A political doctrine based on MarxismLeninism (also called scientific communism) which has as its central tenet the communal ownership of property used in productive processes, and thereby the abolition of private property. While many social and religious communities based on communally shared property have been recorded throughout history, the origins of contemporary communism are associated with the theoretical writings of Karl Marx. In these writings, communism is seen as the final stage in human historical development, a process which sees societies move through feudalism, capitalism, and socialism (a transitional stage involving the dictatorship of the proletariat) before reaching this highest stage. According to Marx, social class (the fundamental social division) is determined by an individual's economic relationship to the means of production. In a society in which productive property is communally owned, every person has the same relationship to the means of production, and is thus of the same social class. Communal ownership therefore logically entails the abolition of social class. Similarly, because the State is seen by Marx as an instrument of class oppression, with the abolition of classes the function performed by the State is no longer necessary and, as a result, Marx predicted that it would wither away. The transition to socialism and then communism was to be brought about by the overthrow of the capitalist system and the seizing of the means of production by the proletariat (or working class). This new socio-economic system would allow for the liberation of human potential and for the development of a new social ethic of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Marx's theories have been developed and adopted by many communist and socialist parties, and these developments have been used to legitimize both the policies and the internal organization of these parties. Thus, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), initially under the leadership of Lenin and later of Stalin, reinterpreted Marxism as, first, MarxismLeninism and then Stalinism. The Party itself was regarded as the vanguard of the working class and, after the socialist revolution, acquired the leading role in society. The major features of this reinterpretation were the communalization of property and the means of production through the agency of the State, and the development of the doctrine of democratic-centralism. This doctrine meant that the CPSU became a highly centralized, monolithic, and secretive organization bearing little resemblance to the spontaneous, decentralized forms of organization envisaged under communism by Marx. Under Lenin and Stalin, the party became an instrument in the development of a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship. During the first half of the 20th-c, the CPSU provided the ideological lead for European communist parties, with only those which accepted this lead being able to join the Third International or Comintern (established 1919, dissolved 1943, Cominform founded in 1947). Latterly, however, the CPSU's leadership was both questioned and challenged for a variety of reasons. These include the economic inefficiencies associated with rigid central planning, the resentment of the leading role of the CPSU by the Yugoslav communist party (1948), and the neo-imperialist military crushing of attempts to liberalize communist regimes in Hungary and Poland (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The emergence of a challenge to Soviet-style communist rule in Poland in the late 1970s, which involved demands for political reforms and the lack of any military response by the USSR, further diminished the leading role of the CPSU.
Outside the communist world, some parties, such as the Italian Communist Party, had developed a new variant, Eurocommunism, which contained elements drawn more from social democracy than from MarxismLeninism, as a response to the changing nature and aspirations of the working class in advanced industrial societies. The fall from a position of dominance of the Communist Party in Poland and the holding of multiparty elections was the first of a series of events which led to the institution of political reform and free elections throughout Eastern Europe, and also in the USSR under the leadership of Secretary-General Gorbachev. This change was symbolized best by the breaching (1989) and demolition of the Berlin Wall, a structure which had stood from 1961 for the division of Europe into two ideologically opposed, armed camps. Following the failure of a military coup against Gorbachev in 1991, in which the CPSU was implicated, the Party was banned. Although the ban was later declared unconstitutional by the Russian Supreme Court, following the breakup of the former USSR, it lost all hold on power in the country which it ruled absolutely for 70 years. There remain a number of countries in which communist parties continue to rule, most notably the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. However, even in these the system is showing signs of strain, and in China the aging rulers (adherents to the variant of communism known as Maoism) had to resort to force to crush demands for reform in the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the banning of the Falun Gong sect in 1999. Only in North Korea and Cuba does a fully-blown totalitarian democratic-centralist regime continue in power.
The experience of communist regimes over the seven and a half decades following the Russian Revolution of 1917 gives rise to two types of assessment of applied Marxism. On the one hand there are those who say that Marxism has failed because of its economic inefficiencies and because, contrary to theory, communist states have seen an inexorable growth in the power of the State rather than the withering away predicted by Marx. On the other hand there are those who say that the regimes that call themselves communist are not really Marxist, but rather some dictatorial misinterpretation of Marxism and that, therefore, Marxism has not yet been tested in practice.
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Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a future classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production. There is a considerable variety of views among self-identified communists, including Maoism, Trotskyism, council communism, Luxemburgism, anarchist communism, Christian communism, and various currents of left communism, which are generally the more widespread varieties. However, various offshoots of the Soviet (what critics call the 'Stalinist') and Maoist interpretations of Marxism-Leninism comprise a particular branch of communism that has the distinction of having been the primary driving force for communism in world politics during most of the 20th century.
Karl Marx held that society could not be transformed from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production all at once, but required a transitional period which Marx described as the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society would actually look like. However, the term 'Communism', especially when it is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties that claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the late 19th century, Marxist theories motivated socialist parties across Europe, although their policies later developed along the lines of "reforming" capitalism, rather than overthrowing it. In 1918, this party changed its name to the Communist Party, thus establishing the contemporary distinction between communism and other trends of socialism.
After the success of the October Revolution in Russia, many socialist parties in other countries became communist parties, signaling varying degrees of allegiance to the new Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After World War II, Communists consolidated power in Eastern Europe, and in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China, which would later follow its own unique ideological path of communist development. By the early 1980s almost one-third of the world's population lived in Communist states.
Since the early 1970s, the term "Eurocommunism" was used to refer to the policies of communist parties in western Europe, which sought to break with the tradition of uncritical and unconditional support of the Soviet Union.
There is a history of anti-communism in the United States, which manifested itself in the Sedition Act of 1918 and in the subsequent Palmer Raids, for example, as well as in the later period of McCarthyism.
With the decline of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s and the breakup of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, communism's influence has decreased dramatically in Europe. However, around a quarter of the world's population still lives in Communist states, mostly in the People's Republic of China.
Early communism
The notion of communism has a history long predating Marx and Engels. Some have argued that Plato's The Republic and works by other ancient political theorists advocated communism in the form of communal living, and that various early Christian sects, in particular the early Church, as recorded in Acts of the Apostles, and indigenous tribes in the pre-Columbian Americas practiced communism in the form of communal living and common ownership. Christian communism espouses the idea that Christianity was meant to be communist in nature.
The word "communist" itself was coined in 1840 by Goodwyn Barmby, after the French word communisme, while discussing the egalitarianism associated with Gracchus Babeuf, one of the most radical participants in the 1789 French Revolution, and the Abbé Constant.
Karl Marx saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of mankind from which it arose. He then proposed that the next step in social evolution would be a return to communism, but at a higher level than when mankind had originally practiced primitive communism (in accordance with the influence of Hegel's dialectic on Marx).
In its contemporary form, communism grew out of the workers' movement of 19th century Europe.
Marxism
Like other socialists, Marx and Engels sought an end to capitalism and the systems which they perceived to be responsible for the exploitation of workers.
According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation;
Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle will result in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a communist society in which private ownership is abolished over time and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community. Marx himself wrote little about life under communism, giving only the most general indication as to what constituted a communist society. In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which each gave according to their abilities, and received according to their needs.' The German Ideology (1845) was one of Marx's few writings to elaborate on the communist future:
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
Marx's lasting vision was to add this vision to a positive scientific theory of how society was moving in a law-governed way toward communism, and, with some tension, a political theory that explained why revolutionary activity was required to bring it about.
By the end of the nineteenth century the terms "socialism" and "communism" were often used interchangeably. Lenin frequently used the term "socialism" to refer to Marx and Engels' supposed "first phase" of communism and used the term "communism" interchangeably with Marx and Engels' "higher phase" of communism.
These later aspects, particularly as developed by Lenin, provided the underpinning for the mobilizing features of 20th century Communist parties.
The growth of modern Communism
In Russia, the 1917 October Revolution was the first time any party with an avowedly Marxist orientation, in this case the Bolshevik Party, seized state power.
The moderate socialist Mensheviks opposed Lenin's communist Bolsheviks' plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed.
The usage of the terms "communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917, when the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a single-party regime devoted to the implementation of socialist policies under Leninism. In France, for example, the majority of the SFIO socialist party split in 1921 to form the SFIC (French Section of the Communist International).
During the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), the Bolsheviks nationalized all productive property and imposed a policy of "war communism," which put factories and railroads under strict government control, collected and rationed food, and introduced some bourgeois management of industry.
Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Communist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base;
The Soviet Union and other countries ruled by Communist Parties are often described as 'Communist states' with 'state socialist' economic bases.
Stalinism
The Stalinist version of socialism, with some important modifications, shaped the Soviet Union and influenced Communist Parties worldwide. The rapid development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, maintained that vision throughout the world, even around a decade following Stalin's death, when the party adopted a program in which it promised the establishment of communism within thirty years.
However, under Stalin's leadership, evidence emerged that dented faith in the possibility of achieving communism within the framework of the Soviet model.
Despite the activity of the Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party adopted the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country" and claimed that, due to the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism," it was possible, even necessary, to build socialism in one country alone.
Trotskyism
Trotsky and his supporters organized into the "Left Opposition," and their platform became known as Trotskyism.
Most recently, Trotskyist ideas have occasionally found an echo among political movements in countries such as Venezuela, where the Committee for a Marxist International has had contact with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
However, as a whole, Trotsky's theories and attitudes were never re-accepted in worldwide mainstream communist circles after Trotsky's expulsion, either within or outside of the Soviet bloc. Today, even given the fact that there are areas of the world where Trotskyist movements are rather large, the rest of the communist movement, and the working class as a whole, continues not to take Trotskyism seriously enough to coalesce in a mass movement around it or any of its offshoots.
Maoism
After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union's new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin's crimes and his cult of personality. As the Sino-Soviet Split in the international Communist movement turned toward open hostility, China portrayed itself as a leader of the underdeveloped world against the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Parties and groups that supported the Communist Party of China (CPC) in their criticism against the new Soviet leadership proclaimed themselves as 'anti-Revisionist' and denounced the CPSU and the parties aligned with it as revisionist "capitalist-roaders." The Sino-Soviet Split resulted in divisions amongst communist parties around the world. Effectively, the CPC under Mao's leadership became the rallying forces of a parallel international Communist tendency.
One notable example of the influence of Maoist ideas of an egalitarian agrarian revolution under Mao's conception of New Democracy was Democratic Kampuchea, led by Khmer Rouge and to a lesser degree Pol Pot.
After the death of Mao and the takeover of Deng Xiaoping, the international Maoist movement fell in disarray.
Other anti-revisionist currents
After the ideological row between the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labour of Albania in 1978, the Albanians rallied a new separate international tendency. The Albanians were able to win over a large share of the Maoists in Latin America, most notably the Communist Party of Brazil.
After the fall of the Communist government in Albania, the pro-Albanian parties are grouped around an international conference and the publication 'Unity and Struggle'.
Under the leadership of Hardial Bains, general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) a small current emerged in the 1970s of Marxist-Leninist groups in several countries.
Cold War years
By virtue of the Soviet Union's victory in the Second World War in 1945, the Soviet Army had occupied nations in both Eastern Europe and East Asia;
Communism had been vastly strengthened by the winning of many new nations into the sphere of Soviet influence and strength in Eastern Europe. Titoism, a new branch in the world communist movement, was labeled "deviationist." Albania also became an independent Communist nation after World War II.
Communism after the collapse of the Soviet Union
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and relaxed central control, in accordance with reform policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The Soviet Union did not intervene as Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary all abandoned Communist rule by 1990.
By the beginning of the 21st century, states controlled by Communist parties under a single-party system include the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova is a member of the Communist Party of Moldova, but the country is not run under single-party rule. Communist parties, or their descendant parties, remain politically important in many European countries and throughout the Third World, particularly in India.
The People's Republic of China has reassessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy;
Theories within Marxism as to why communism in Eastern Europe was not achieved after socialist revolutions pointed to such elements as the pressure of external capitalist states, the relative backwardness of the societies in which the revolutions occurred, and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum or class that arrested or diverted the transition press in its own interests. Marxist critics of the Soviet Union, most notably Trotsky, referred to the Soviet system, along with other Communist states, as "degenerated" or "deformed workers' states", arguing that the Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal.
Non-Marxists, in contrast, have often applied the term to any society ruled by a Communist Party and to any party aspiring to create a society similar to such existing nation-states. In the social sciences, societies ruled by Communist Parties are distinct for their single party control and their socialist economic bases.
Criticism of communism
A diverse array of writers and political activists have published criticism of communism, such as Soviet bloc dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel; Some of the critics were former Marxists, such as Wittfogel, who applied Marx's concept of "Oriental despotism" to communist societies such as the Soviet Union, and Silone, Wright, Koestler (among other writers) who contributed essays to the book The God that Failed (the title refers not to the Christian God but Marxism itself).
There have also been more direct criticisms of Marxism, such as criticisms of the labor theory of value or Marx's predictions. Nevertheless, Communist parties outside of the Warsaw Pact, such as the Communist parties in Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, differed greatly.
Comparing "Communism" to "communism"
According to the 1996 third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, communism and derived words are written with the lowercase "c" except when they refer to a political party of that name, a member of that party, or a government led by such a party, in which case the word "Communist" is written with the uppercase "C." Thus, one may be a communist (an advocate of communism) without being a Communist (a member of a Communist Party or another similar organization).
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