communism

/kom"yeuh niz'euhm/, n.

1. a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

2. (often cap.) a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.

3. (cap.) the principles and practices of the Communist party.

4. communalism.

[1835-45; < F communisme. See COMMON, -ISM]

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Political theory advocating community ownership of all property, the benefits of which are to be shared by all according to the needs of each.

The theory was principally the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their "Communist Manifesto" (1848) further specified a "dictatorship of the proletariat," a transitional stage Marx called socialism; communism was the final stage in which not only class division but even the organized state

seen by Marx as inevitably an instrument of oppression

would be transcended (see Marxism). That distinction was soon lost, and "communist" began to apply to a specific party rather than a final goal. Vladimir Ilich Lenin maintained that the proletariat needed professional revolutionaries to guide it (see Leninism). Joseph Stalin's version of communism (see Stalinism) was synonymous to many with totalitarianism. Mao Zedong mobilized peasants rather than an urban proletariat in China's communist revolution (see Maoism). European communism (see Eurocommunism) lost most of its following with the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). See also Communist Party, dialectical materialism, First International, Second International.

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▪ ideology

Introduction

      the political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism—a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates. Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx (Marx, Karl).

 Like most writers of the 19th century, Marx tended to use the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), however, Marx identified two phases of communism that would follow the predicted overthrow of capitalism: the first would be a transitional system in which the working class would control the government and economy yet still find it necessary to pay people according to how long, hard, or well they worked; the second would be fully realized communism—a society without class (social class) divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx's followers, especially the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), took up this distinction.

      In State and Revolution (1917), Lenin asserted that socialism corresponds to Marx's first phase of communist society and communism proper to the second. Lenin and the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party reinforced this distinction in 1918, the year after they seized power in Russia, by taking the name All-Russian Communist Party (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Since then, communism has been largely, if not exclusively, identified with the form of political and economic organization developed in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and adopted subsequently in the People's Republic of China (china) and other countries ruled by communist parties.

      For much of the 20th century, in fact, about one-third of the world's population lived under communist regimes. These regimes were characterized by the rule of a single party that tolerated no opposition and little dissent. In place of a capitalist economy, in which individuals compete for profits, moreover, party leaders established a command economy in which the state controlled property and its bureaucrats determined wages, prices, and production goals. The inefficiency of these economies played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the remaining communist countries (excepting North Korea) are now allowing greater economic competition while holding fast to one-party rule. Whether they will succeed in this endeavour remains to be seen. Succeed or fail, however, communism is clearly not the world-shaking force it was in the 20th century.

Historical background

      Although the term communism did not come into use until the 1840s—it is derived from the Latin communis, meaning “shared” or “common”—visions of a society that may be considered communist appeared as long ago as the 4th century BCE. In the ideal state described in Plato's (Plato) Republic, the governing class of guardians devotes itself to serving the interests of the whole community. Because private ownership of goods would corrupt their owners by encouraging selfishness, Plato argued, the guardians must live as a large family that shares common ownership not only of material goods but also of spouses and children.

      Other early visions of communism drew their inspiration from religion. The first Christians practiced a simple kind of communism—as described in Acts 4:32–37, for example—both as a form of solidarity and as a way of renouncing worldly possessions. Similar motives later inspired the formation of monastic orders in which monks took vows of poverty and promised to share their few worldly goods with each other and with the poor. The English humanist Sir Thomas More (More, Sir Thomas) extended this monastic communism in Utopia (1516), which describes an imaginary society in which money is abolished and people share meals, houses, and other goods in common.

      Other fictional communistic utopias followed, notably City of the Sun (1623), by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (Campanella, Tommaso), as did attempts to put communist ideas into practice. Perhaps the most noteworthy (if not notorious) of the latter was the theocracy of the Anabaptists (Anabaptist) in the Westphalian city of Münster (1534–35), which ended with the military capture of the city and the execution of its leaders. The English Civil Wars (1642–51) prompted the Diggers (Digger) to advocate a kind of agrarian communism in which the Earth would be “a common treasury,” as Gerrard Winstanley (Winstanley, Gerrard) envisioned in The Law of Freedom (1652) and other works. The vision was not shared by the Protectorate led by Oliver Cromwell (Cromwell, Oliver), which harshly suppressed the Diggers in 1650.

      It was neither a religious upheaval nor a civil war but a technological and economic revolution—the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—that provided the impetus and inspiration for modern communism. This revolution, which achieved great gains in economic productivity at the expense of an increasingly miserable working class, encouraged Marx to think that the class struggles that dominated history were leading inevitably to a society in which prosperity would be shared by all through common ownership of the means of production.

Marxian communism (Marxism)

 Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) was born in the German Rhineland to middle-class parents of Jewish descent who had abandoned their religion in an attempt to assimilate into an anti-Semitic (anti-Semitism) society. The young Marx studied philosophy at the University of Berlin and received a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but he was unable, because of his Jewish ancestry and his liberal political views, to secure a teaching position. He then turned to journalism, where his investigations disclosed what he perceived as systematic injustice and corruption at all levels of German society. Convinced that German (and, more broadly, European) society could not be reformed from within but instead had to be remade from the ground up, Marx became a political radical. His views soon brought him to the attention of the police, and, fearing arrest and imprisonment, he left for Paris. There he renewed an acquaintance with his countryman Friedrich Engels (Engels, Friedrich), who became his friend and coauthor in a collaboration that was to last nearly 40 years.

      The son of the co-owner of a textile firm with factories in Germany and Britain, Engels was himself a capitalist who helped to manage the firm's factory in Manchester. Like Marx, Engels was deeply disturbed by what he regarded as the injustices of a society divided by class (social class). Appalled by the poverty and squalor in which ordinary workers lived and worked, he described their misery in grisly detail in The Condition of the English Working Class (1844).

      Marx and Engels maintained that the poverty, disease, and early death that afflicted the proletariat (the industrial working class) were endemic to capitalism: they were systemic and structural problems that could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism. Under this alternative system, the major means of industrial production—such as mines, mills, factories, and railroads—would be publicly owned and operated for the benefit of all. Marx and Engels presented this critique of capitalism and a brief sketch of a possible future communist society in Manifesto of the Communist Party (Communist Manifesto, The) (1848), which they wrote at the commission of a small group of radicals called the Communist League.

      Marx, meanwhile, had begun to lay the theoretical and (he believed) scientific foundations of communism, first in The German Ideology (written 1845–46, published 1932) and later in Das Kapital (1867; Capital). His theory has three main aspects: first, a materialist conception of history; second, a critique of capitalism and its inner workings; and third, an account of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by communism.

Historical Materialism

      According to Marx's materialist theory, history is a series of class struggles and revolutionary upheavals, leading ultimately to freedom for all. Marx derived his views in part from the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), who conceived of history as the dialectical self-development of “spirit.” In contrast to Hegel's philosophical Idealism, however, Marx held that history is driven by the material or economic conditions that prevail in a given age. “Before men can do anything else,” Marx wrote, “they must first produce the means of their subsistence.” Without material production there would be no life and thus no human activity.

      According to Marx, material production requires two things: “material forces of production”—roughly, raw materials and the tools required to extract and process them—and “social relations of production”—the division of labour through which raw materials are extracted and processed. Human history is the story of both elements' changing and becoming ever more complex. In primitive societies the material forces were few and simple—for example, grains and the stone tools used to grind them into flour. With the growth of knowledge and technology came successive upheavals, or “revolutions,” in the forces and relations of production and in the complexity of both. For example, iron miners once worked with pickaxes and shovels, which they owned, but the invention of the steam shovel changed the way they extracted iron ore. Since no miner could afford to buy a steam shovel, he had to work for someone who could. Industrial capitalism, in Marx's view, is an economic system in which one class (social class)—the ruling bourgeoisie—owns the means of production while the working class or proletariat effectively loses its independence, the worker becoming part of the means of production, a mere “appendage of the machine.”

Critique of capitalism

      The second aspect of Marx's theory is his critique of capitalism. Marx held that human history had progressed through a series of stages, from ancient slave society through feudalism to capitalism. In each stage a dominant class uses its control of the means of production to exploit the labour of a larger class of workers. But internal tensions or “contradictions” in each stage eventually lead to the overthrow and replacement of the ruling class by its successor. Thus, the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy and replaced feudalism with capitalism; so too, Marx predicted, will the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace capitalism with communism.

      Marx acknowledged that capitalism was a historically necessary stage of development that had brought about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind's power over nature. The problem, Marx believed, was that this wealth—and the political power and economic opportunities that went with it—was unfairly distributed. The capitalists reap the profits while paying the workers a pittance for long hours of hard labour. Yet it is the workers who create economic value, according to Marx's labour theory of value, which holds that the worth of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour required to produce it. Under capitalism, Marx claimed, workers are not paid fully or fairly for their labour because the capitalists siphon off surplus value, which they call profit. Thus, the bourgeois owners of the means of production amass enormous wealth, while the proletariat falls further into poverty. This wealth also enables the bourgeoisie to control the government or state, which does the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the powerless.

      The exploitation of one class (social class) by another remains hidden, however, by a set of ideas that Marx called ideology. “The ruling ideas of every epoch,” he wrote in The German Ideology, “are the ideas of the ruling class.” By this, Marx meant that 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. In slave societies, for example, slavery was depicted as normal, natural, and just. In capitalist societies the free market is portrayed as operating efficiently, fairly, and for the benefit of all, while alternative economic arrangements such as socialism are derided or dismissed as false or fanciful. These ideas serve to justify or legitimize the unequal distribution of economic and political power. Even exploited workers may fail to understand their true interests and accept the dominant ideology—a condition that later Marxists called “false consciousness.” One particularly pernicious source of ideological obfuscation is religion, which Marx called “the opium of the people” because it purportedly dulls the critical faculties and leads workers to accept their wretched condition as part of God's plan.

      Besides inequality, poverty, and false consciousness, capitalism also produces “ alienation.” By this, Marx meant that the worker is separated or estranged from (1) the product of his labour, which he does not own; (2) the process of production, which under factory conditions makes him “an appendage of the machine”; (3) the sense of satisfaction that he would derive from using his human capacities in unique and creative ways; and (4) other human beings, whom he sees as rivals competing for jobs and wages.

revolution and communism

      Marx believed that capitalism is a volatile economic system that will suffer a series of ever-worsening crises—recessions (recession) and depressions (depression)—that will produce greater unemployment, lower wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. These crises will convince the proletariat that its interests as a class are implacably opposed to those of the ruling bourgeoisie. Armed with revolutionary class consciousness, the proletariat will seize the major means of production along with the institutions of state power—police, courts, prisons, and so on—and establish a socialist state that Marx called “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” The proletariat will thus rule in its own class interest, as the bourgeoisie did before, in order to prevent a counterrevolution by the displaced bourgeoisie. Once this threat disappears, however, the need for the state will also disappear. Thus, the interim state will wither away and be replaced by a classless communist society (see classless society).

      Marx's vision of communist society is remarkably (and perhaps intentionally) vague. Unlike earlier “utopian socialists,” whom Marx and Engels derided as unscientific and impractical—including Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simon, Henri de), Charles Fourier (Fourier, Charles), and Robert Owen (Owen, Robert)—Marx did not produce detailed blueprints for a future society. Some features that he did describe, such as free education for all and a graduated income tax, are now commonplace. Other features, such as public ownership of the major means of production and distribution of goods and services according to the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” remain as radical as they were in Marx's time. But for the most part, Marx believed that the institutions of a future communist society should be designed and decided democratically by the people living in it; it was not his task, he said, to “write recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Yet, though Marx was reluctant to write such recipes, many of his followers were not. Among them was his friend and coauthor, Friedrich Engels.

Communism after Marx

 After Marx's death in 1883, Engels became the chief expositor of Marxist theory, which he simplified and in several respects transformed. His version of Marxism, which he called “scientific socialism,” made Marxist theory more rigid and deterministic than Marx had intended. Thus, Marx's historical materialism became a variant of philosophical Materialism—i.e., the doctrine that only physical matter and its motions are real. According to Engels's science of “dialectics,” everything—nature, history, even human thought—is reducible to matter moving in accordance with the same timeless “iron laws” of motion. This emendation of Marxist theory provided the basis for the subsequent development of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union.

revisionism

      After Engels's death in 1895, Marx's followers split into two main camps: “revisionist” Marxists, who favoured a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism, and revolutionary Marxists, among them the leaders of the communist Russian Revolution of 1917. The foremost revisionist was Eduard Bernstein (Bernstein, Eduard), a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, who fled his homeland in 1881 to avoid arrest and imprisonment under the antisocialist laws of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (Bismarck, Otto von). Bernstein spent most of his exile in Britain, where he befriended Engels and later served as executor of his will. Bernstein's experiences there (including his association with the gradualist Fabian Society) led him to conclude that a peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism was possible in that country—a conclusion he defended and extended beyond Britain in his Evolutionary Socialism (1899).

      Bernstein revised Marxian theory in four interrelated respects. First, he added an ethical dimension that had been largely lacking in Marx's thought; specifically, he held, following the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel), that human beings should be treated as ends in themselves and never as means or instruments, whether by capitalists (who used workers as human machines) or by communists (who were prepared to use them as cannon fodder in the future revolution). Second, he argued that the emergence of trade unions (trade union) and working-class political parties in late 19th-century Europe presented opportunities that required revisions in Marx's theory and therefore in Marxian political practice. Third, Bernstein noted that rising wages and better working conditions meant that—contrary to Marx's prediction of the immiseration of the proletariat—the lives of workers in advanced capitalist countries were actually improving. This trend he traced not to the kindness of capitalists but to the growing power of unions and working-class political parties. Fourth, however, he also warned of the danger of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, which was likely to become a dictatorship of “club orators and writers.” On the basis of these four revisions, then, Bernstein advocated gradual, piecemeal, and peaceful reform—“evolutionary” socialism—rather than violent proletarian revolution.

      Orthodox Marxists branded Bernstein a bourgeois and a counterrevolutionary traitor to the cause. Chief among his communist critics was Lenin, who had devoted his life to the revolutionary transformation of Russia.

Bolshevism (Leninism): Lenin's (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) revolutionary communism

      Russia in the early 20th century was an unlikely setting for the proletarian revolution that Marx had predicted. Its economy was primarily agricultural; its factories were few and inefficient; and its industrial proletariat was small. Most Russians were peasants who farmed land owned by wealthy nobles. Russia, in short, was nearer feudalism than capitalism. There was, however, growing discontent in the countryside, and Lenin's Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party saw an opportunity to harness that discontent to overthrow the autocratic tsarist regime and replace it with a radically different economic and political system.

      Lenin was the chief architect of this plan. As head of the revolutionary Bolshevik faction of the party, Lenin made two important changes to the theory and practice of communism as Marx had envisioned it—changes so significant that the party's ideology was later renamed Marxism-Leninism. The first, set out in What Is to Be Done? (1902), was that revolution could not and should not be made spontaneously by the proletariat, as Marx had expected, but had to be made by workers and peasants led by an elite “vanguard” party composed of radicalized middle-class intellectuals like himself. Secretive, tightly organized, and highly disciplined, the communist party (political 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 be trusted to govern themselves. democracy was to be practiced only within the party, and even then it was to be constrained by the policy of democratic centralism. That is, full and vigorous debate would lead to a decision that would determine the party's “line” on an issue, whereupon the party's central leadership would close off debate and require adherence to the party line. Such strict discipline was necessary, Lenin maintained, if the party was to guide the masses to revolution and establish the socialist workers' state that would follow. In short, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat had to be a dictatorship of the communist party in the name of the proletariat.

      A second and closely related change appears in Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), in which he implied that communist revolution would not begin in advanced capitalist countries such as Germany and Britain because workers there were imbued with reform-minded “trade-union consciousness” instead of revolutionary class consciousness. This, he argued, was because the most direct and brutal exploitation of workers had shifted to the colonies (colonialism, Western) of imperialist (imperialism) nations such as Britain. The capitalists reaped “superprofits” from the cheap raw materials and labour available in these colonies and were thus able to “bribe” workers at home with slightly higher wages, a shorter workweek, and other reforms. So, contrary to Marx's expectations, communist revolution would begin in economically backward countries such as Russia and in the oppressed and exploited colonial countries of the capitalist periphery (later to be called the Third World).

The Russian Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917)

      The Russian Revolution of 1917 came about in a way that no one, not even Lenin, had predicted. Its immediate impetus was World War I, which was taking a heavy toll on Russian soldiers at the front and on peasants at home. Riots broke out in several Russian cities. When Tsar Nicholas II ordered soldiers to put them down, they refused. Nicholas abdicated, and his government was replaced by one led by Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich). Committed to continuing the war against Germany, Kerensky's provisional government was almost as unpopular as the tsar's. Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland barely in time to lead the Bolsheviks in seizing state power in October (November, New Style) 1917. He then became premier of a new government based on soviets (soviet), or workers' councils.

      The Soviet government moved quickly to withdraw from the war in Europe and to nationalize (nationalization) private industry and agriculture. In the name of the people and under the banner of War Communism, it seized mines, mills, factories, and the estates of wealthy landowners, which it redistributed to peasants. The landowners and aristocrats, aided by troops and supplies from capitalist countries, including Britain and the United States, mounted a “White” counterrevolution against the “Red” government. The Russian Civil War ended in 1920 with the victory of the Reds, but the war in Europe and the war at home left the Soviet Union in shambles, its economic productivity meagre and its people hungry and discontented. Desperate for room to maneuver, Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) in 1921 announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), whereby the state retained control of large industries but encouraged individual initiative, private enterprise, and the profit motive among farmers and owners of small businesses.

Stalinism

      Lenin's death in 1924 left Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph), Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon), and Nikolay Bukharin (Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich) as the leaders of the All-Russian Communist Party. Before he died, Lenin warned his party comrades to beware of Stalin's ambitions. The warning proved prophetic. Ruthless and cunning, Stalin—born Iosif Djugashvili—seemed intent on living up to his revolutionary surname (which means “man of steel”). In the late 1920s, Stalin began to consolidate his power by intimidating and discrediting his rivals. In the mid-1930s, claiming to see spies and saboteurs everywhere, he purged (purge trials) the party and the general populace, exiling dissidents to Siberia or summarily executing them after staged show trials (purge trials). Bukharin was convicted on trumped-up charges and was executed in 1938. Trotsky, who had fled abroad, was condemned in absentia and was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by one of Stalin's agents. Those who remained lived in fear of the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB), Stalin's secret police.

      As a variant of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism had three key features. The first was its reliance on dialectical materialism as a way of justifying almost any course of action that Stalin (Stalin, Joseph) wished to pursue. For example, in a report to the 16th Congress of the Communist Party in June 1930, Stalin justified the rapid growth of centralized state power as follows:

We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the…strongest state power that has ever existed.…Is this “contradictory”? Yes, it is contradictory. But this contradiction…fully reflects Marx's dialectics.

      But Stalin omitted mentioning that Marx believed that contradictions were to be exposed and overcome, not accepted and embraced.

      A second feature of Stalinism was its cult of personality. Whereas Lenin had claimed that the workers suffered from false consciousness and therefore needed a vanguard party to guide them, Stalin maintained that the Communist Party itself suffered from false consciousness (and from spies and traitors within its ranks) and therefore needed an all-wise leader—Stalin himself—to guide it. This effectively ended intraparty democracy and democratic centralism. The resulting cult of personality portrayed Stalin as a universal genius in every subject, from linguistics to genetics.

      A third feature of Stalinism was the idea of “socialism in one country”—i.e., building up the industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad. To this end, Stalin rescinded the NEP, began the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, and embarked on a national program of rapid, forced industrialization. Specifically, he insisted that the Soviet Union had to be quickly, and, if need be, brutally, transformed from a primarily agricultural nation to an advanced industrial power. During the collectivization, millions of kulaks (kulak), or prosperous peasants, were deprived of their farms and forced to labour on large collective farms; if they resisted (or were even thought likely to do so), they were shot or sent to forced labour camps in Siberia to starve or freeze to death. In the food shortages that resulted, several million people (the precise number remains unknown) starved, and many more suffered from malnutrition and disease.

      In foreign policy, socialism in one country meant putting the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the interests of the international communist movement. After World War II, as Winston Churchill (Churchill, Sir Winston) famously remarked, an Iron Curtain descended across Europe as Stalin installed communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Soviet-occupied East Germany as a buffer zone against an invasion from western Europe. He also subordinated the interests and aspirations of communist parties there and elsewhere to the interests of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). A few dissident leaders, notably Josip Broz Tito (Tito, Josip Broz) in Yugoslavia, were rather reluctant allies; but most were pliant, perhaps out of fear of Soviet military might. Beyond Europe, the Soviet Union supported anticolonial “wars of national liberation” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and gave economic and military support to communist regimes in North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba.

 After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a slow liberalization within the CPSU and in Soviet society at large, though the Cold War with the West continued. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich) denounced Stalin's crimes in a secret speech (Khrushchev's secret speech) to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Khrushchev himself was deposed in 1964, after which a succession of Soviet leaders stifled reform and attempted to impose a modified version of Stalinism. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbachev, Mikhail)'s policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) began a new liberalization of Soviet society. Yet the ghost of Stalin was not exorcized completely until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the effective demise of the CPSU in 1991.

Chinese communism

 The People's Republic of China is the only global superpower still ruled by a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it has been since the communists came to power in 1949. Even so, the official Chinese version of communism— Maoism, or “Mao Zedong thought”—is a far cry from Marx's original vision. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic and China's first communist leader, claimed to have “creatively” amended Marxist theory and communist practice to suit Chinese conditions. First, he invoked Lenin's theory of imperialism to explain Chinese “backwardness” and to justify a revolution in a poor agricultural society without the sizable industrial proletariat that Marx believed was generally necessary to instigate a workers' revolution. Second, Mao redefined or replaced key concepts of Marx's theory. Most notably, he replaced the Marxist concept of a proletarian “class” of industrial wage labourers exploited by the capitalist ruling class with the idea of a proletarian “nation” of agricultural peasants exploited by capitalist countries such as the United States. Mao envisioned the proletarian countries encircling the capitalist countries and waging wars of national liberation to cut off foreign sources of cheap labour and raw materials, thereby depriving the capitalist countries of the ever-expanding revenues that are the lifeblood of their economies.

      Mao also planned and oversaw several industrial and agricultural initiatives that proved disastrous for the Chinese people. Among the most important of these was the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), his version of Stalin's policy of rapid, forced industrialization. Aiming to produce steel in backyard blast furnaces and to manufacture other commodities in hastily erected small-scale factories, it was a spectacular failure.

      As Mao consolidated his power, he became increasingly concerned with ideological purity, favouring ideologically dedicated cadres of “reds” over technical “experts” in education, engineering, factory management, and other areas. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) attempted to enforce ideological orthodoxy, and it too proved disastrous. Young Red Guards attacked bureaucrats, managers, teachers, and others whose ideological purity was suspect. Widespread chaos ensued, and eventually the People's Liberation Army was called in to restore order.

      Mao also aspired to being the “great helmsman” who would lead China out of poverty and into a bright communist future. His cult of personality, like Stalin's, portrayed him as larger than life and endowed with unrivaled wisdom—as found, for example, in the sayings and slogans in his “Little Red Book” (Quotations from Chairman Mao). After Mao's death in 1976, the Chinese communist leadership began to experiment with limited free-market reforms in the economy but continued to keep a tight lid on political dissent.

Non-Marxian communism

      Although Marx remains the preeminent communist theorist, there have been several varieties of non-Marxist communism. Among the most influential is anarchism, or anarcho-communism, which advocates not only communal ownership of property but also the abolition of the state. Historically important anarcho-communists include William Godwin (Godwin, William) in England, Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich) and Peter Kropotkin (Kropotkin, Peter Alekseyevich) in Russia (though both spent much of their lives in exile), and Emma Goldman (Goldman, Emma) in the United States. In different ways they argued that the state and private property are interdependent institutions: the state exists to protect private property, and the owners of private property protect the state. If property is to be owned communally and distributed equally, the state must be smashed once and for all. In Statism and Anarchy (1874), for example, Bakunin attacked Marx's view that the transitional state—the dictatorship of the proletariat—would simply wither away after it had served its purpose of preventing a bourgeois counterrevolution. No state, said Bakunin, has ever withered away, and no state ever will. To the contrary, it is in the very nature of the state to extend its control over its subjects, limiting and finally eliminating whatever liberty they once had to control their own lives. Marx's interim state would in fact be a dictatorship “over” the proletariat. In that respect, at least, Bakunin proved to be a better prophet than Marx.

Communism today

      Despite the difficulties and dislocations wrought by the transition to a capitalist market economy, Russia and the former Soviet republics are unlikely to reestablish communist rule. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the successor of the CPSU, attracts some followers, but its ideology is reformist rather than revolutionary; its chief aim appears to be that of smoothing the continuing and sometimes painful transition to a market economy and trying to mitigate its more blatantly inegalitarian aspects. In China, Maoism is given lip service but no longer is put into practice. Some large industries are still state-owned, but the trend is clearly toward increasing privatization and a decentralized market economy. China is now on the verge of having a full-fledged capitalist economy. This raises the question of whether free markets and democracy can be decoupled, or whether one implies the other. The CCP still brooks no opposition, as the suppression of pro-democracy student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 made clear. But the views of a new generation of leaders that arose in the early 21st century were unknown, which makes the direction of Chinese policy difficult to predict.

      Mao's version of Marxism-Leninism remains an active but ambiguous force elsewhere in Asia, most notably in Nepal. After a decade of armed struggle, Maoist insurgents there agreed in 2006 to lay down their arms and participate in national elections to choose an assembly to rewrite the Nepalese constitution. Claiming a commitment to multiparty democracy and a mixed economy, the Maoists emerged from the elections in 2008 as the largest party in the assembly—a party that now appears to resemble the pragmatic CCP of recent years more closely than it resembles Maoist revolutionaries of the 20th century.

      Meanwhile, North Korea, the last bastion of old Soviet-style communism, is an isolated and repressive regime. Long deprived of Soviet sponsorship and subsidies, Cuba and Vietnam have been reaching out diplomatically and seeking foreign investment in their increasingly market-oriented economies, but politically both remain single-party communist states.

      Today Soviet-style communism, with its command economy and top-down bureaucratic planning, is defunct. Whether that kind of regime was ever consistent with Marx's conception of communism is doubtful; whether anyone will lead a new movement to build a communist society on Marxist lines remains to be seen.

Terence Ball Richard Dagger

Additional Reading

Plato's communism is concisely discussed in George Klosko, “Platonic Politics,” part 3 in his The Development of Plato's Political Theory, 2nd ed. (2006). The classic critique of Plato's communism is his pupil Aristotle's Politics, Book II. The origins and development of Thomas More's utopian communism are deftly traced in J.H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (1952, reprinted 1976); and in Edward L. Surtz, The Praise of Pleasure (1957).Marx's life, times, and ideas are the subjects of several biographies, including Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th ed. (1978, reissued 1996); David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973, reissued 1987); and Peter Singer, Marx (1980, reissued 1996). His collaboration with Engels is portrayed in Terrell Carver, Marx & Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (1983), and Engels (1981, reissued 1991). In-depth treatments of Marx's theories can be found in George Lichtheim, Marxism, 2nd ed. (1964, reprinted 1982); John Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (1975); Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1968, reissued 1990; originally published in Hebrew, 1967); Terrell Carver, Marx's Social Theory (1982); and G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, expanded ed. (2000). The ways in which Marx was interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted by Marxists of various stripes are delineated in Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vol., trans. by P.S. Falla (1978, reissued 2005; originally published in Polish, 1976–78).Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (1952, reissued 1983), treats Bernstein and revisionism.The lives and ideas of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky are explored in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (1948, reissued 2001), a readable, stimulating history of Bolshevism in its formative years. Robert Conquest, V.I. Lenin (also published as Lenin, 1972); and Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, 2 vol. (1971–81), address Lenin's life and thought. Critical reassessments of Stalin's ideas and policies are Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism (1977, reissued 1999); and Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and expanded ed., edited and trans. from Russian by George Schriver (1982). Two other important figures are examined in Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (1978); and Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973, reissued 1980). Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. by Daphne Hardy (1940, reissued 2005), is a fictional treatment of Stalin's purge trials, with the character Rubashov a thinly veiled stand-in for Bukharin.Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong (1999, reissued 2006); and John Bryan Starr, Continuing the Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao (1979), treat Mao Zedong's life and ideas. Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature (2001), assesses Mao's ideologically driven policies, particularly as regards the natural environment.Psychological attractions of communism are described in Gabriel A. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (1954, reissued 1965); Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977); and Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951, reissued 1989). Works by disillusioned former communists include the essays by Arthur Koestler and others in Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (1949, reissued 2001); Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 50th anniversary ed. (2001); and Milovan Djilas, The New Class (1957, reprinted 1983).Terence Ball Richard Dagger

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