communism
A leaflet containing the Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels while members of the Communist League in London.
Revolutionary socialism based on the theories of the political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, emphasizing common ownership of the means of production and a planned, or command economy. The principle held is that each should work according to his or her capacity and receive according to his or her needs. Politically, it seeks the overthrow of capitalism through a proletarian (working-class) revolution. The first communist state was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) after the revolution of 1917. Revolutionary socialist parties and groups united to form communist parties in other countries during the inter-war years. After World War II, communism was enforced in those countries that came under Soviet occupation. Communism as the ideology of a nation state survives in only a few countries in the 21st century, notably China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam, where market forces are being encouraged in the economic sphere.
China emerged after 1961 as a rival to the USSR in world communist leadership, and other countries attempted to adapt communism to their own needs. The late 1980s saw a movement for more individual freedom in many communist countries, ending in the abolition or overthrow of communist rule in Eastern European countries and Mongolia, and further state repression in China. The failed hard-line coup in the USSR against President Gorbachev in 1991 resulted in the abandonment of communism there. However, in December 1995 the reform-socialist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) did well in Russian parliamentary elections, with the party's leader, Gennady Zyuganov, running high in the opinion polls. Reform communist parties have also recovered some strength in other states in central and Eastern Europe, forming governments. In Hungary the ex-communist Hungarian Socialist Party achieved power in a coalition government in 1994; in Lithuania, the ex-communist Democratic Labour Party (LDLP) won a parliamentary majority and the presidency in 1993; and in Poland the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and Polish Peasant Party (PSL) polled strongly in the December 1993 elections. Communist parties also remain the largest parliamentary forces in Moldova (in March 1998 elections the Moldovan Communist Party (PCM) won the biggest share (30% of the popular vote) and the Ukraine (since 1994 an alliance of communist and socialist parties have formed the largest bloc).
Communism and social democracy
Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto 1848 put forward the theory that human society, having passed through successive stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, must advance to communism.
This combines with a belief in economic determinism to form the central communist concept of dialectical materialism. Marx believed that capitalism had become a barrier to progress and needed to be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat (working class), which would build a socialist society. The Social Democratic parties formed in Europe in the second half of the 19th century professed to be Marxist, but gradually began to aim at reforms of capitalist society rather than at the radical social change envisaged by Marx. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, remained Marxist, and after the November 1917 revolution changed its name to Communist Party to emphasize its difference from Social Democratic parties elsewhere. The communal basis of feudalism was still strong in Russia, and Lenin and Joseph Stalin were able to impose the communist system. China's communist revolution was completed in 1949 under Mao Zedong.
China and Russia
Both China and the USSR took strong measures to maintain or establish their own types of ‘orthodox’ communism in countries on their borders (the USSR in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and China in North Korea and Vietnam). In more remote areas (the USSR in the Arab world and Cuba, and China in Albania) and (both of them) in the newly-emergent African countries, these orthodoxies were installed as the fount of doctrine and the source of technological aid.
Uprisings and dissent
In 1956 the Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev denounced
Stalinism, and there were uprisings in Hungary and Poland. During the late 1960s and the 1970s it was debated whether the state required to be maintained as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ once revolution on the economic front was achieved, or whether it then became the state of the entire people: Engels, Lenin, Khrushchev, and
Liu Shaoqi held the latter view; Stalin and Mao the former.
Communist grip weakens
After the 1960s communist parties in many capitalist countries (for example, Japan and the
Eurocommunism of France, Italy, and the major part of the British Communist Party) rejected Soviet dominance. In the 1980s there was an expansion of political and economic freedom in Eastern Europe: the USSR remained a single-party state, but with a relaxation of strict party orthodoxy and a policy of
perestroika (‘restructuring’), while the other Warsaw Pact countries moved towards an end to communist rule and its replacement by free elections within more democratic political systems. However, the 1995 Russian parliamentary and 1996 presidential elections showed that the communists still had significant popular support.
Other manifestations of communism have included Libya's attempt to combine revolutionary socialism with Islam and the devastation of Cambodia (then called Kampuchea) by the extreme communist Khmer Rouge 1975–79. Latin America suffered from the US fear of communism, with the democratically-elected Marxist regime in Chile violently overthrown in 1973, and the socialist government of Nicaragua (until it fell in 1990) involved in a prolonged civil war against US-backed guerrillas (Contras).
Origins In early times property was often held in common, and in this respect the religious orders have always practised a form of communism. Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia advocate social organizations which have many communistic elements. Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier are also generally considered to be communists, though their systems do not demand absolute equality. In theory, communism posits the disappearance of classes and the withering away of the state as an oppressive institution of class domination. |
Communism in the USSR Russian communism aimed at much more than the socialization of wealth, for the state seized the means of wealth-production. Following, adapting, and sometimes distorting Marx, Lenin contended that revolution must precede good order, and that a dictatorship was essential in order to procure national equality. Milder notions of gradual change were repudiated and the necessity of tearing down existing institutions, no matter how great the immediate cost, before new ones could be devised, was proclaimed. Russian communism, successful at all events in revolution and in the establishment of a dictatorship, proceeded along the two definite lines of education and propaganda in order to make certain its future; but even the vigorous prosecution of these methods did not lessen the apparent need for ever-increasing powers of dictatorship. |
| This ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was exercised through the soviets (or councils) and trade unions by the Communist Party. The constitution of 1936 described the USSR as having become ‘a socialist state of workers and peasants’, and the Party as ‘the vanguard of the working people’. Socialism, the transition stage on the path to communism, was proclaimed to have been essentially built. During the ensuing period, however, that of the completion of ‘socialist construction’ and the start of ‘communist construction’, state power continued to be referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This term finally disappeared in 1961, when Khrushchev's new party programme proclaimed that as class harmony was now perfect, the dictatorship had given way to a ‘state of the whole people’. |
| This change paralleled (1) the Party's transformation into ‘the vanguard of the Soviet people, a party of the entire people’, and (2) the final acceptance of the ‘intelligentsia’ (all intellectuals and white-collar workers) as a third, non-antagonistic class, equal in status to the workers and peasants. According to the 1961 party programme, the ‘material-technical base of communism’ should theoretically be built by 1980, and the current Soviet generation would live under full communism. Except for the more independent Chinese, Cuban, and Yugoslav parties, the other ruling communist parties usually copied the Soviet pattern in matters concerning the ideology of communism. |
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