not own every factory if it commands the monetary system within which all factories operate.

"centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."

The middle sections extend this logic to communications, transport, public enterprise, and planning. The FCC and ICC are treated as instruments of indirect socialization; federal power projects, atomic energy, and space exploration as examples of direct state production. What matters is cumulative dependence: subsidies, regulation, taxation, and ownership combine to make enterprise formally private but politically subordinate.

"the federal government has become the controlling partner in every enterprise."

The later sections address labor, agriculture, population distribution, and education. Sennholz regards the Peace Corps as the embryo of “industrial armies,” area planning as a step toward managed population distribution, and federal aid to education as a movement toward control over children’s minds and bodies. His treatment of child labor and labor regulation rejects humanitarian explanations; he argues that improved working conditions came from capital accumulation and productivity, not legislation.

The essay’s final argument concerns language. Sennholz claims that Fabian and liberal reformers have made Marxian measures palatable by renaming them: farm controls become aid to farmers, estate taxes become equal opportunity, credit control becomes stabilization, federal education funds become assistance. The sharpest charge is that collectivism has been nationalized rhetorically as “American.”

"desire our servitude, but be proud of it."

Yet the essay does not claim that America is already identical to the Soviet bloc. Its closing distinction is crucial: markets, constitutional restraints, due process, republican habits, and memories of liberty still remain. These remnants explain both America’s continuing prosperity and the possibility of resistance.

"Hampered and mutilated, our market economy has so far survived the fearful blows of government regulation and taxation."

The work’s relevance lies in its fusion of Austrian/libertarian economics with 1960s anti-Communist politics. It reads the welfare-regulatory state as a gradual implementation of Marx’s transitional program, even when advanced under liberal, patriotic, or emergency language. Its core contribution is a conceptual warning: communism can advance “by degrees,” through control rather than formal ownership, and through domestic policy justified as reform.