COMMUNISM

system of political and economic organization in which property is owned by the state and all citizens share in the common wealth, more or less according to their need. The word communism, a term of ancient origin, originally meant a system of society in which property was owned by the community and all citizens shared in the enjoyment of the common wealth, more or less according to their need. Many small communist communities have existed at one time or another, most of them on a religious basis, generally under the inspiration of a literal interpretation of Scripture. The utopian socialists of the 19th century also founded communities, though they replaced the religious emphasis with a rational and philanthropic idealism. Best known among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony in Indiana (1825), and Charles Fourier, whose disciples organized other settlements in the United States such as Brook Farm (184147). In 1848 the word communism acquired a new meaning when it was used as identical with socialism by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their famous Communist Manifesto. They, and later their followers, used the term to mean a late stage of socialism in which goods would become so abundant that they would be distributed on the basis of need rather than of endeavour. The Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, which took power in Russia in 1917, adopted the name All-Russian Communist Party in 1918, and some of its allied parties in other countries also adopted the term Communist. Consequently, the former Soviet Union and other states that were governed by Soviet-type parties were commonly referred to as Communist and their official doctrines were called Communism, although in none of these countries had a communist society fully been established. The word communism is also applied to the doctrines of Communist parties operating within states where they are not in power. system of political and economic organization in which property is owned by the community and all citizens share in the enjoyment of the common wealth, more or less according to their need. Following the rise to power of the Marxist-inspired Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 and the consolidation of their power under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, communism came to denote a totalitarian system in which a single political party controls the government, which in turn owns the means of production and distributes wealth with the professed aim of establishing a classless (and eventually a stateless) society. The term communism is also applied to revolutionary movements, inspired by MarxistLeninist principles, that seek to bring about such a society. The origins of the idea of communism lie deep in Western thought. The idea of a classless society, in which all the means of production and distribution are owned by the community as a whole and from which any traces of a state have disappeared, has long held a fascination for human beings. A number of the utopias that have been described in literature, including Thomas More's Utopia, provide for the common ownership of property to some extent. Communism acquired a new meaning in 1848 with the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Marx and Engels, communism would occur as the inevitable outcome of a historical process. In their view, all of human history has been a long, protracted struggle between an exploiting class, the capitalists in the present age, and an exploited class, the workers, or proletariat. This historical struggle enters its critical stage in the period of capitalism and its highest achievement, industrialization. The effect of industrialization is to heighten and intensify the internal contradictions in capitalism. In practical terms, Marx and Engels asserted that the ownership of industry would become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while the capitalists' exploitation of the urban workers would plunge the latter into a state of ever-increasing misery. The impoverished workers would grow in numbers and organize themselves into a political party that would lead a revolution in which the proletariat dispossess the capitalists. The proletariat would then establish a society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat and based on the communal ownership of wealth. Marx referred to this phase of human society as socialism, and reserved the word communism for the authentically propertyless, classless, and stateless higher phase of society for which he asserted socialism is merely a preparation. Communism is, strictly speaking, the stage of final transcendence of class division and the elimination of a coercive State. This is the reason that communism is missing from the name U.S.S.R.; it is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Early on, however, this precise distinction began to be confused. In 1847 Marx himself had founded a party he called the Communist Leagueto distinguish it, he said, from certain already-existing parties which called themselves socialist but which, to Marx, were not worthy of the term. Communist began to be used to apply to a specific party with a specific program, rather than to its final goal. The individual who did most to unify this party and forge this program was the Russian Marxist ideologue Vladimir Lenin. Lenin felt that the working class was unable to bring about a revolution on its own but needed a professional group of revolutionaries to guide it. Lenin and his Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917. Under Lenin, the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks renamed themselves) of the Soviet Union took control of the government and outlawed all other political parties. They established this dictatorship so that the Communist Party could ensure the Soviet Union's transition from capitalism to socialism. The new totalitarian political system thus created, along with the principles and methods the Bolsheviks had originated for gaining power in the first place, became known as Leninism (q.v.). Under Joseph Stalin, Lenin's successor as the leader of the Soviet Union, the Soviets forcibly accomplished the transition from capitalism to socialism (the communal ownership of the means of economic production) by nationalizing the Soviet Union's industries and collectivizing its agriculture. A program of rapid industrialization was pushed forward despite the great material deprivations it caused, and police terror was applied indiscriminately to the population to suppress all dissent and opposition. The system thus established became known as Stalinism (q.v.). Communist rule was basically confined to the Soviet Union until after World War II, at which time the victorious Soviet Red Army liberated the countries of eastern Europe from Nazi Germany's control. The Soviets subsequently sponsored the formation of communist governments in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and North Korea, while more independent communist regimes came to power in Yugoslavia and Albania. Stalinism became the basic model for almost all of these new communist governments. In 1949 the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong emerged victorious from a civil war with the Nationalists. In contrast to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, who had all believed that a successful socialist revolution could only be carried out by the urban proletariat, Mao had achieved a successful revolution in his country by mobilizing China's immense rural peasantry in a prolonged campaign of guerrilla war. Once in power, Mao sought an alternative to the bureaucratic and technical elites that had emerged in the Soviet Union. Mao tried to achieve economic growth by sheer revolutionary enthusiasm and the mass mobilization of China's manpower on a strictly egalitarian basis. (See Maoism.) This program was eventually rejected by Mao's fellow Chinese communists as impractical, but Mao's revolutionary strategy, and particularly his emphasis on peasant-based guerrilla war, proved influential. In Southeast Asia communists using Maoist strategies came to power in North Vietnam in 1954 and in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the mid-1970s. Cuba became a communist nation in 1958. In the meantime, Stalinist practices in the Soviet Union had noticeably softened after Stalin's death in 1953, but the basic elements of the totalitarian system that he had created remained intact for more than four decades in the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites. Both as an ideology and as a practical system for the organization of a state, communism entered a period of crisis in the late 20th century. By the 1980s it had become clear that state-owned systems of economic production were unable to provide the same standards of living obtained in many countries with free-market economies. The unequal concentrations of wealth in capitalist countries were matched by glaring concentrations of power in communist ones, and it had become obvious that the maintenance of one-party communist rule tended to limit personal freedoms in a way unknown in parliamentary democracies. In response to some of these problems, the communist government of China abandoned the economics of Maoism in the late 1970s and '80s and began allowing limited private ownership and the use of market incentives in its economy. The rise to power in the Soviet Union of the reform-minded leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the mid-1980s set in motion an even more far-reaching reassessment of the efficacy of communist ideals and practices in that nation. In 198990 the communist parties of eastern Europe abandoned their monopoly of power (with the tacit acceptance of the Soviet Union), and communist governments in those countries either fell or submitted themselves to free, multiparty elections. In the Soviet Union Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet politico-economic system provoked that system's collapse altogether in 1991, after which communism rapidly withered as a viable ideology in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. Additional reading Useful works include Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1968, reissued 1990; originally published in Hebrew, 1967); Tom Bottomore (ed.), Interpretations of Marx (1988); Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vol. (1978; originally published in Polish, 197678); H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch (1962, reissued 1972); Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 2nd ed. (1972); Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th ed. (1978); R.N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism, 5th rev. ed. (1957, reissued 1977); J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (1963), an outstanding history of the subject up to 1906; Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State: First Phase, 19171922, 2nd ed. (1977); Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (1965; also published as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, 1966); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (1960, reprinted 1983; originally published in Italian, 1952); and Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 4th rev. ed. (1964, reissued 1984), a readable, stimulating history of Bolshevism in its formative years.Works on Stalinism include Ian Grey, The First Fifty Years: Soviet Russia, 191767 (1967); Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd rev. and enlarged ed. (1970), a detailed history of the Communist Party in theory and in practice up to 1968; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (1973); Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito (1988); Graeme Gill, Stalinism (1990); and Robert V. Daniels, Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism (1991).The phenomenon of totalitarianism is treated well in Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time (1951; also published as The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed., 1973, reprinted 1986); and Ellen Frankel Paul (ed.), Totalitarianism at the Crossroads (1990).The world movement up to Stalin's death is treated in Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Tito and Goliath (1951), an excellent study of the conflict between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union; Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. and enlarged ed. (1967), and Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (1993); Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (1952, reissued 1971); Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (eds.), Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (1993); Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks (1953); Jane Degras (ed.), Communist International, 19191943: Documents, 3 vol. (195665, reprinted 1971), a collection of documents with commentary; Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, 2nd ed. (1967), a well-documented study of wartime diplomacy; Gunther Nollau, International Communism and World Revolution (1961, reissued 1975; originally published in German, 1959); Eugenio Reale, Avec Jacques Duclos: au banc des accuss la runion constitutive du Kominform Szklarska Poreba (2227 septembre 1947), trans. from Italian (1958); David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (1964); and Hugh Seton-Watson, From Lenin to Khrushchev (1960, reissued 1985; also published as The Pattern of Communist Revolution, rev. and enlarged ed., 1960), a study of the rise of Communism in eastern Europe.Developments after Stalin are surveyed in Tariq Ali (ed.), The Stalinist Legacy (1984); Adam Bromke (ed.), The Communist States at the Crossroads Between Moscow and Peking (1965); Alexander Dallin (ed.), Diversity in International Communism: A Documentary Record, 196163 (1963); Hlne Carrre d'Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (1969; originally published in French, 1965); Edward Crankshaw, The New Cold War: Moscow v. Peking (1963); Ghita Ionescu, The Break-up of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe (1965, reprinted 1984); Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz (eds.), Polycentrism (1962), a valuable collection of essays on dissent in the Communist parties; Wolfgang Leonhard, The Kremlin Since Stalin (1962, reprinted 1975; originally published in German, 1959); Columbia University, Russian Institute, The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, rev. ed. (1956), an annotated text of Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, with some other documents; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Imperialist Revolutionaries (1978); H. Gordon Skilling, The Governments of Communist East Europe (1966); Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin (1969; originally published in French, 1967); Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 195661 (1962, reissued 1973); Milorad M. Drachkovitch (ed.), Fifty Years of Communism in Russia (1968), a symposium by a number of experts on changes in Communist doctrine; Leonard Schapiro (ed.), The USSR and the Future (1962), essays by specialists on various aspects of the party program of 1961; Peter Ferdinand, Communist Regimes in Comparative Perspective (1991); and Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1993). Three important sources for studies of regime change are Daniel Chirot, Social Change in the Modern Era, ed. by Robert K. Merton (1986); Jack A. Goldstone (ed.), Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (1994); and John Dunn, Modern Revolutions, 2nd ed. (1989). The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica