Who does Communism hurt: workers or bosses?

[Jay]

The Cold War was fought because the Soviet Union and the United States each believed that its respective economic, social, and political system was superior to the other, and moreover, that the gains of the other could only come at the expense their own.

It wasn't really a desire to preserve class distinctions, because America at that time didn't really look at disparities in wealth within society as a "class distinction" because there was a sense that upward mobility for the working and middle classes was possible and desirable, although the experience of the Great Depression had shaken that faith. And there wasn't really a fear that Communism was an existential threat to the United States itself, because the vast majority of Americans were anti-Communist.

This is not to say that there were many communist sympathizers and even an active Communist party, but these negative feelings regarding the excesses of capitalism were not to the extent that a majority or even a large minority wanted America to become communist.

The Cold War was a struggle waged on the question of what the future of the world at large would be, economically and politically, more so than that of what the future of the US or the USSR would be, for the capitalist and communist course, respectively, of these two nations, had already been long established, with even the most fervent advocates for world revolution on the side of the Soviets conceding that the United States was capitalist in its national character.

The military counterpart to the ideological conflict was a more serious problem from the perspective of both nations, because the USA and the USSR both had formidable military forces capable of unleashing tremendous destruction; but it was the ideological differences that led to the tension and suspicions that fueled the military arms race. The US feared the Soviet Union's military power and its capacity to withstand the tremendous human and material cost in the Second World War and against all odds emerge victorious, and was alarmed at the political influence that such a military strength would naturally beget.

[Good As Gold]

It hurts both.
"A Tribute to Communism (feel the love)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyUu-8nbd58