Communism
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Communism Portal
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Communism (from Latin communis = "com-
mon") is a socioeconomic structure and polit-
ical ideology that promotes the establishment
of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society
based on common ownership and control of
the means of production and property in gen-
eral.[1][2][3] In political science, the term
"communism" is sometimes used to refer to
communist states, a form of government in
which the state operates under a one-party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
1
system and declares allegiance to Marxism-
Leninism or a derivative thereof, even if the
party does not actually claim that it has
already developed communism.
Forerunners of communist ideas existed
already since antiquity and then in particular
in the 18th and early 19th century France,
with thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
even more radical Gracchus Babeuf. The
egalitarianism then emerged as a significant
political power in the first half of 19th cen-
tury in Western Europe. In the world shaped
by the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution, the newly established political
left included many various political and intel-
lectual movements, which are the direct an-
cestors of today’s communism and socialism
– these two then newly minted words were al-
most interchangeable in the time – and of an-
archism or anarcho-communism. The two by
far most influential theoreticians of commun-
ism of the 19th century were Germans Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The
Communist Manifesto
(1848), who also
helped to form the first openly communist
political organizations and firmly tied com-
munism with the idea of revolution conduc-
ted by the exploited working class. Karl Marx
posited that communism would be the final
stage in human society, which would be
achieved after an intermediate stage called
the revolutionary dictatorship of the prolet-
ariat. Communism in the Marxian sense
refers
to
a
classless,
stateless
and
oppression-free society where decisions on
what to produce and what policies to pursue
are made democratically, allowing every
member of society to participate in the
decision-making process in both the political
and
economic
spheres
of
life.
Some
"revisionist" Marxists of the following gener-
ations, henceforth known as socialists or so-
cial democrats, slowly drifted away from the
radical views of Marx after his death in 1883;
other communists, like Vladimir Lenin, con-
tinued to prepare world revolution.
The communist left, led by Vladimir Lenin,
successfully came to power in Russia (1917),
disrupted by the World War I. After years of
civil war (1917–1921), international isolation
and internal struggle in the Communist
party, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
emerged as a new global superpower on the
victorious side of the World War II. In the five
years after the World War, communist re-
gimes were established in many states of
Central and Eastern Europe and in China.
Communism began to spread its influence in
the Third World while continuing to be a sig-
nificant political force in many Western coun-
tries. International relations between Soviets
and the West, led by USA, quickly worsened
after the end of the war and there began the
Cold war, a continuing state of conflict, ten-
sion and competition between the United
States and the Soviet Union and those coun-
tries’ respective allies. The "Iron curtain"
between West and East then divided Europe
and world from the mid-1940s to the early
1990s. Despite many communist successes
like the victorious Vietnam War (1959-1975)
or the first human spaceflight (1961), the
communist regimes were in the long term un-
able to keep up with the West. People under
communist regimes showed their discontent
in events like the Hungarian Revolution of
1956, Prague Spring of 1968 or Polish Solid-
arity movement in early 1980s. Since 1985,
the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
tried to implement market and democratic
reforms under devices like perestroika ("re-
structuring") and glasnost ("transparency").
His reforms sharpened internal conflicts in
the communist regimes and quickly led to Re-
volutions of 1989, a
total
collapse of
European communist regimes outside of
Soviet Union, which dissolved itself two years
later, in 1991. Some communist regimes out-
side of Europa survive till now, the most im-
portant of them is People’s Republic of Ch-
ina,
trying to introduce market reforms
without rapid democratization.
Birth
See also: History of communism
The ideal of egalitarian and collectivist soci-
ety can be traced into antiquity. Plato’s The
Republic suggests collective education of
children and control of possessions. Leader
of a slave uprising Spartacus inspired many
social revolutionaries later on.[4] Also Christi-
an teachings like the Sermon on the Mount
were interpreted politically in the sense of
Christian communism or as underpinning of
monasticism with its sharing of possession.[5]
Early modern writers like Thomas More in
his treatise Utopia (1516) dreamed about so-
cieties based on common ownership of
property.
Criticism of the idea of private property
continued into the Age of Enlightenment of
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
2
Gracchus Babeuf
the 18th century, through such thinkers as
Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Later, fol-
lowing the upheaval of the French Revolu-
tion, communism emerged as a political doc-
trine.[6] Gracchus Babeuf, in particular, es-
poused the goals of common ownership of
land and total economic and political equality
among citizens.
During the early development of the polit-
ical Left in the first decades of 19th century,
the germs of communism – together with
those of socialism, Christian utopianism,
anarchism, trade-unionism and feminism –
differentiated and were theoretically ex-
amined. The term "communism" was prob-
ably coined by the French utopist Étienne Ca-
bet for his communitarian social movement in
1839. In the following year 1840 the British
leftist John Goodwyn Barmby used this word
for Babeuf’s teachings. Also the word "social-
ism" came in use about 1840 and both words
were largely interchangeable in this time; the
difference between the two terms was rather
regional and cultural: In continental Europe
"communism" was thought to be more radical
and atheist than socialist while British athe-
ists preferred the word "socialism".[7]
The Left, rather undifferentiated in the
time, concentrated in the most industrialized
European countries. In France with its re-
volutionary tradition lived for example Henri
de Saint-Simon, whose circle coined the term
"exploitation of man by man"; Charles
Henri de Saint-Simon
Fourier, the inventor of the word "feminism"
and a propagator of communist communities;
Louis Auguste Blanqui, author of the term
"dictatorship of the proletariat", who spent
most of his life in prisons for his revolution-
ary actions. France saw also activities of fath-
ers of anarchism Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
who asserted that "Property is theft!", and
the Russian nobleman Mikhail Alexandrovich
Bakunin.
In Great Britain,
there was also the
Chartist movement here, named after the
People’s Charter published in 1838, which
demanded equal civil right to vote for all men
including the unprivileged. Among the early
English social reformers was Robert Owen,
the founder of cooperative movement and of
the utopist community New Harmony. New
Harmony, founded in US state Indiana in
1825, was a typical example of communist so-
cial experiment of the time, and collapsed
after four years for unsolvable internal quar-
rels like many other similar undertakings.[8]
Around 1850, the modern political Left
emerged also in Germany and in Italy. Marx-
ists call this early stage of communist theory
"utopian socialism" while their own views as
"scientific socialism" or "scientific commun-
ism".[9]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
3
Robert Owen
From Marx to the World
War I.
Marxism, the by far most important commun-
ist theory, was created by Karl Marx a
Friedrich Engels around 1850. The philo-
sopher Leszek Kołakowski calls the years
from Marx’s death until the October Revolu-
tion in 1917 as the "Golden Age" of Marxism,
compared to the breakdown under Stalin.[10]
Marxism
See also: List of communist ideologies
Maxism, developed by Marx and Engels from
1840s into the 1890s, became the principal
form of Leftist thought during the lives of its
fathers, and with the exception of USA it re-
mained in this position well until 1960s. Most
of other influential Leftist and socially critical
theories either develop Marxism further (e.g.,
classical social democracy, Leninism and
Maoism), or completely drop the term "com-
munism" and do not try to create a new class-
less society (e.g., the modern Feminism, New
Labour, Environmentalism). Therefore the
words "Marxism" and "Communism" are of-
ten understood as synonymous.
Marx and Engels saw capitalism as based
on the exploitation of workers. According to
Karl Marx
The Communist manifesto, London 1848
Marx, the main characteristic of human life
in
class
society
is
alienation,
while
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
4
communism entails the full realization of hu-
man freedom.[11] Marx here follows Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving free-
dom not merely as an absence of restraints
but as action with content.[12] Marx believed
that communism would give people the
power to appropriate the fruits of their labor
while preventing them from exploiting oth-
ers. 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 forces, particularly
the development of the means of produc-
tion.[12]
Marxism holds that a process of class con-
flict and revolutionary struggle will result in
victory for the proletariat and the establish-
ment of a communist society in which private
ownership is abolished over time and the
means of production and subsistence become
the property of society. Marx himself wrote
little about life under communism, giving
only the most general indication as to what
constituted a communist society. The German
Ideology (1845) was one of Marx’s few writ-
ings to elaborate on the communist future:
"In
communist
society,
where
nobody has one exclusive sphere of
activity but each can become accom-
plished in any branch he wishes, so-
ciety regulates the general produc-
tion and thus makes it possible for
me to do one thing today and anoth-
er 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, herds-
man or critic."[13]
In
the
late 19th 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 lower phase
in which productive property was owned in
common but people would be allowed to take
from the social wealth only to the extent of
their contribution to the production of that
wealth. The "lower phase" would eventually
evolve into a "higher phase" in which the an-
tithesis between mental and physical labor
has disappeared, people enjoy their work,
and goods are produced in abundance,
allowing people to freely take according to
their needs. Lenin frequently used the term
"socialism" to refer to Marx and Engels’
"lower phase" of communism and used the
term "communism"
interchangeably with
Marx
and Engels’
"higher
phase"
of
communism.
First international organizations
The first Marxist international organization
was the Communist League. It was founded
originally as the League of the Just by Ger-
man workers in Paris in 1836. This was ini-
tially a utopian socialist and Christian com-
munist grouping devoted to the ideas of
Gracchus Babeuf. The League of the Just par-
ticipated in the Blanquist uprising of May
1839 in Paris[14]. Hereafter expelled from
France, the League of the Just moved to Lon-
don where by 1847 numbered about 1,000.
Wilhelm Weitling’s 1842 book, Guarantees of
Harmony and Freedom, which criticized
private property and bourgeois society, was
one of the bases of its social theory. The
Communist League was created in London in
June 1847 out of a merger of the League of
the Just and of the fifteen-man Communist
Correspondence Committee of Bruxelles,
headed by Karl Marx[15]. The birth confer-
ence was attended by Friedrich Engels, who
convinced the League to change its motto
from All men are brethren[16] to Karl Marx’s
phrase, Working men of all countries, unite!.
The Communist League held a second con-
gress, also in London, in November and
December 1847. Both Marx and Engels atten-
ded, and they were mandated to draw up a
manifesto for the organisation. This became
The Communist Manifesto. The League was
ended formally in 1852.
In 1864 in a workmen’s meeting held in
Saint Martin’s Hall, London there was foun-
ded the International Workingmen’s Associ-
ation (IWA), better known as the First Inter-
national. It was an international socialist or-
ganization which aimed at uniting a variety of
different left-wing political groups and trade
union organizations that were based on the
working class and class struggle. At its
founding, it was an alliance of people from di-
verse groups, besides Marxists it included
French Mutualists, Blanquists, English Owen-
ites, Italian republicans, such American pro-
ponents of individualist anarchism as Steph-
en Pearl Andrews and William B. Greene,
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
5
Mikhail Bakunin
followers of Mazzini, and other socialists of
various persuasions. Due to the wide variety
of philosophies present in the First Interna-
tional, there was conflict from the start. The
first objections to Marx’s came from the Mu-
tualists who opposed communism and stat-
ism. However, shortly after Mikhail Bakunin
and his followers (called Collectivists while in
the International) joined in 1868, the First In-
ternational became polarised into two camps,
with Marx and Bakunin as their respective
figureheads. Perhaps the clearest differences
between the groups emerged over their pro-
posed strategies for achieving their visions of
socialism. The anarchists grouped around
Bakunin favoured (in Kropotkin’s words) "dir-
ect economical struggle against capitalism,
without interfering in the political parlia-
mentary agitation." Marxist thinking, at that
time, focused on parliamentary activity. For
example, when the new German Empire of
1871 introduced manhood suffrage, many
German socialists became active in the Marx-
ist Social Democratic Party of Germany.
In 1872, the conflict in the First Interna-
tional climaxed with a final split between the
two groups at the Hague Congress. This
clash is often cited as the origin of the long-
running conflict between anarchists and
Marxists. From then on, the Marxist and an-
archist currents of socialism had distinct or-
ganisations, at various points including rival
’internationals’. In 1872, the organization
was relocated to New York City. The First In-
ternational disbanded four years later, at the
1876 Philadelphia conference.
In the last years of the First International
there was a short-lived but important first at-
tempt of Left-wing politicians to seize power,
the Paris Commune, a government that
briefly ruled Paris, from March 28 to May 28,
1871. It existed before the final split between
anarchists and socialists had taken place, and
therefore it is hailed by both groups as the
first assumption of power by the working
class. Debates over the policies and outcome
of the Commune contributed to the break
between those two political groups.
Second International
The Socialist International better known as
the Second International
(1889–1916), a
Marxist organization of socialist and labour
parties, was formed in Paris on July 14, 1889
with support of Engels (Marx was already
deat at the time). At the Paris meeting deleg-
ations from 20 countries participated.[17] The
International continued the work of the dis-
solved First International, though excluding
the still-powerful anarcho-syndicalist move-
ment and unions, and was in existence until
1916.
Among the Second International’s most
famous actions were its (1889) declaration of
May 1 as International Workers’ Day and its
(1910) declaration of March 8 as Internation-
al Women’s Day. It initiated the international
campaign for the 8-hour working day.[18] The
International’s permanent executive and in-
formation body was the International Social-
ist Bureau (ISB), based in Brussels and
formed after the International’s Paris Con-
gress of 1900. Emile Vandervelde and Ca-
mille Huysmans of the Belgian Labour Party
were its chair and secretary. Lenin was a
member of the International from 1905. The
Second International dissolved during World
War I, in 1916, as the separate national
parties that composed it did not maintain a
unified front against the war, instead gener-
ally supporting their respective nations’ role.
French Section of the Workers’ International
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
6
Friedrich Engels
(SFIO) leader Jean Jaurès’s assassination, a
few days before the beginning of the war,
symbolized the failure of the antimilitarist
doctrine of the Second International.
Although mostly Marxist, the loose federa-
tion of the world’s socialist parties included
both openly reformist type organizations that
saw a gradual implementation of reforms of
capitalism to achieve socialism (foreruners of
today’s Socialists and Social democrats) and
revolutionary parties that saw the need to
openly smash the capitalist state structure
and create communism, that is the Commun-
ists in the sense of the 20th century.
Communists in power
Lenin and the birth of the Soviet
Union
See also: History of Soviet Russia and the
Soviet Union (1917–1927)
In Russia, the 1917 October Revolution was
the first time any party with an avowedly
Marxist orientation, in this case the Bolshev-
ik Party, seized state power. The assumption
of state power by the Bolsheviks generated a
great deal of practical and theoretical debate
Left to right: Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin,
and Lev Kamenev.
within the Marxist movement. Marx pre-
dicted 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 work-
ers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia
might be able to skip the stage of bourgeoisie
capitalism.[19] Other socialists also believed
that a Russian revolution could be the pre-
cursor of workers’ revolutions in the West.
The moderate Mensheviks opposed Len-
in’s Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution be-
fore 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 re-
form, 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 Com-
munist Party and installed a single party re-
gime devoted to the implementation of social-
ist policies under Leninism. Lenin created the
Third International (Comintern) in 1919 and
sent the Twenty-one Conditions, which in-
cluded
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
French Communist Party (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
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
7
The red star and hammer and sickle, common
symbols of communism.
called for the uniting of workers of the world
for revolution, which would be followed by
the establishment of a dictatorship of the pro-
letariat as well as the development of a so-
cialist economy. Ultimately, if 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 com-
munism, 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 give a
"limited place for a limited time to capital-
ism." The NEP lasted until 1928, when
Joseph Stalin achieved party leadership, and
the introduction of the first Five Year Plan
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 mem-
bers as the broad base; they were made up
only of elite cadres approved by higher mem-
bers of the party as being reliable and com-
pletely subject to party discipline.[20]
Stalin
Few years after Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin
won over his chief rival Leon Trotsky and in
1928 emerged as the sole leader of the Soviet
Union, the position he held until his death in
1953. He is connected with Stalinism, an op-
pressive system of extensive government spy-
ing, extrajudicial punishment, and political
"purging", or elimination of political oppon-
ents either by direct killing or through exile.
His methods involved an extensive use of pro-
paganda to establish a personality cult
around him to maintain control over the na-
tion’s people and to maintain political control
for the Communist Party.
Stalinism usually defines the style of a
government rather than an ideology. The
ideology was Marxism-Leninism, reflecting
that Stalin prided himself on maintaining the
legacy of Lenin as a founding father for the
Soviet Union and the future Socialist world.
Stalinism is an interpretation of their ideas,
and a certain political regime claiming to ap-
ply those ideas in ways fitting the changing
needs of society, as with the transition from
"socialism at a snail’s pace" in the mid-twen-
ties to the rapid industrialization of the Five-
Year Plans. Sometimes, although rarely, the
compound terms "Marxism-Leninism-Stalin-
ism" (used by the Brazilian MR-8), or teach-
ings of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin, are used to
show the alleged heritage and succession.
Simultaneously, however, many people who
profess Marxism or Leninism view Stalinism
as a perversion of their ideas; Trotskyists, in
particular, are virulently anti-Stalinist, con-
sidering Stalin a counter-revolutionary.
The main contributions of Stalin to com-
munist theory were the groundwork for the
Soviet policy concerning nationalities, laid in
Stalin’s 1913 work Marxism and the National
Question,[21], the theory of Socialism in One
Country as a correction of Marx’s theory of
World revolution, and the theory of "aggrava-
tion of the class struggle along with the de-
velopment of socialism", a theoretical base
supporting
the
repression
of
political
opponents.
At the end of the 1920s Stalin launched a
wave of radical economic policies, which
completely overhauled the industrial and ag-
ricultural face of the Soviet Union. This came
to be known as the Great Turn as Russia
turned away from the near-capitalist New
Economic Policy.
The NEP had been
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
8
implemented by Lenin in order to ensure the
survival of the state following seven years of
war (1914-1921, World War I from 1914 to
1917, and the subsequent Civil War) and had
rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. It
"modernized the Soviet Union, transforming
a peasant society into an industrial state with
a literate population and a remarkable sci-
entific superstructure."[22] but at the ex-
penses of forced collectivization, famine and
terror.[23]
Cold War
A map of countries who declared themselves
to be socialist states under the Marxist-Len-
inist (red satelites of USSR, black other
states) or Maoist definition (yellow) during
Cold War
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 ideo-
logical path of Communist development.
Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambod-
ia, Angola, and Mozambique were among the
other countries in the Third World that adop-
ted or imposed a pro-Communist government
at some point. Although never formally uni-
fied as a single political entity, by the early
1980s almost one-third of the world’s popula-
tion lived in Communist states, including the
former Soviet Union and People’s Republic of
China. By comparison, the British Empire
had ruled up to one-quarter of the world’s
population at its greatest extent.[24]
Communist states such as Soviet Union
and China succeeded in becoming industrial
and technological powers, challenging the
capitalists’ powers in the arms race and
space race and military conflicts.
The split between Communist and Capital-
ist worlds resulted in the Cold War, an con-
tinuing state of conflict, tension and competi-
tion that existed primarily between the Un-
ited States and the Soviet Union and those
countries’
respective
allies
from
the
mid-1940s to the early 1990s. Throughout
this period,
the conflict was expressed
through military
coalitions,
espionage,
weapons development,
invasions,
propa-
ganda, and competitive technological devel-
opment, which included the space race. The
conflict included costly defense spending, a
massive conventional and nuclear arms race,
and numerous proxy wars; the two super-
powers never fought one another directly.
The Soviet Union created an Eastern Bloc
of countries that it occupied, annexing some
as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining
others as Satellite states that would later
form the Warsaw Pact. The United States and
various western European countries began a
policy of "containment" of communism and
forged many alliances to this end, including
later NATO. In the Third world the Soviet
Union
fostered Communist
revolutionary
movements, which the United States and
many of its allies opposed and, in some cases,
attempted to "rollback". Many countries were
prompted to align themselves with the coun-
tries that would later either form NATO or
the Warsaw Pact. The Cold War saw periods
of both heightened tension and relative calm
as both sides sought détente. Direct military
attacks on adversaries were deterred by the
potential for mutual assured destruction us-
ing deliverable nuclear weapons.
The relations between the Soviet Union
and its satelited were described by the so-
called Brezhnev Doctrine which was an-
nounced to justify the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to terminate
the Prague Spring, an attack similar to earli-
er Soviet military interventions, such as the
invasion of Hungary in 1956. These interven-
tions were meant to put an end to liberaliza-
tion efforts and uprisings that had the poten-
tial to compromise Soviet hegemony inside
the Eastern bloc, which was considered by
the Soviets to be an essential defensive and
strategic buffer in case hostilities with the
West were to break out. It meant that limited
independence of communist parties was al-
lowed, but no country would be allowed to
leave the Warsaw Pact, disturb a nation’s
communist party’s monopoly on power, or in
any way compromise the strength of the
Eastern bloc. Implicit in this doctrine was
that the leadership of the Soviet Union re-
served, for itself, the right to define "social-
ism" and "capitalism". The principles of the
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
9
doctrine were so broad that the Soviets even
used it to justify their military intervention in
the non-Warsaw Pact nation of Afghanistan in
1979.
Crisis
The Cold War drew to a close in the late
1980s and the early 1990s. The United States
under President Ronald Reagan increased
diplomatic, military, and economic pressure
on the Soviet Union, which was already suf-
fering from severe economic stagnation. In
the second half of the 1980s, newly appoin-
ted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev intro-
duced the perestroika and glasnost reforms.
The weakening of the central power en-
abled revolutions of 1989, sometimes called
the "Autumn of Nations",[25] a revolutionary
wave that swept across Central and Eastern
Europe in late 1989, ending in the overthrow
of Soviet-style communist states within the
space of a few months.[26]
The political upheaval began in Poland,[27]
continued in Hungary, and then led to a
surge of mostly peaceful revolutions in East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Ro-
mania was the only Eastern-bloc country to
overthrow its communist regime violently
and execute its head of state.[28]
The Revolutions of 1989 greatly altered
the balance of power in the world and
marked (together with the subsequent col-
lapse of the Soviet Union) the end of the Cold
War and the beginning of the Post-Cold War
era. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,
leaving the United States as the dominant
military power, though Russia retained much
of the massive Soviet nuclear arsenal.
On the other side, People’s Republic of
China and other Asian Communist states and
Cuba proved resistant. The Chinese version
of reforms concentrated on support of market
forces while effectively prohibiting Western-
style human rights and was able both main-
tain the leading role of the Communist party
and quickly modernize the country.
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. Communist parties, or their
descendant parties, remain politically import-
ant in many countries. President Vladimir
Voronin of Moldova is a member of the Party
of Communists of the Republic of Moldova,
This map shows the states which today are
officially run by a Communist party alone:
People’s Republic of China, North Korea,
Laos, Vietnam and Cuba.
and President Dimitris Christofias of Cyprus
is a member of the Progressive Party of
Working People, but the countries are not
run under single-party rule. In South Africa,
the Communist Party is a partner in the ANC-
led government. In India, communists lead
the governments of three states, with a com-
bined population of more than 115 million. In
Nepal, communists hold a majority in the par-
liament.[29]
The People’s Republic of China has reas-
sessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy;
and the People’s Republic of China, Laos, Vi-
etnam, and, to a far lesser degree, Cuba have
reduced state control of the economy in or-
der to stimulate growth. The People’s Repub-
lic 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, includ-
ing Vietnam.
Today, Marxist revolutionaries are con-
ducting armed insurgencies in India, Philip-
pines, Peru, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, and
Colombia.
References
Notes
[1] Morris, William (in English). News from
nowhere. http://www.marxists.org/
archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/
index.htm. Retrieved on January 2008.
[2] "Communism". The Columbia
Encyclopedia (6th ed.). 2007.
http://www.bartleby.com/65/co/
communism.html.
[3] Colton, Timothy J. (2007). "Communism".
Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia.
http://encarta.msn.com/
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
10
encyclopedia_761572241/
Communism.html.
[4] Wilkerson, Doxey A.. "An Epic Revolt".
from Masses & Mainstream, March,
1952, pp 53-58. http://www.trussel.com/
hf/revolt.htm. Retrieved on 2008-02-13.
[5] "Communism." Encyclopædia Britannica.
2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
[6] "Communism" A Dictionary of Sociology.
John Scott and Gordon Marshall. Oxford
University Press 2005. Oxford Reference
Online. Oxford University Press.
[7] Williams, Raymond (1976). Keywords: a
vocabulary of culture and society.
Fontana. ISBN 0006334792.
[8] MURAVCHIK, Joshua. Heaven on Earth:
The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Chapter
2, ISBN 978-1893554450
[9] Engels, Friedrich. "Socialism: Utopian
and Scientific". Marxists.org.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.
[10]Kolakowski, Leszek (2005). Main
Currents of Marxism. W.W. Norton. ISBN
0-393-06054-3.
[11]Stephen Whitefield. "Communism." The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed.
Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford University Press, 2003.
[12]^ McLean and McMillan, 2003.
[13]Karl Marx, (1845). The German Ideology,
Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow. ISBN
978-1-57392-258-6. Sources available at
The German Ideology at
www.marxists.org.
[14]Marx and the Permanent Revolution in
France: Background to the Communist
Manifesto by Bernard Moss, p.10, in The
Socialist Register, 1998
[15]Murray Rothbard, "Karl Marx:
Communist as Religious Eschatologist,"
p.166
[16]Volkov, G. N. (1979). The Basics of
Marxist-Leninist Theory. Moskva:
Progress Publishers.
[17]Rubio, José Luis. Las internacionales
obreras en América. Madrid: 1971. p. 42.
[18]Rubio, José Luis. Las internacionales
obreras en América. Madrid: 1971. p. 43
[19]Marc Edelman, "Late Marx and the
Russian road: Marx and the ’Peripheries
of Capitalism’" - book reviews. Monthly
Review, Dec., 1984. Late Marx and the
Russian road: Marx and the "Peripheries
of Capitalism." - book reviews Monthly
Review Find Articles at BNET at
www.findarticles.com.
[20]Norman Davies. "Communism" The
Oxford Companion to World War II. Ed. I.
C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot. Oxford
University Press, 2001.
[21] "Marxism and the National Question"
[22]Fredric Jameson, collected in Marxism
Beyond Marxism (1996) ISBN
0-415-91442-6, page 43
[23]Robert Conquest Reflections on a
Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN
0-393-04818-7, page 101
[24]Hildreth, Jeremy (2005-06-14). "The
British Empire’s Lessons for Our own".
The Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB111870387824258558.html.
[25]See various uses of this term in the
following publications. The term is a play
on a more widely used term for 1848
revolutions, the Spring of Nations.
[26]E. Szafarz, "The Legal Framework for
Political Cooperation in Europe" in The
Changing Political Structure of Europe:
Aspects of International Law, Martinus
Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 0-7923-1379-8.
p.221.
[27]Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismăneanu,
"Independence Reborn and the Demons
of the Velvet Revolution" in Between
Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989
and Their Aftermath, Central European
University Press. ISBN 963-9116-71-8.
p.85.
[28]Piotr Sztompka, preface to Society in
Action: the Theory of Social Becoming,
University of Chicago Press. ISBN
0-226-78815-6. p. x.
[29]Nepal’s election The Maoists triumph
Economist.com
Further reading
• Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern
Science By Alan Woods and Ted Grant
• Forman, James D., "Communism from
Marx’s Manifesto to 20th century Reality",
New York, Watts. 1972. ISBN
978-0-531-02571-0
• Books on Communism, Socialism and
Trotskyism
• Furet, Francois, Furet, Deborah Kan
(Translator), "The Passing of an Illusion:
The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Communism
11
Century", University of Chicago Press,
2000, ISBN 978-0-226-27341-9
• Daniels, Robert Vincent, "A Documentary
History of Communism and the World:
From Revolution to Collapse", University
Press of New England, 1994, ISBN
978-0-87451-678-4
• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels,
"Communist Manifesto", (Mass Market
Paperback - REPRINT), Signet Classics,
1998, ISBN 978-0-451-52710-3
• Dirlik, Arif, "Origins of Chinese
Communism", Oxford University Press,
1989, ISBN 978-0-19-505454-5
• Beer, Max, "The General History of
Socialism and Social Struggles Volumes 1
& 2", New York, Russel and Russel, Inc.
1957
• Adami, Stefano, ’Communism’, in
Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies,
ed. Gaetana Marrone - P.Puppa,
Routledge, New York- London, 2006
External links
• European Parliament resolution on
European conscience and totalitarianism
• In Defense of Marxism
• Comprehensive list of the leftist parties of
the world
• Anarchy Archives Includes the works of
anarchist communists.
• Libertarian Communist Library
• Marxists Internet Archive
• Marxist.net
• The Mu Particle in "Communism", a short
etymological essay by Wu Ming.
• Open Society Archives, one of the biggest
history of communism and cold war
archives in the world.
• Islam and Communism
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