Portal:Communism

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THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more authoritarian vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a socialist state, followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communism is placed on the left-wing alongside socialism, and communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far-left.

Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.

Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. In the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)

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Pin of the flag of the CPSU
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза, Kommunisticheskaya partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza; short: КПСС, KPSS) was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It lost its dominance in the wake of the failed August 1991 coup d'état attempt led by authoritarian hardliners.

It emerged from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The party led the 1917 October Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and established the world's first socialist state. Given the central role under the Constitution of the Soviet Union, the party controlled all tiers of government in the Soviet Union and tolerated no opposition. Its organization was subdivided into communist parties of the constituent Soviet republics as well as the mass youth organization, Komsomol. The party was also the driving force of the Third International (Comintern).

The party ceased to exist after the coup d'état attempt in 1991 and was succeeded by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Russia and the communist parties of the now-independent former Soviet republics.

Selected biography

Lin Biao
Lin Biao (pinyin: Lín Biāo; IPA: [lǐn pjáʊ]; 5 December 1907 – 13 September 1971) was a major Chinese Communist military leader who was pivotal in the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeastern China. Lin was the general who commanded the decisive Liaoshen Campaign and Pingjin Campaign, co-led the Manchurian Field Army of the People's Liberation Army into Beijing, and crossed the Yangtze River in 1949. He ranked third among the Ten Marshals. Zhu De and Peng Dehuai were considered senior to Lin, and Lin ranked directly ahead of He Long and Liu Bocheng.

Lin abstained from taking an active role in politics after the civil war, but became instrumental in creating the foundations for Mao Zedong's cult of personality in the early 1960s. Lin was rewarded for his service to Mao by being named Mao's designated successor during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 until his death.

Lin died in September 1971 when his plane crashed in Mongolia, following what appeared to be a failed coup to oust Mao. Because little inside information is available to the public on what has been dubbed as the "Lin Biao incident", the exact events preceding Lin's death have been a source of speculation ever since. Following Lin's death, he was officially condemned as a traitor by the Communist Party of China. He and Jiang Qing are still considered to be the two "major Counter-revolutionary cliques" blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

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Norwegian Maoists demonstrate at May Day 2013.

Photo credit: Ezzex

News related to communism

21 March 2024 –
President of Vietnam Võ Văn Thưởng resigns after just over a year in office amid the Communist Party's anti-corruption campaign, making him the shortest-serving president in Vietnamese history. (Reuters) (Al Jazeera) (Bloomberg)

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No one can possibly deny that the education of Soviet children, too, is propaganda. The only difference is that in bourgeois countries it is a question of injecting into the child respect for old institutions and ideas which are taken for granted. In the USSR it is a question of new ideas, and therefore the propaganda leaps to the eye. “Propaganda,” in the evil sense of the word, is the name that people usually give to the defense and spread of such ideas as do not please them.

In times of conservatism and stability the daily propaganda is not noticeable. In times of revolution, propaganda necessarily takes on a belligerent and aggressive character. When I returned to Moscow from Canada with my family early in May, 1917, my two boys studied at a “gymnasium” (roughly, high school) which was attended by the children of many politicians, including some ministers of the provisional government. In the whole gymnasium there were only two Bolsheviks, my sons, and a third sympathizer. In spite of the official rule, “the school must be free of politics,” my son barely twelve years old was unmercifully beaten up as a Bolshevik. After I was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, my son was never called anything but Chairman and received a double beating. That was propaganda against Bolshevism.

Those parents and teachers who are devoted to the old society cry out against “propaganda.” If a state is to build a new society, can it do otherwise than begin with the school?

— Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
Family Relations Under the Soviets , 1932

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