Communism

• 1. Introduction

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  Communism imagines a world without private property, without social classes, and ultimately without money or the state itself. It is a political and economic ideology whose goal is a society built on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Products would be allocated based on need. For much of the 20th century, more than one-third of the world's population lived under governments that claimed this banner. Then, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of those governments abolished Communist rule. Today only a handful remain, among them China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. How did an idea about shared property travel from monastic communities and a letter written around 1785 to one-party states ruling billions? Why did its supporters fracture into so many rival camps that some called each other fascists? And why do scholars still argue over whether any of these states ever achieved what they promised?

• 2. Naming An Idea

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  Communism derives from the French word communisme, joining the Latin communis, meaning common, with the suffix isme, which marks an act, practice, or doctrine. The word can be read as the state of being of or for the community. One of the first uses in its modern sense appears in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay calls himself an auteur communiste, a communist author. In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and common ownership of property, and he was the first to describe communism as a form of government. John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840. Since the 1840s, the term has usually been distinguished from socialism. An early distinction held that socialism aimed only to socialize production, while communism aimed to socialize both production and consumption. The split also tracked religion. In European Christendom, communism was believed to be the atheist way of life. In Protestant England the word sounded too close to the Roman Catholic communion rite, so English atheists called themselves socialists instead. Friedrich Engels noted that in 1848 socialism was respectable on the continent while communism was not. A sharper political meaning arrived only in 1918, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

• 3. The Marxist Engine

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  In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered a new definition of communism in The Communist Manifesto. At the root of their thinking is historical materialism, the view that the key feature of economic systems through history has been the mode of production. Change between those modes, they argued, is triggered by class struggle. Capitalism, in this analysis, divided the world into two major classes. The proletariat are wage laborers who own no means of production and must sell their labor to survive. The bourgeoisie are the owning minority who extract wealth as profit from the surplus the workers produce. These classes are directly antagonistic. According to Marxist theory, the resistance of the exploited can culminate in a proletarian revolution. Victory would establish a socialist mode of production based on social ownership and the principle, to each according to his contribution. As the productive forces advance further, a classless and stateless society would follow, guided by the maxim, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Between capitalism and communism sits the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxists describe it, on the model of the Paris Commune, as the most democratic state, where the whole public authority is elected and recallable under universal suffrage. Marxism considers itself scientific socialism, yet it refuses to design an ideal society from the minds of intellectuals. Engels drew a sharp line on ownership itself. He wrote that the transformation into state ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. That distinction between socialization and nationalization would later let Marxist critics brand the Soviet Union state capitalist.

• 4. Eighteen Seventeen

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  In 1917, the October Revolution in Russia brought Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks to state power, the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position. The moment cut against Marx's own expectation. He had argued socialism would be built on the most advanced capitalist development, yet the Russian Empire was one of Europe's poorest countries, with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry. The Bolsheviks rose on slogans such as Peace, Bread, and Land, tapping public hunger for an end to the war and peasant demand for land reform. Fifty thousand workers had passed a resolution favoring the transfer of power to the soviets. Lenin's government instituted universal education, healthcare, and equal rights for women, and the initial assault on Petrograd occurred largely without human casualties. The new order quickly turned on its rivals. In the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, the Socialist Revolutionaries finished first with 37.6 percent on the strength of rural peasants, while the Bolsheviks took 23.3 percent, strongest in the cities. The Ukrainian Socialist Bloc finished third at 12.7 percent and the Mensheviks took 3.0 percent. Citing outdated voter rolls, the Bolshevik government moved to dissolve the assembly in January 1918. Lenin, who had once supported free elections, began calling the assembly a deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarianism. Some see this as the birth of vanguardism, a hierarchical party elite that controls society, and the moment anarchism and Marxism split for good.

• 5. Stalin And Mao

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  The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 was Joseph Stalin's attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the Moscow trials, old Bolsheviks including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin pleaded guilty to conspiracy and were executed. Stalin built a leadership system that reflected historic czarist styles of paternalism and repression yet was also quite modern, where personal loyalty to him counted for everything. After 1945 his overriding goal was to consolidate the nation's superpower status and hold total power. In early 1950 he gave the go-ahead for North Korea's invasion of South Korea, expecting a short war, and was stunned when American forces entered and drove the North Koreans back. After the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 as the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. Mao Zedong and his top aide Deng Xiaoping launched the Great Leap Forward in 1957 to 1961, aiming to industrialize China overnight using peasant villages rather than cities. Industrialization failed and agricultural output fell sharply, leading to mass famine. The years 1958 through 1961 were the only ones between 1953 and 1983 in which China's economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins judged it a very expensive disaster. Mao then purged Deng and his allies in the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, an upheaval that targeted intellectuals and party leaders to impose Maoist orthodoxy. Millions were accused, humiliated, and imprisoned, killed, or sent to work as farm laborers. Estimates of deaths under Mao's government range from 40 to 80 million through starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions. He has also been praised for transforming China into a leading world power with greatly advanced literacy, women's rights, and life expectancy.

• 6. A Movement Divided

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  Marxism-Leninism, a political ideology developed by Joseph Stalin, became the official ideology of 20th-century Communist parties. Its three principles were dialectical materialism, the leading role of the Communist party through democratic centralism, and a planned economy with industrialization and agricultural collectivization. At its height it covered at least one-third of the world's population. From it splintered a long roster of rivals. Trotskyism, developed by Leon Trotsky in opposition to Stalinism, supported permanent revolution and world revolution rather than Stalin's socialism in one country. Trotsky claimed the Soviet Union had become a degenerated workers' state. Exiled in 1929, he founded the Fourth International in 1938, and in August 1940 he was assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin's orders. Maoism, derived from Mao Zedong's teachings, held that peasants should be the bulwark of revolutionary energy led by the working class. Its adherents claim it was not consolidated until the 1980s, first formalized by the Shining Path in 1982. The fractures grew bitter and theatrical. In the early 1930s the Comintern advanced social fascism, a theory that social democracy was a variant of fascism, advocated vociferously by the Communist Party of Germany. Mao later accused the post-Stalin Soviet Union of social imperialism, charging it had become an imperialist power behind a socialist facade. Enver Hoxha agreed, then turned the same charge against Mao. Eurocommunism, a revisionist trend of the 1970s and 1980s, moved the other way, with parties in France, Italy, and Spain attaching themselves more firmly to liberty and democracy. Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of Italy's major Communist party, was widely considered its father.

• 7. Without A Party

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  Council communism originated in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s, its primary organization the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. Its core principle is that government and economy should be managed by workers' councils, composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. Council communists hold that a revolution led by a party would necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Libertarian Marxism, a broad range of philosophies emphasizing the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism, often draws on Marx and Engels' later works, the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France. Its theorists have included Anton Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Daniel Guerin, and Yanis Varoufakis, the last of whom claims Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist. Anarcho-communism rejects the Marxist view that a state socialism phase must come first. Peter Kropotkin, its main theorist, argued that a revolutionary society should transform itself immediately into a communist society. Some currents push further toward the individual. Christian communism holds that the teachings of Jesus Christ compel Christians to support religious communism as the ideal social system. Many Christian communists argue that the first Christians, including the Apostles, established their own small communist society after Jesus' death. Russian musician Yegor Letov was an outspoken Christian communist, quoted in a 1995 interview as saying, Communism is the Kingdom of God on Earth.

• 8. After The Flag Came Down

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  On the evening of the 26th of December 1991, at 7:32, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. The dissolution followed declaration number 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet. The day before, Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, resigned and handed his powers, including control of the Cheget, to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The collapse has been attributed to economic inefficiency and to authoritarianism and bureaucracy within Communist governments. What followed was not a single fate but many. Some hardline Communists, sometimes called neo-Stalinists, stayed committed to orthodox Marxism-Leninism, while others, such as The Left in Germany, work within the liberal-democratic process. In Nepal, Communists were part of the constituent assembly that abolished the monarchy in 2008 and turned the country into a federal liberal-democratic republic, sharing power as part of their People's Multiparty Democracy. In China, the reform and opening up began in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping, and the poverty rate fell from 53 percent in the Mao era to just 8 percent in 2001. Vietnam and Cuba, after losing Soviet subsidies, drew foreign investment and grew more market-oriented. North Korea, described as the last country still practicing Soviet-style Communism, remains both repressive and isolationist. Public memory of these states has been described as a battleground between anti-communism and anti anti-communism, an argument still fought in academia, historiography, and politics.