The word communism is derived from the Latin communis meaning common or shared. Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that aims to replace profit-based economy through the abolishment of private property and the public ownership of the means of production, distribution, exchange, and subsistence. According to the communist view, everything that people produce is a social product; therefore, everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Communism/socialism is opposed to capitalism, which is based on private property and the free market that determines how goods and services are distributed. Karl Marx, like most writers of the 19th century, used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably. Precisely how communism differs from socialism has been a matter of debate, although the dissimilarity rests mainly on the communists’ observance of the revolutionary socialism of Marx. Andrew Roberts (2004) notes that the anthropologist Jan Kubik believed that some political regimes made communist and socialism ambiguous terms in order to gain legitimacy and confuse the public about who the enemy was.
An earlier definition of communism was introduced by the English humanist Sir Thomas More. More (1516) in his work Utopia describes an invented society in which money is eliminated and citizens share in common houses, meals, and other goods. Friedrich Engels (1847) defines communism as “the doctrine of the conditions of liberation of the proletariat.” According to The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, the main planks of communism are: (1) the abolition of private property, (2) heavy progressive income tax, (3) confiscation of rights of inheritance, (4) a central bank, (5) government ownership of communication and transportation, (6) government ownership of factories and agriculture, (7) government control over labor, (8) corporate farms and regional planning, and (9) government control of education.
According to Marx, the history of humanity is a series of class struggles from ancient slavery through feudalism, leading ultimately to freedom for all. In each period, a class has dominated the other social classes and has exploited the labor class. For Marx, material production requires material forces and social relations for production. In Marx’s view, capitalism is ruled by the bourgeoisie class that owns the means of production and controls the working class or proletariat. Marx recognizes that capitalism has brought remarkable and unprecedented scientific advancement and technological improvements; however, the economic opportunities and political power, in Marx’s view, are unfairly distributed. Besides this unequal distribution, Marx found that capitalism alienates workers in the sense that workers are separated from: (1) the product of their labor, (2) the process of production, (3) the sense of satisfaction derived from doing creative work, and (4) other human beings whom workers see as competitors for wages and jobs.
As stated in The Communist Manifesto, “the distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.” Marx and Engels summed up communism within a single phrase: Abolition of private property. Marx felt that communism would “supersede” capitalism once the capitalist system of production becomes an obstacle for the development of the forces of production.
In Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx recognized two stages of communism that would be pursued after the overthrow of capitalism. The first stage would be a transitional system in which the economy and the government would be controlled by the working class. The second stage would be a fully realized communism, without government or class division. In this second stage, the distribution of goods and the production would be based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
According to some authors, there are distinctions to be made between communism and socialism. In general, socialism refers to an economy with considerable public ownership. Communism refers to a country or political system in which a communist party rules. According to J. Kornai (1992), four prototypes of socialist systems can be identified, which seem to refer to consecutive stages in history: (1) the revolutionary-transitional system from capitalism to socialism, (2) the classical socialist system, (3) reform socialism, and (4) the post-socialist system (transition from socialism to capitalism).
Communist States
In the early 20th century, the primary focus of the economy in Russia was agriculture. Most Russians were peasants who farmed land owned by wealthy nobles. Because of land tenancy and labor exploitation, there was discontent in the Russian countryside, and the Russian Social Democratic Party was seen as an opportunity to overthrow the tsarist regime and to replace it with a radically different sociopolitical system. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. After the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution in October 1917, Lenin’s party became the model for communist parties around the world. Soviet Union countries from Lenin’s time to Gorbachev’s called themselves socialist countries, and denoting both a revolutionary dictatorship and an evolutionary democracy regime.
In 1985 reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union. He allowed freer discourse (glasnost) and movement toward more economic diversity (perestroika). He made it clear that the Soviet Union would no longer forcefully dominate the communist nations of Eastern Europe, and by 1989, they had largely left communism. In 1991 Boris Yeltsin succeeded Gorbachev and announced the dissolution of the Soviet regime.
Although there are a number of communist parties active around the world, only in China, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Laos, and Vietnam do they retain power over the state, and therefore these countries are denominated communist states. After the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, communist parties around the world suffered drastically.
Marxism
Karl Marx (1818–83) has been the most influential theorist of communism. He studied law and completed a doctorate in philosophy, and he dedicated his life to radical political activity, theoretical studies in history and political economy, and journalism as a profession. Marx described communism as the “the riddle of history solved.” He thought that the gap between private interest and community interest was a feature of a particular stage of human development, rather than an unavoidable characteristic of social existence.
The Marxist tradition is built around three theoretical clusters: (1) a theory of the development and destiny of capitalism, (2) a theory of the contradictions of capitalism, and (3) a normative theory of socialism and communism. Marx as a scholar thought he had discovered the laws of socioeconomic change leading a society toward a communist stage based on historical determinism. Marx described the materialist conception of history as the core of his studies. In his book Capital, he presented his economic theories, and he concluded that the capitalist economic system was an alienated form of human life. For Marx, under capitalism workers are forced to sell their labor to the capitalists, who use this labor to accumulate more capital, which further raises the power of the capitalists over workers. In this cycle, capitalists became wealthier, while wages are drained down to the subsistence level; consequently, if capital grows, the domination of capital over workers increases. Furthermore, capital increases its domination by increasing the division of labor. Under Marx’s view, labor is a commodity that the worker must sell in order to live. Therefore, wages are determined like the price for any other commodity.
Conservative governments have guided social reforms to undercut revolutionary Marxist movements. Mussolini and Hitler were supported by conservatives who saw their nationalism as the answer to combat the Marxist threat.
Leninism
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. It built on Marxism and provided the philosophical bases for Soviet communism. In his 1902 publication What Is to Be Done? Lenin argued that the revolution against capitalism can be achieved through the disciplined effort of full-time professional revolutionaries. These full-time revolutionaries were paid by the Bolshevik Party, using bureaucratic control as a method of enforcing ideological principles.
In Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, it is postulated that in the last stage of capitalism, capital is exported in order to pursue higher profit than the domestic market can offer. This is what Lenin named the monopoly finance stage. Lenin argued that at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
Maoism
Maoism or Chinese Marxism is a combination of German Marxism, Soviet Leninism, Confucianism, and China’s own guerrilla movement. It is referred to as Maoism because Mao Zedong (1893–1976) was the cofounder and the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, which defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) in the Chinese civil war, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. Maoism’s ideology was centered in the violent revolutionary potential of the peasantry. It differs from Marxist and Leninist approaches that focused on the potential power of the industrial proletariat.
Mao Zedong promoted a self-reliant, grain-first development repudiating material and market incentives for the people of China. The goals of Maoism included the salvation of China from its foreign enemies, and the reinforcement of the country through modernization. Two of his main socioeconomic programs—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—focused on the problems of the rural poor.
Evolution Of Communist Regimes
Communist systems have five common characteristics that distinguish them from other authoritarian regimes: (1) the monopoly of power of the Communist Party; (2) intra-party relations that were highly centralized and strictly disciplined; (3) state, rather than private, ownership of the means of production; (4) the establishment of communism as the ultimate, legitimizing goal; and (5) a sense of belonging to an international communist movement.
Bartłomiej Kamiński and Karol Sołtan (1989) proposed a political-economic framework to understand change within communism. They distinguish a three stage typology of development. The first stage is pure communism or totalitarian communism. It is characterized by total control of the economy and society by a political center backed by an extensive and repressive political party apparatus. Therefore, this totalitarian communism is antilaw, antimarket, and antidemocratic. The second stage is late communism, which features the weakening of the main characteristics of totalitarian communism. The authorities in late communism are forced to bargain in order to impose their will. Symptoms of late communism include accepting some degree of autonomy for economic actors. The final stage is constitutional (or juridical) communism, in which the interests of the rulers are imposed. Key components of this tendency include the separation of powers, the institutionalization of bargaining, the institutionalization of freer information flows, and the introduction of clearly defined rules of the state in the economy.
Bibliography:
- Edward Friedman, “Maoism and the Liberation of the Poor,” World Politics (v.39/3, 1987);
- Sujian Go, The Political Economy of Asian Transition from Communism (Ashgate Publishing, 2006);
- Nigel Holden, Andrei Kutznetsov, and Jeryl Whitelock, “Russia’s Struggle with the Language of Marketing in the Communist and Post-communist Eras,” Business History (v.50/4, 2008);
- Bartłomiej Kamiński and Karol Sołtan, “The Evolution of Communism,” International Political Science Review (v.10/4, 1989);
- János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford University Press, 1992);
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916);
- Roderick Martin, “Post-socialist Segmented Capitalism: The Case of Hungary. Developing Business Systems Theory,” Human Relations (v.61/1, 2008);
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848);
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- Anna Seleny, The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland: From Communism to the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006);
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- Brooke Skinner and Rosemary B. Bryant, “From Communism to Consumerism,” New Presence: The Prague Journal of Central European Affairs (v.8/4, 2006);
- Gabriel Temkin, “Karl Marx and the Economics of Communism: Anniversary Recollections,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies (v.31/4, 1998).
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