Free Audiobook Available for Download: "The Naked Communist" by W. Cleon Skousen

Librivox.org ^ | 1958 | W. Cleon Skousen

[rlmorel]

The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen

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I have spent the last several months working intensively on completing the dictation of an audiobook that is available as a free down on the reputable site Librivox.org, which is partnered with Gutenberg.org, a global repository for books that are not covered under international copyright laws (whether those books were printed before copyright law as we know it existed, or if a sufficient time has passed, and the copyright has expired.)

This important and relevant work may be downloaded at this link: LINK TO: “The Naked Communist”

It was first published in 1958 by W. Cleon Skousen (a former FBI employee) and has had updated editions published since then. We know it on this forum for the famous “45 Goals of Communism” which were read into the Congressional Record in 1963, and which have also been posted here on this forum many times.

Note that this book is available for purchase as an audiobook, ebook, and paperback or hardcopy at audible.com and amazon.com, as well as other sources. However, I made this recording so it is freely downloadable at Librivox.org (Link above) without needing an account. You can simply download it and listen on your smart phone or wherever you like to listen to audio.

You can also read this book for free if that is your preference (also without opening an account) at LINK TO: “The Naked Communist” (PDF format) but keep in mind that you would need to open an account to read the book. (Haithitrust is an academic source, and it is safe and reliable). However, you can download the audiobook and listen to it for free at Librivox.org.

Before dictating this audiobook, I had never read the work before. I was well acquainted with it due to the famous “45 Communist Goals”, but dictating, it was my first exposure to the full text of the book. I was so impressed that I immediately purchased a Kindle version and a hardcopy.

There are many books I have read which have been most influential to me in understanding Marxism and Communism, such as Whitaker Chambers's "witness" and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”. I have also read many books by Thomas Sowell (13 of them!) which have contributed greatly to my understanding of the evil socialism.

The thing I found most impressive about this book, why I worked so hard to get it done before the election, and why I am posting it here as a source for downloading, is because this book was written contemporaneously with world events as they were happening during the Cold War, and nearly every single thing I read in this book has either passed or appears it is going to come to pass with respect to Communism.

In his book, W. Cleon Skousen provides history on both Marx and Engles, and also explains in some detail the explanation they dreamed up for Communism that they could use as a “fact base” to justify their replacement of God with Man. It is educational, fascinating, and repulsive all at the same time. It has holes so big in it (which he describes) that you could drive a truck through. It reminds me (in a creepy fashion) of the way certain books of science fiction become so popular that the followers and fans of the book try to build an extensive history and even languages complete with syntax to make them more “real”, as the example of Star Trek fans created the Klingon language for that purpose.

We need to fight this fight against Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. They are trying to peddle their ideology as something like “Democratic Socialism”, and as W. Cleon Skousen makes clear in work, they are all the same thing, even under the sheep’s clothing of “Democratic Socialism. (He makes the point, using the words of Marx and the Soviet Leadership at the the time, that they were fully aware that Socialism was only a waypoint, and that the true nature of Communism had to be concealed until they achieved or had critical mass for achieving full control.)

Much like what we see today when they soft-pedal their hideous Socialist wares.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote in his seminal work The Gulag Archipelago:

“…And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward…”

We need to remember that so we don’t burn later in the camps. And we need to remember that it is easier to fight to stay out from ending up under the boot of tyranny than it is to fight your way out from under that boot while it is on your neck.

[rlmorel]

I would like to convey some pertinent history of why I see this book as so timely and important, but there is history behind it that is relevant to understanding why it is. There are a lot of people who think this current explosion of elected officials who are openly Marxist is somehow new and unexpected, and the openness and brazenness of these people running for office actually is. However, to those of us who have monitored and watched this often subterranean battle for decades, we know that this battle is not a new one, and that is widely important to understand.

In that context, I want to explain this battle as it has been going on in our country for decades…actually, approaching a century now.

We are at a critical point in this country with regard to communism. We have been fighting this battle for many years, and the intensity, awareness, and participation in this battle has ebbed and flowed.

During the 1920s in the 1930s, the battle against Marxism, Socialism, and Communism, this battle largely took place out of sight of the eyes of the Public. The FBI (under J Edgar Hoover) was very involved in this fight early on from the late 20s into the mid 50s, but to most citizens, communism was something that frivolous young people often dipped their fingers into, and then forgot about it afterwards, and nobody gave it much thought. In other words, it was not thought of as dangerous as much as it was thought of as a youthful indiscretion or peccadillo. It was largely thought that stupidity of youth was harmless, and almost a passage of rite for many. They grew up, realized how silly they had been, and became responsible American citizens.

However, in the 1940s, especially after World War II (where the Soviets were presented to the American Public as our friends and allies during the war) the true intentions of communism burst onto the Public scene as the Cold War began. The world saw hundreds of millions of people become captives to Communism as the Iron Curtain came crashing down.

After Senator Joseph McCarthy made communism disreputable in the eyes of Americans, the threat of communism inside this country largely dropped out of sight. However, it did not disappear. There were many of these people with Marxist, socialist, and communist leanings who did not abandon these corrosive ideologies. They often banded together, hiding their beliefs out of a rational fear of stigma being applied to them. They socialized, and even vacationed together in like-minded groups.

David Horowitz described this in his phenomenal 1996 biography: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. (In that book, he describes the traumatic experience he had when he was closely allied with the Black Panthers and found out that they had murdered a woman that he worked with in that organization because they thought "she knew too much". That planted the seed of thought in his brain that eventually resulted in his reputation of leftism, and he became a staunch conservative after that. It is well worth reading.)

We began to see radicalization of college students during the 1960s, and many of these radicals were again submerged, but instead of disappearing or dropping their communism and continuing with life, they began to cut their hair and put on suits to enter the halls of power in this country.

For the most part, politicians with Marxist, socialist, and communist leanings remain largely invisible, but they were not dormant. A good example of these types of people were likes of Bernadette Dohrn and Bill Ayers. A more pertinent example, with far reaching implications were activists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, both both of whom were key figures in getting the legislation passed in the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, legislation that progressive activists had been pushing for almost a decade, and now commonly known as the “Motor Voter" bill.

If you are unaware of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (who were instrumental in the past that act as shown in the picture below) you aren't alone. This couple actually had a strategy they developed that was named after them called eponymously: the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”.

In short, from Wikipedia (which I use deliberately as a source in this case) the Cloward-Piven Strategy is described as follows:

“Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize "militant anti poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and "redistributing income through the federal government”.

The point of highlighting these two people shows that as early as 1993, the Marxists, socialist, and communists began to be openly visible as allies to one of the two major political parties in this country. (I will note that for those who were paying attention, this relationship between the Marxists, socialists, and communists with the Democrat party would've been apparent back in the late 40s into the mid 50s. To be fair, the Democrat party was largely unintentionally aligning with those people, but was largely doing it out of damage control because they knew that normal Americans would be repulsed by their seeming support of the Marxists of all stripes. But also in fairness, one cannot overlook the fact that the Soviets and other communist around the world, such as China saw the Democratic Party as easily infiltratable, and we can see now exactly why.

In the same way that both communists and fascists leading up to and during World War II recognized that the "other" side was a fertile ground for recruiting, communist, realized that the American left was a fertile ground for recruitment.

And that means the American Democrat Party.

[rlmorel]

Greetings-you mentioned to me that you might be interested in this audiobook. You can find the link above.

[rlmorel]

This is vital context (from this book The Naked Communist. It is nearly unnerving to see how many of these "goals" they have already accomplished, and I encourage people to listen to the statements of the current "Democratic Socialists of America" and many others affiliated and part of today's Democrat Party and verify for themselves how they closely align with this list from 1958.

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Congressional Record — Appendix, pp. A34-A35

January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963

Mr. HERLONG: Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America. At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen: [From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]

CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.

[Texas_Jarhead]

His other book, The Naked Capitalist, is also a good read.

[proust]

That list must have sounded like far off science fiction in 1963 America. But so many of the goals have been accomplished.

[frank ballenger]

Public service for you to post this. I heard someone reference it recently and the stuff sounded as fresh as a loathsome socialist on the news shows now.

Communist Party member Pete Seegar (died 2014) after lying to Congress about being one “That’s not the question you should be asking. You should be asking me....” years later said: “I don’t need the Communist Party now. I’m out. I’m through with it. All I wanted is in the Democratic Party. Black power, women’s rights, abortion rights, cutting down American military power around the world, unions given special power against capitalists taking advantage of us all. It’s all there in the Democratic Party now.”

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks, RL. I bought "The Naked Communist" years ago and never read it. I planned to read it in retirement but I developed an eye problem that makes reading very hard, so I've been using more audio books. I look forward to this.

The "Red Green Alliance" is especially troublesome. Did you read the article in AT a couple days ago?

"The Mohammunist Manifesto—Public Or Private, Nothing Is Beyond Our Control."

Whether the government is Islamic or communist, the leaders can reach into every sphere of life and can truly make the rules up as they go along.
By Milli Sands
August 9, 2026

We have a very serious two-front war at home now. We are about to pay a very dear price for having let the communist "long march" strategy gain a foothold, letting them go through our educational establishment, and letting George Bush's "Religion of Peace" take root after 9/11. Petrodollars, the islamist "jihad by migration," the cowardice resulting from leftists instill fear being called "racist" or "islamophobe," the decades of preaching about "tolerance" and teaching that to our kids, the rise of AWFLs, Cloward-Piven taking root.

We really and truly face national and existential disaster. Fighting WW II was a lot easier than fighting this. There we had avowed enemies on the battlefield. Now the battlefield is at home and in the minds of our young people.

[Inyo-Mono]

Bookmark.

[rlmorel]

Thank you, TJ. I looked on Audible for it, but it was not available. I am going to search for other avenues including Librivox.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Bkmk

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Bkmrk

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Impala64ssa]

"An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms." Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

As we see, 0bama and his lackeys learned this lesson very well. 🤢😖🤮🤮

[rlmorel]

I know. It is astonishing how prescient that book was.

All those rules are daunting. Look at just one:

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.

You hear this a lot these days from the people who want to defund the police. We all wondered where they got that insane "solution" of having social workers handle criminals from...

[Impala64ssa]

I read the Naked Communist a long time ago. Another good read, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, who like David Horowitz years later was an ex commie. Never mind the CRT and trans ideology 🐂💩, those books belong in every public, HS and college library

[ProgressingAmerica]

Ping to ping list

Bob did excellent work here, who knew this book was open source/public domain prior to now? As such we can do whatever we want with it BUT. We are respectful, we want the author's original work and message fully intact because that provides the pinnacle of maximum value. The more deviations there are, the lower the value goes.

Ping added a few extra user names who it is hoped might find value in this. Please disregard if your username was included in error.

[nicollo]

Great job! BTTP

[rlmorel]

Whittaker Chambers's Witness was one of the most politically influential books for me. I had little to no familiarity with it, but I had been observing the perfidy of the Left for many years at that point, and it shocked me to see that, although the technology had changed, the tactics of the Left had not.

The same blatant arrogant lying. The same condescending deception. The same harnessing of good and moral attitudes and conversion to weapons to turn them as weapons against trusting people they deem as enemies. The same support of Leftists in 1949 by the Media that we see today.

A truly putrid class of people, Leftists, and even more so since they try to clothe themselves in the fabric of moral superiority and compassion, and then cover those deceptions with a fake cloak of patriotism and love of America.

It shocked and disgusted me. And although I had already been long inclined to view Leftists in the most negative manner, the reading of Witness firmly cemented those feelings in me.

My wife was learning to paint, and she chose these books as my favorites (from hearing me talk about them) as subject matter:

As an interesting side note: I had a personal web page (back when that was kind of a thing, and I was learning the rudiments of HTML) that prominently featured many quotes by Whittaker Chambers, and I had an entire page with the full copy of his "Letter to my Children", which was just brilliant.

I was contacted by his grandson, who politely and cordially asked me to take the page down due to copyright protections, which I immediately did.

Then, I got another call from him, and he said it was still up, and asked me to kindly take it down, so I said I had done that, but when I looked, it was still there. So I removed it again, and sent him an email saying I had made sure I removed it. And he sent me back another email saying it was still there. This all went on over the course of a few months.

It turned out I had some kind of backup and restore process running for the web page, and it was restoring it behind the scenes. I finally got it permanently removed.

It nearly made me crazy, because he was so polite and patient. He must have thought I was some kind of blithering idiot.

[rlmorel]

Thank you, ProgressingAmerica. I very much enjoyed this book. It is now one of those books I have the audiobook, hardcopy, and ebook versions of it.

I learned a LOT reading it.

[rlmorel]

Thanks, nicollo. That was a great book. What I found most fascinating was Marx and Engles's attempts (as described in the 3rd Chapter (THE COMMUNIST APPROACH TO THE SOLUTION OF WORLD PROBLEMS) to create a foundational philosophical underpinning to the structure of society, societal morality, and religion.

It was crazy. Skousen deconstructs all of their constructs and claims in Chapter 4, and it is almost hilarious to see how hard Marx and Engles tried to create those things, and how hard the Communists over the years tried so hard to uphold Marx's and Engles's "discoveries", but in some cases, could not.

Then, they simply stopped talking about those parts they couldn't logically square away. It was fascinating to read.

You could almost imagine the commissars saying "No, no, Comrade. Didn't you read the last update? We aren't supposed to focus on those things or initiate discussion on them anymore. You should be more careful."