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Communism (from the Latin communis, meaning “shared” or “common”) advocates public ownership and communal control of the major means of production, distribution, transportation, and communication.

Origins And History

Although modern communism is associated with ideas advanced by German political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Russian Communist leader and theorist Vladimir I. Lenin, its intellectual roots are as old as Plato’s Republic in the fourth century BCE. The vast disparities of wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries supplied the impetus and inspiration for modern communist theorizing, which consisted of (1) a critique of capitalism and (2) its replacement by an alternative social and economic system—communism.

The Critique Of Capitalism

In The Communist Manifesto (1848) and other works, Marx (1818–1883) and Engels (1820–1895) criticized capitalism for alienating and exploiting workers (the proletariat), enriching capitalists (the bourgeoisie), and ensuring the rule of the latter over the former. All of human history, they wrote, is the history of struggles between classes—between slaves and masters; serfs and lords; and now, proletarians and capitalists. This epic struggle will be the final chapter in the story of class struggle. Out of it will emerge an egalitarian, just, and classless communist society.

Marx and Engels viewed capitalism as a historically necessary stage of development that had brought about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased humankind’s power over nature. Capitalism had also greatly increased aggregate wealth. In these respects, capitalism had been a positive and progressive force. The problem, in their view, was that wealth—and the political power and life chances that go with it—was unevenly and unfairly distributed. Workers are paid a pittance for long hours of hard labor. Moreover, it is they, not the capitalists, who are the creators of wealth. According to the labor theory of value, the worth of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. Under capitalism, workers are not paid fully or fairly for their labor. This enables capitalists to siphon off a portion that Marx calls “surplus value,” the difference between what the workers are paid and the price paid by buyers of the product. This surplus is invested to yield even greater returns. This in turn enables the bourgeoisie to amass enormous wealth, while the proletariat falls further into poverty. The capitalist ruling class passes laws that benefit its members and disadvantage the proletariat. The state thus becomes an instrument for doing the bidding of the wealthy and powerful.

The exploitation of one class by another remains hidden, however, by a system or set of ideas that Marx and Engels call “ideology.” “The ruling ideas of every epoch,” they write in The Communist Manifesto, “are the ideas of the ruling class.” That is, the conventional or mainstream ideas taught in classrooms, preached from pulpits, and communicated through the mass media are ideas that serve the interests of the dominant class and disserve those of the subordinate class.

The Coming Of Communist Society

Marx predicted that a series of ever-worsening economic crises will produce ever-greater unemployment, lower wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. The proletariat will come to see that its interests are implacably opposed to the interests of the ruling bourgeoisie. Increasingly “immiserated” and motivated by “revolutionary class consciousness,” the proletariat will seize state power and establish its own interim socialist state that Marx calls “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. ”That is, the proletariat will, as the bourgeoisie did before, rule in its own class interest in order to prevent a counter-revolution by the defeated bourgeoisie. Once this threat has passed there is no need for a state, and the state will “wither away” and make way for the emergence of a classless communist society.

Marx’s vision of a communist society is remarkably (and perhaps intentionally) vague and sketchy. Unlike earlier “utopian socialists,” whom he derided as unscientific and impractical, Marx did not produce detailed blueprints for a future society. Some features that he did describe, such as free public education for all and a graduated income tax (both considered radical in his day), are now commonplace. Other features—such as public ownership and control of the major means of production, and distribution of goods and services according to the principle in the 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program,” which states, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—are anything but commonplace. Marx believed that the institutions of a future communist society should be designed and decided democratically by future people; it was not his task to “write recipes for the kitchens of the future” (preface to Capital, vol. 1). If Marx was reluctant to write such recipes, many of his followers were not. Among these was the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Communism After Marx

Lenin (1870–1924) made two important departures from the theory and practice of communism as Marx had envisioned it. The first is Lenin’s view that communist revolution would not begin in advanced capitalist countries, as Marx had predicted, because workers there were imbued with reform-minded “trade union consciousness” instead of “revolutionary class consciousness.” This led them to organize unions and workers’ political parties to press for an ever-larger slice of the exploitative capitalist pie. Such workers had no interest in revolution. Communist revolution would begin instead in economically backward nations such as Russia and in the oppressed and exploited colonial countries of the capitalist periphery (now called the third world). This, Lenin argued, was because the scene of the most direct and brutal exploitation of workers had shifted from the first world to the third. Capitalists reaped “superprofits” from the cheap raw materials and labor available in the third world and were thus able to “bribe” workers at home with slightly higher wages, a shorter work week, and other reforms. Thus, contrary to Marx’s expectation, it was not the industrial proletariat but the agricultural peasantry, directed by the Communist “vanguard,” that was to make communist revolution.

A second major change is Lenin’s view that revolution could not and should not be made “spontaneously” by the industrial proletariat—as Marx had held—but by the peasantry directed by an elite “vanguard party” composed of radicalized middle-class intellectuals like himself. Secretive, tightly organized, and highly disciplined, the Communist Party would educate, guide, and direct the masses. This was necessary, Lenin claimed, because the masses, suffering from “false consciousness” and unable to discern their true interests, could not yet be trusted to govern themselves.

In the bloody and violent revolution and its repressive aftermath there was, Lenin believed, no place for moral scruples. “You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he was said to have remarked, meaning: you cannot make a revolution without breaking heads, or breaking promises: “Promises are like pie crusts—made to be broken.” Immoral acts were justified in the name of a higher “socialist” morality, which held that the ultimate end—a classless communist society—justifies almost any means used to achieve it.

Marx’s hopeful vision of a classless communist society in the nineteenth century turned toxic in the twentieth as a “new class” of party functionaries and bureaucrats rose to prominence. Regimes ruled by Josef Stalin (1879–1953) in the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong (1893–1976) in China, far from liberating workers, further exploited them.

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