My experiences in the General Strike cured me of communism... I decided that the Communist Party was not for me and quietly lapsed, thus escaping the soul torments that troubled so many intellectuals during the 1930s.

In 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia, and I did not know the last American chiefs of the Third International, who now officially embrace Democracy. They would repudiate me even as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of The Party. But it was merely an accident that I was not.

Let me say frankly that in my judgment the CIO and the PAC are Communist organizations. I know that there are millions of good loyal Americans who belong to the CIO; but in my judgment, the leadership of that organization is definitely Communistic.

The 1950s and early '60s were emotionally rough for me. In 1950, when I was 23, I was named a Communist by Red Channels, an anti-Communist pamphlet, and was blacklisted by Hollywood from 1952 until the early 1960s.

His role in the expulsion of Michael O’Riordan (who founded the Communist Party of Ireland) from the Labour Party served to underline his assertion that ‘the working men of Ireland...have neither room nor scope for fascism or communism’.

::Oh, communism! That was a burning issue. It was an outrageous issue. To be termed a communist would damage your whole family, damage your whole world — your friends wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking about other people — because I wouldn’t go near the stuff. Sure, I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies — I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie.

What a weird experience I had had! At no time had I felt at home in the Communist party. I had always felt that the possibility was there, but always I was not quite sure of the motives of the people with whom I worked and they never seemed quite sure of mine. My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty. But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my blood and bones.

[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism.... I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism.... I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them..... the first book I read... was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin.... He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good.... Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police.... Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed.... I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ ... If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? .... The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul.... (pp. 79-83)

You have expelled us from the Party and sent us away as counter-revolutionaries without reckoning that the older ones among us fought for Communism for a quarter of a century and that the younger ones were in the ranks of the October revolution from the first moment of their conscious life. This fact does not give me the right to appeal to your sentiments, but since the time when you decided on the incredible step of expelling us from the Party, with an accusation which dishonors not us but those who have made it, and exiling us – from that moment it is time that you draw the balance and render an accounting on the whole matter.

Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one’s chance of usefulness.

Mussolini was, of course, not the only dissident ever to leave a socialist party, especially during the trauma of the First World War. In many countries, the great conflict demanded that a choice be made between the ideals of internationalist socialism and those of the nation.

I'm literally a communist, you idiot.

I didn’t think Communists should be allowed to hold office for the same reason that I don’t think you should give Al Capone the key to your safe-deposit box.

On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.