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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 and the absence of private property. It can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement. Communism also refers to a variety of political movements which claim the establishment of such a social organization as their ultimate goal.

Early forms of human social organization have been described as 'primitive communism' by Marxists. However, communism as a political goal generally is a conjectured form of future social organization. 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. The competing branch of Trotskyism has not had such a distinction.

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 state 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 the word is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties which 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. The exception was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. One branch of this party, commonly known as the Bolsheviks and headed by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in taking control of the country after the toppling of the Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917. 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. Among the other countries in the Third World that adopted a pro-communist government at some point were Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Mozambique. 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. Such parties were politically active and electorally significant in France and Italy.

There is a history of anti-communism in the United States. However, many regions of South America and Central America continue to have strong communist movements of various types.

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. In ancient Greece the idea of communism was connected to a myth about the "golden age" of humanity, when society lived in full harmony, before the development of private property. 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.

In his 1516 treatise Utopia, Thomas More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose leaders administered it through the application of reason. François Rabelais also described such a utopian society through the mythic Abbey of Thélème. In the 17th century, communist thought arguably surfaced again in England. Eduard Bernstein, in his 1895 Cromwell and Communism argued that several groupings in the English Civil War, especially the Diggers (or "True Levellers") espoused clear communistic, agrarian ideals, and that Oliver Cromwell's attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile.

Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Enlightenment era of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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. A correspondent of Engels, Goodwyn Barmby himself founded the London Communist Propaganda Society in 1841. "Utopian socialism", a term itself coined by Marx in contrast with "scientific socialism" (a term coined by Engels), designed all utopian writings and foundation of settlements by writers such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Saint-Simon.

Karl Marx saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of mankind from which it arose. When humanity was capable of producing surplus, private property developed, society became unequal, resulting in classical society, and then to the feudal mode of production, to its current state of capitalism reached by a violent primitive accumulation of capital, which in part depended on the development of mercantilism. 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. At the time, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for creating a new class of unskilled, urban factory workers who labored under harsh conditions, and for widening the gulf between rich and poor. Engels, who lived in Manchester, observed the organization of the Chartist movement (see History of British socialism), while Marx departed from his university comrades to meet the proletariat in France and Germany.

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. But whereas earlier socialists often favored longer-term social reform, Marx and Engels believed that popular revolution was all but inevitable, and the only path to socialism.

According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of constraints but as action having moral content. They believed that communism allowed people to do what they want but also put humans in such conditions and such relations with one another that they would not wish to have need for exploitation. Whereas for Hegel the unfolding of this ethical life in history is mainly driven by the realm of ideas, for Marx, communism emerged from material, especially the development of the means of production.

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. It is clear that it entails abundance in which there is little limit to the projects that humans may undertake. In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which each gave according to his abilities, and received according to his 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. However, Marx and Engels argued that communism would not emerge from capitalism in a fully developed state, but would pass through a "first phase" in which most productive property was owned in common, but with some class differences remaining. The "first phase" would eventually give way to a "higher phase" in which class differences were eliminated, and a state was no longer needed. 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. Later writers such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas modified Marx's vision by allotting a central place to the state in the development of such societies, by arguing for a prolonged transition period of socialism prior to the attainment of full communism.

Some of Marx's contemporaries, such as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, espoused similar ideas, but differed in their views of how to reach to a harmonic society with no classes. To this day there has been a split in the workers movement between Marxist communists and anarchists. The anarchists are against, and wish to abolish, every hierarchical institution including the state. Among them, anarchist-communists such as Peter Kropotkin theorised an immediate transition to one society with no classes under gift economics, while anarcho-syndicalists argue that labor unions, as opposed to Communist parties, are the organizations that can help change the society.

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 assumption of state power by the Bolsheviks generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx believed that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development. Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. It should be noted, however, that Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois capitalism. Other socialists also believed that a Russian revolution could be the precursor of workers' revolutions in the West.

The moderate socialist Mensheviks opposed Lenin's communist Bolsheviks' plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Bolsheviks successful rise to power was based upon the slogans "peace, bread, and land" and "All power to the Soviets," slogans which tapped the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, the peasants' demand for land reform, and popular support for the Soviets.

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. The Second International had dissolved in 1916 over national divisions, as the separate national parties that composed it did not maintain a unified front against the war, instead generally supporting their respective nation's role. Lenin thus created the Third International (Comintern) in 1919 and sent the Twenty-one Conditions, which included democratic centralism, to all European socialist parties willing to adhere. In France, for example, the majority of the SFIO socialist party split in 1921 to form the SFIC (French Section of the Communist International). Henceforth, the term "Communism" was applied to the objective of the parties founded under the umbrella of the Comintern. Their program called for the uniting of workers of the world for revolution, which would be followed by the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as well as the development of a socialist economy. Ultimately, their program held, there would develop a harmonious classless society, with the withering away of the state.

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. After three years of war and the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin declared the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which was to do a "limited place for a limited time to capitalism." The NEP lasted until 1930, when Joseph Stalin's personal fight for leadership spelled the end of it. Following the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks formed in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire.

Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Communist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base; they were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline.

The Soviet Union and other countries ruled by Communist Parties are often described as 'Communist states' with 'state socialist' economic bases. This usage indicates that they proclaim that they have realized part of the socialist program by abolishing private control of the means of production and establishing state control over the economy; however, they do not declare themselves truly communist, as they have not established communal ownership of property.

Stalinism

The Stalinist version of socialism, with some important modifications, shaped the Soviet Union and influenced Communist Parties worldwide. It was heralded as a possibility of building communism via a massive program of industrialization and collectivization. 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. Stalin had created in the Soviet Union a repressive state that dominated every aspect of life. Later, growth declined, and rent-seeking and corruption by state officials increased, which dented the legitimacy of the Soviet system.

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. This departure from Marxist internationalism was challenged by Leon Trotsky, whose theory of "permanent revolution" stressed the necessity of world revolution.

Trotskyism

Trotsky and his supporters organized into the "Left Opposition," and their platform became known as Trotskyism. But Stalin eventually succeeded in gaining full control of the Soviet regime, and their attempts to remove Stalin from power resulted in Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. After Trotsky's exile, world communism fractured in two distinct branches: Stalinism and Trotskyism. Trotsky later founded the Fourth International, a Trotskyist rival to the Comintern, in 1938.

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. Many Trotskyist parties are also active in politically stable, developed countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.

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. This remained the case even after the Secret Speech and subsequent events exposed the fallibility of Stalinism and Maoism. 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 to not take Trotskyism seriously enough to coalesce in a mass movement around it or any of its offshoots. Thus, Trotskyism has never been successful in building a mass social movement capable of overthrowing a capitalist state apparatus.

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. He called for a return to the principles of Lenin, thus presaging some change in Communist methods. However, Khrushchev's reforms heightened ideological differences between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, which became increasingly apparent in the 1960s. 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. Notably, the Party of Labour of Albania sided with the People's Republic of China. Effectively, the CPC under Mao's leadership became the rallying forces of a parallel international Communist tendency. The ideology of CPC, Mao Zedong Thought (generally referred to as 'Maoism'), was adopted by many of these groups.

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. China and North Korea were the only Communist states visited by Khmer Rouge during their reign. Later, China was to arm Khmer Rouge rebels, after they had been overthrown by Vietnamese invasion.

After the death of Mao and the takeover of Deng Xiaoping, the international Maoist movement fell in disarray. One sector accepted the new leadership in China, a second renounced the new leadership and reaffirmed their commitment to Mao's legacy, and a third renounced Maoism altogether and aligned with the Albanian Party of Labour.

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. This tendency would demarcate itself by a strict defense of the legacy of Joseph Stalin and fierce criticism of virtually all other Communist groupings. The Albanians were able to win over a large share of the Maoists in Latin America, most notably the Communist Party of Brazil. This tendency has occasionally been labeled as 'Hoxhaism' after the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha.

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'. Another important institution for them is the biannual International Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Youth Camp, which was initiated in 1970s.

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; as a result, communism as a movement spread to many new countries. This expansion of communism both in Europe and Asia gave rise to a few different branches of its own, such as Maoism.

Communism had been vastly strengthened by the winning of many new nations into the sphere of Soviet influence and strength in Eastern Europe. Governments modeled on Soviet Communism took power with Soviet assistance in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania. A Communist government was also created under Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, but Tito's independent policies led to the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, which had replaced the Comintern. Titoism, a new branch in the world communist movement, was labeled "deviationist." Albania also became an independent Communist nation after World War II.

By 1950 the Chinese Communists held all of Mainland China, thus controlling the most populous nation in the world. Other areas where rising Communist strength provoked dissension and in some cases led to actual fighting include the Korean Peninsula, Laos, many nations of the Middle East and Africa, and, especially, Vietnam (see Vietnam War). With varying degrees of success, Communists attempted to unite with nationalist and socialist forces against what they saw as Western imperialism in these poor countries.

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. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

By the beginning of the 21st century, states under control 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 descendent 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; and the People's Republic of China, Laos, Vietnam, and, to a lesser degree, Cuba have reduced state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. The People's Republic of China runs Special Economic Zones dedicated to market-oriented enterprise, free from central government control. Several other communist states have also attempted to implement market-based reforms, including Vietnam. Officially, the leadership of the People's Republic of China refers to its policies as "Socialism with Chinese characteristics."

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 "state capitalism," arguing that the Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal. They argued that the state and party bureaucratic elite acted as a surrogate capitalist class in the heavily centralized and repressive political apparatus.

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. While anticommunists applied the concept of "totalitarianism" to these societies, many social scientists identified possibilities for independent political activity within them, and stressed their continued evolution up to the point of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Today, Marxist revolutionaries are conducting armed insurgencies in India, Nepal, and Colombia.

Criticism of communism

Main article: Criticisms 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; social theorists Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Ralf Dahrendorf, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Karl Wittfogel; economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman; historians and social scientists Robert Conquest, Stéphane Courtois, Richard Pipes, and R. J. Rummel; anti-communist leftists Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Saul Alinsky, Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler, and Bernard-Henri Levy; novelist Ayn Rand; and philosophers Leszek Kołakowski and Karl Popper. Some writers such as Courtois go beyond attributing the estimated tens of millions of deaths and other large-scale human rights abuses during the 20th century merely to the Communist regimes associated with these atrocities; rather, these authors present the events occurring in these countries, particularly under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, as an argument against Marxism itself. 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. Thus a criticism that is applicable to one such party is not necessarily applicable to another.

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).

See also

• Communist state
• Anti-communism
• Criticisms of communism
• Post-Communism
• Communization
• Communist Manifesto

Schools of communism

• Council communism
• De Leonism
• Eurocommunism
• Hoxhaism
• Juche
• Left communism
• Luxembourgism
• Marxism
• Leninism
• Marxism-Leninism
• Maoism
• Religious communism
• Stalinism
• Titoism
• Trotskyism

Organisations and people

• Communist Party
• List of Communist parties
• List of Communists

References

1. Eduard Bernstein, (1895). Kommunistische und demokratisch-sozialistische Strömungen während der englischen Revolution, J.H.W. Dietz, Stuttgart. ISBN 081246303. Sources available at
2. Karl Marx, (1845). The German Ideology, Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow. ISBN 1573922587. Sources available at
3. H. Gordon Skilling (April 1966). "Interest Groups and Communist Politics". World Politics. 18 (3): 435–451.�UNIQ3ab34e171166e61b-HTMLCommentStrip7c7dfbc41ccbeb7000000002
4. Arch Getty (1985). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered: 1933-1938. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521335701.
5. Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087

External links

Online resources for original Marxist literature

• Marxists Internet Archive
• What is Communism? (PDF File) Booklet explaining what communism is. Presented by The Communist League
• Libertarian Communist Library
• Marxist.net
• Theses on Feuerbach
• Principles of Communism
• The Communist Manifesto
• The Civil War in France
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
• Reform or Revolution?
• What is to be Done?
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
• Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
• The Accumulation of Capital
• The National Question
• Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism
• The State and Revolution
• The Russian Revolution

• Communism
• Economic ideologies
• Political ideologies