Communist

Communism (from Latin: communis = "common") is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. In political science, the term "communism" is sometimes used to refer to communist states, a form of government in which the state operates under a one-party system and declares allegiance to Marxism-Leninism or a derivative thereof, even if the party does not actually claim that it has already reached communism.

Forerunners of communist ideas existed in antiquity and particularly in the 18th and early 19th century France, with thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the more radical Gracchus Babeuf. Radical egalitarianism then emerged as a significant political power in the first half of 19th century in Western Europe. In the world shaped by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, the newly established political left included many various political and intellectual movements, which are the direct ancestors of today's communism and socialism – these two then newly minted words were almost interchangeable at the time – and of anarchism or anarcho-communism. The two most influential theoreticians of communism of the 19th century were Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848), who also helped to form the first openly communist political organizations and firmly tied communism with the idea of revolution conducted by the exploited working class. Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved after an intermediate stage called the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless, and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. Some "revisionist" Marxists of the following generations, henceforth known as socialists or social democrats, slowly drifted away from the radical views of Marx after his death in 1883; other communists, like Vladimir Lenin, continued to prepare world revolution.

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, came to power in Russia (1917), whose Tzarist regime was disrupted by World War I. After years of civil war (1917–1921), international isolation and internal struggle in the Communist party, the Soviet Union was founded (1922). Under Joseph Stalin, who completed the purge of the left communists/opposition and established the character of communism as the totalitarian ideology it is known as today, the Soviet Union emerged as a new global superpower on the victorious side of World War II. In the five years after the World War, communist regimes were established in many states of Central and Eastern Europe and in China. Communism began to spread its influence in the Third World while continuing to be a significant political force in many Western countries. International relations between Soviets and the West, led by USA, quickly worsened after the end of the war and the Cold war began, a continuing state of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and those countries' respective allies. The "Iron curtain" between West and East then divided Europe and world from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. Despite many communist successes like the victorious Vietnam War (1959-1975) or the first human spaceflight (1961), the communist regimes were ultimately unable to keep up with the West. People under communist regimes showed their discontent in events like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Prague Spring of 1968 or Polish Solidarity movement in early 1980s. After 1985, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to implement market and democratic reforms under devices like perestroika ("restructuring") and glasnost ("transparency"). His reforms sharpened internal conflicts in the communist regimes and quickly led to the Revolutions of 1989 and a total collapse of European communist regimes outside of the Soviet Union, which dissolved itself two years later (1991). Some communist regimes outside of Europe have survived to this day, the most important of them being the People's Republic of China, whose Socialism with Chinese characteristics attempts to introduce market reforms without western style democratization and with the introduction of new capitalist and middle classes.

Birth

The ideal of egalitarian and collectivist society can be traced to antiquity. Plato's The Republic suggests collective education of children and control of possessions. Spartacus, the leader of a 1st-century-BCE slave uprising, inspired many later social revolutionaries. Christian teachings such as the Sermon on the Mount have been interpreted politically in the sense of Christian communism or as an underpinning of monasticism with its advocacy of shared possessions. Early modern writers such as Thomas More in his treatise Utopia (1516) speculated about societies based on common ownership of property.

Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau. Later, following the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine. Gracchus Babeuf, in particular, espoused the goals of common ownership of land and total economic and political equality among citizens.

During the early development of the political Left in the first decades of 19th century, the germs of communism – together with those of socialism, Christian utopianism, anarchism, trade-unionism, and feminism – differentiated and were theoretically examined. The term "communism" was probably coined by the French utopist Étienne Cabet for his communitarian social movement in 1839. In the following year 1840 the British leftist John Goodwyn Barmby used this term for Babeuf's teachings. The word "socialism" came in use about 1840 and both terms were largely interchangeable at the time; the difference between the two terms was largely regional and cultural: In continental Europe "communism" was thought to be more radical and atheist than socialism, while British atheists preferred "socialism".

The Left, rather undifferentiated at the time, concentrated in the most industrialized European countries. In France with its revolutionary tradition lived Henri de Saint-Simon, whose circle coined the term "exploitation of man by man"; Charles Fourier, the inventor of the word "feminism" and a propagator of communist communities; and Louis Auguste Blanqui, author of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", who spent most of his life in prisons for his revolutionary actions. France saw also activities of early anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who asserted that "Property is theft!", and the Russian nobleman Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin.

In Great Britain, the Chartist movement, named after the People's Charter published in 1838, demanded the equal civil right to vote for all men, including the lower classes. Among early English social reformers was Robert Owen, the founder of the cooperative movement and of the utopian community of New Harmony. Founded in the U.S. state of Indiana in 1825, New Harmony collapsed after four years over internal quarrels, much like other similar undertakings.

Around 1850, the modern political Left emerged in Germany and in Italy. Marxists call this early stage of communist theory "utopian socialism" while calling their own views "scientific socialism" or "scientific communism".

From Marx to World War I

Marxism was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around 1850. The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski calls the years from Marx's death until the October Revolution in 1917 as the "Golden Age" of Marxism, compared to the breakdown under Stalin.

Marxism

Maxism, developed from 1840s into the 1890s, became the principal form of Leftist thought during this time, and with the exception of the USA, it remained in this position well until 1960s. Most other influential Leftist and socially critical theories either develop Marxism further (e.g., classical social democracy, Leninism and Maoism), or completely drop the term "communism" and do not try to create a new classless society (e.g., the modern Feminism, New Labour, Environmentalism). Therefore the words "Marxism" and "Communism" are often understood as synonymous.

Marx and Engels considered capitalism to be based on the exploitation of workers. According to Marx, the main characteristic of human life in a class society is alienation, while communism entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of restraints but as action with content. Marx believed that communism would give people the power to appropriate the fruits of their labor while preventing them from exploiting others. Whereas for Hegel the unfolding of this ethical life in history is mainly driven by the realm of ideas, for Marx, communism emerged from material forces, particularly the development of the means of production.

Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle will result in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a communist society in which private ownership is abolished over time and the means of production and subsistence become the property of society. Marx himself wrote little about life under communism, giving only the most general indication as to what constituted a communist society. The German Ideology (1845) was one of Marx's few writings to elaborate on the communist future:

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

In the late 19th century, the terms "socialism" and "communism" were often used interchangeably. However, Marx and Engels argued that communism would not emerge from capitalism in a fully developed state, but would pass through a lower phase in which productive property was owned in common but people would be allowed to take from the social wealth only to the extent of their contribution to the production of that wealth. The "lower phase" would eventually evolve into a "higher phase" in which the antithesis between mental and physical labor has disappeared, people enjoy their work, and goods are produced in abundance, allowing people to freely take according to their needs. Lenin frequently used the term "socialism" to refer to Marx and Engels' "lower phase" of communism and used the term "communism" interchangeably with Marx and Engels' "higher phase" of communism.

First international organizations

The first Marxist international organization was the Communist League. It was founded originally as the League of the Just by German workers in Paris in 1836. This was initially a utopian socialist and Christian communist grouping devoted to the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf. The League of the Just participated in the Blanquist uprising of May 1839 in Paris. Hereafter expelled from France, the League of the Just moved to London where by 1847 numbered about 1,000. Wilhelm Weitling's 1842 book, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, which criticized private property and bourgeois society, was one of the bases of its social theory. The Communist League was created in London in June 1847 out of a merger of the League of the Just and of the fifteen-man Communist Correspondence Committee of Bruxelles, headed by Karl Marx. The birth conference was attended by Friedrich Engels, who convinced the League to change its motto from All men are brethren to Karl Marx's phrase, Working men of all countries, unite!. The Communist League held a second congress, also in London, in November and December 1847. Both Marx and Engels attended, and they were mandated to draw up a manifesto for the organisation. This became The Communist Manifesto. The League was ended formally in 1852.

In 1864 in a workmen's meeting held in Saint Martin's Hall, London there was founded the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), better known as the First International. It was an international socialist organization which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing political groups and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle. At its founding, it was an alliance of people from diverse groups, besides Marxists it included French Mutualists, Blanquists, English Owenites, Italian republicans, such American proponents of individualist anarchism as Stephen Pearl Andrews and William B. Greene, followers of Mazzini, and other socialists of various persuasions. Due to the wide variety of philosophies present in the First International, there was conflict from the start. The first objections to Marx's came from the Mutualists who opposed communism and statism. However, shortly after Mikhail Bakunin and his followers (called Collectivists while in the International) joined in 1868, the First International became polarised into two camps, with Marx and Bakunin as their respective figureheads. Perhaps the clearest differences between the groups emerged over their proposed strategies for achieving their visions of socialism. The anarchists grouped around Bakunin favoured (in Kropotkin's words) "direct economical struggle against capitalism, without interfering in the political parliamentary agitation." Marxist thinking, at that time, focused on parliamentary activity. For example, when the new German Empire of 1871 introduced manhood suffrage, many German socialists became active in the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany.

In 1872, the conflict in the First International climaxed with a final split between the two groups at the Hague Congress. This clash is often cited as the origin of the long-running conflict between anarchists and Marxists. From then on, the Marxist and anarchist currents of socialism had distinct organisations, at various points including rival 'internationals'. In 1872, the organization was relocated to New York City. The First International disbanded four years later, at the 1876 Philadelphia conference.

In the last years of the First International there was a short-lived but important first attempt of Left-wing politicians to seize power, the Paris Commune, a government that briefly ruled Paris, from March 28 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the final split between anarchists and socialists had taken place, and therefore it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class. Debates over the policies and outcome of the Commune contributed to the break between those two political groups.

Second International

The Socialist International better known as the Second International (1889–1916), a Marxist organization of socialist and labour parties, was formed in Paris on July 14, 1889 with support of Engels (Marx was already dead at the time). At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated. The International continued the work of the dissolved First International, though excluding the still-powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement and unions, and was in existence until 1916.

Among the Second International's most famous actions were its (1889) declaration of May 1 as International Workers' Day and its (1910) declaration of March 8 as International Women's Day. It initiated the international campaign for the 8-hour working day. The International's permanent executive and information body was the International Socialist Bureau (ISB), based in Brussels and formed after the International's Paris Congress of 1900. Emile Vandervelde and Camille Huysmans of the Belgian Labour Party were its chair and secretary. Lenin was a member of the International from 1905. The Second International dissolved during World War I, in 1916, as the separate national parties that composed it did not maintain a unified front against the war, instead generally supporting their respective nations' role. French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) leader Jean Jaurès's assassination, a few days before the beginning of the war, symbolized the failure of the antimilitarist doctrine of the Second International.

Although mostly Marxist, the loose federation of the world’s socialist parties included both openly reformist type organizations that saw a gradual implementation of reforms of capitalism to achieve socialism (foreruners of today's Socialists and Social democrats) and revolutionary parties that saw the need to openly smash the capitalist state structure and create communism, that is the Communists in the sense of the 20th century.

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