Communism

A sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic doctrine, communism. The construction of a socioeconomic system that distributes goods to every member of the community and is based on shared ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange is its main objective. The elimination of private property, social classes, money, and the state are all features of a communist society. Several nominally communist governments that supported Marxism-Leninism and its offshoots rose to power in the 20th century. One-party rule, as well as the repression of dissent and opposition, were hallmarks of these governments.
Several formerly Communist governments rejected or ended Communist rule after the Soviet Union's collapsed in 1991. Victor d'Hupay used communism for the first time in a letter to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne. Communism and socialism have often been differentiated since the 1840s. By the 1860s, the latter would have a stable definition and usage. It wasn't until 1918, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party changed its name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that the terms communist and socialism came to be used as descriptors of political ideas.
Since communism in Protestant England was too phonetically similar to the Roman Catholic sacrament of communion, English atheists identified as socialists. Countries ruled by Communist parties are referred to as "Communist states." Communist states may refer to themselves as national-democratic, populist democratic, socialist-leaning, or workers' and peasants' governments. According to Richard Pipes, Ancient Greece is where the concept of a classless, egalitarian society originally appeared. Thomas More's writings have also been linked to communist ideas.
In his work Utopia from 1516, More envisioned a society where all members shared in property ownership. The Christian universalist concept that all people are one is reflected in the Marxist communist mentality, which strives for unification. Various social reformers established common-owned villages in the 19th century. Marx and Engels' well-known book The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, is credited with popularizing the term communism. The Russian October Revolution of 1917 created the conditions for Lenin's Bolsheviks to gain control of the state.
The catchphrases "Peace, Bread, and Land" served as the foundation for the Bolsheviks' successful ascent to power. Socialist parties received well over 70% of the vote in the 1917 Russian election for the Constituent Assembly. Between November 1917 and July 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks formed a coalition government. Left communism and council communism, which oppose self-declared socialist nations, emerged in response to events in Russia. Some left-leaning political groups took pride in having spoken with the Bolsheviks, and by extension, those Communist nations that either adopted or were motivated by their growth model.
Despite having the word "communism" in its name, it had nothing to do with communism, as seen by the harsh worker discipline, ban on strikes, required labor, and military-style management. Joseph Stalin tried to eliminate any potential resistance inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Great Purge of 1936–1938. After 1945, Stalin wanted to keep ultimate control over the country and solidify its position as a superpower. As they opposed Stalin's political dominance over eastern Europe, relations with the United States and Great Britain turned antagonistic. Stalin is seen as a mass killer by the majority of Westerners and anti-communist Russians.
The Great Leap Forward, which Mao Zedong and his top assistant started in 1957–1961, was intended to industrialize China quickly. The main outcome of the failure of industrialization was a sudden and dramatic drop in agricultural output. Deng and his associates were expelled during the Cultural Revolution after Mao took back the spotlight.
Mao wanted to rid communism of traditionalists and pro-capitalists. Young people around the nation formed Red Guard organizations in response to Mao's demand. Between 40 and 80 million people have reportedly died from malnutrition, persecution, forced labor in prison, and mass executions. For the majority of the 20th century, communism was considered a danger to Western capitalism. Many Western communist parties have denounced many of the practices of communist nations by the 1960s and 1970s.
The Alma-Ata Protocol was signed on December 26, 1991, which resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In a number of other nations, communist parties or their offspring are still significant political forces. The People's Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam are among the states with a single-party system that are now ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties as of 2023. While communist political philosophy and ideology are different, they all share a few fundamental components. Marxism or Leninism are the foundations of the predominant varieties of communism.
Anarcho-communism and Christian communism are two examples of non-Marxist forms of communism. Marxist theories continue to have some influence on some communist theories. Marxist theory holds that conflicts between the downtrodden and the exploited lead to class struggle in capitalist countries. In times of severe crises, oppressed people's resistance may result in a proletarian revolution. The most well-known of these is Marxism-Leninism and its offshoots.
The school of Marxist thinking that developed after Marx's passing is known as orthodox Marxism. It seeks to streamline, codify, and organize Marxist theory and method. Orthodox Marxism is a concept that refers to the historical and dialectical materialist methodologies rather than the normative features of traditional Marxism. Political economy criticism is a type of social critique that disavows the many social structures and categories that make up the dominant discourse on the ways in which resources are distributed and how income is distributed in the economy. The critique discredits economists' reliance on what its proponents view as implausible premises and false historical presumptions.
Economy critics focus on the current state of the economy rather than trying to develop theories for managing them. Marxian crisis theory claims that communism is an economic necessity rather than an inevitable outcome. Social ownership—a key idea in Marxism—is one. e. State nationalization versus societal ownership.
Leninism is a political philosophy created by Vladimir Lenin, a Russian Marxist revolutionary. It suggests establishing a proletariat dictatorship under the control of a revolutionary vanguard party. Based on The Communist Manifesto, Leninist revolutionary leadership is revolutionary. The official ideology of Communist parties in the 20th century was Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism was the philosophy guiding the most outwardly apparent communist movement during the Cold War.
Due to its widespread effect, it is useful to refer to the Communist bloc as this dynamic ideological system. Anti-revisionism is a viewpoint that evolved in opposition to the reforms and Khrushchev Thaw in the 1950s.
What constitutes anti-revisionism now is a topic of much debate. Those who trace their intellectual antecedents to Marx and Lenin condemn both Stalin and Mao. Others support a variety of historical figures who are less well-known, like Enver Hoxha. Stalinism disappeared after de-Stalinization, while Marxism-Leninism survived. It is debatable if the proletariat actually held power in the Marxist-Leninist governments.
Trotskyism served as a stand-in for this opposition to Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union. Trotskyism advocated for a global proletarian revolution as opposed to socialism in a single nation. Revolutionary populism, being practical, and dialectics are three core Maoist principles. The convergence of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism did not take place during Mao's lifetime. In Western European communist parties throughout the 1970s and 1980s, eurocommunism was a revisionist movement.
One of the main offshoots of libertarian socialism is libertarian Marxism. Antonie Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Daniel Guérin, and Yanis Varoufakis are notable libertarian Marxist theorists. The movement known as council communism began in the 1920s in Germany and the Netherlands. The variety of communist beliefs held by the communist left is known as left communism. They advocate for ideas they believe to be more directly Marxist and proletariat.
The Leninist left-communist trend known as Bordigism is named for Amadeo Bordiga, who has been referred to as "more Leninist than Lenin." A theological and political philosophy known as Christian communism holds that Jesus' teachings oblige Christians to accept religious communism as the ideal social structure. Insurrectionary anarchism is one type of anarcho-communism that is egoist and heavily influenced by radical individualism. Numerous writers have discussed mortality rates and excess fatalities in Communist countries. There are various estimates of the number of Communists who have died, according to several authors.
The question of whether part or all of the events were genocide or mass murder is one on which genocide researchers are divided. There is no agreement among genocide experts on a standard word for the instances known as excess mortality or mass fatalities. The names classicide, democide, genocide, politicide, holocaust, mass murder, and repression are also used to describe some of these killings. Some writers claim that Karl Marx made recommendations for genocide in otherwise unread writings. It has been said that the anti-communism of the right and the communist-sympatethtic, or anti-anti-communist, political left fought over public memory of Communist regimes from the 20th century.
The extra deaths in Communist governments are cited as evidence against communism by conservative political opponents. Communist memorials and museums have been built in honor of the regime's victims. Discussions on contrasting Nazism and Stalinism, and consequently communism, gained legitimacy thanks to publications like The Black Book of Communism. The demise of communism has been attributed to Communist regimes' failure to uphold the concept of a communist society. Post-Communist individuals support social assistance programs offered by the government more so than they do democracy.
Under Communism, the economies of the Eastern Bloc stagnated in the 1980s. The emergence and demise of labor movements and social welfare states in the United States and other Western cultures were significantly influenced by the rise and fall of communism.
== Criticism of Communist Party Rule ==
Totalitarianism, political persecution, human rights restrictions, subpar economic performance, and censorship of the arts and culture have all resulted from communist party rule. Its socioeconomic characteristics have been disputed; it has been variously described as a type of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a wholly distinct mode of production. Right-wing critics contend that an increase in deaths is proof that communism is bad. Those who disagree with this viewpoint, notably those on the political left, claim that these murders were an aberration brought on by authoritarian governments. The Soviet Union seized control of the areas gained by the Red Army after World War II.
The Chinese Communist Party led the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Communist governments have come under fire for a variety of reasons, including how they affect the nations they rule. The primary focus of criticism of communist governance has been the special treatment given to socialist realism. Expansionist foreign policies, environmental damage, and restrictions on free cultural expression are some other issues that have drawn criticism. It has also been criticized that the Soviet Union placed a strong emphasis on the "hard sciences."
Some claim that the demise of Communism was aided by stronger Western controls on technology exports. Soviet economic planning is criticized for using false statistics that indicate rapid growth. After embracing market reforms like socialism with Chinese characteristics starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, China and Vietnam had substantially faster rates of growth. Before the country's reunification in 1990, East Germany's output fell from 67 percent in 1950 to 50 percent. Productivity in all of the Eastern European countries was significantly lower than that of Western Europe as a whole.
Critics of communist government contend that for the most of their existence, socialist economies lagged behind the industrialized West in terms of economic development. Under communist leadership, high growth rates were linked to extremely severe misery and even widespread hunger among the peasantry. Aral Sea extinction, Black Sea, Baltic Sea, and Lake Baikal contamination are examples of environmental catastrophes. Compared to Western countries or the Third World, communist economies continued to maintain a significantly greater level of energy intensity. Energy intensity was between two and three times higher in Eastern Bloc economies than in Western countries.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several ecological difficulties persisted and are still significant today. Although the Soviet Gulag system was abolished in 1960, it continued to function informally for some time after that. An estimated 200,000 prisoners are held in a network of prisons and labor camps maintained by North Korea. To halt immigration from East Berlin to West Berlin, the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
From 1950 to 1961, 2. Moved to West Germany were 75 million East Germans. After the Cuban Revolution, 50,000 middle-class Cubans emigrated from the country between 1959 and 1961. 547,000 Cubans came to the US between 1971 and 1998. Sixty thousand persons tried unsuccessfully to leave East Germany illegally while the Berlin Wall was up, and they were sentenced to prison as a result.
The countries that restricted emigration the most were North Korea and Albania. During the 1970s, tens of thousands of Soviet residents left the country lawfully each year. According to Benjamin Valentino, killing happens when a single individual or a small group of people have control. According to Christopher J. Finlay, Marxism justifies violence in the absence of any definite guiding principles. Karl Marx, according to Rustam Singh, stressed the necessity of violent revolution following the unsuccessful Revolutions of 1848.
According to Jacques Sémelin, communist leaders' passionate conviction that socialism could be brought to succeed drove them to ruthlessly dehumanize their adversaries. According to Michael Mann, members of the communist party were "ideologically motivated, believing that in order to lead in socialism zeal, they must construct a new socialist society." Rummels claims that Marxist communists viewed the creation of their utopia as a struggle against inequality, exploitation, poverty, and imperialism. According to Benjamin Valentino, strong political support for murderous leaders and regimes should not be immediately associated with sympathy for mass murder. The Soviet Union and subsequent post-communist states, according to French sociologist Jacques Sémelin, decimated their own people not because they planned to eliminate them as such but rather because they sought to completely reorganize the "social body."
Communist nations have been charged with engaging in imperialism throughout the Cold War. Some have come under fire for directly supporting Communist groups. Maoists claimed that despite preserving a socialist front, the Soviet Union had transformed into an imperialist state. Terrorist incidents like the downing of Korean Air Flight 858 have been linked to North Korea. Many academics have argued that revolutions and civil wars create the conditions for the state to commit mass murder.
According to expert on genocide Adam Jones, the Russian Civil War had a significant impact on the rise of figures like Stalin. The two World Wars' "brutal training," according to historian Martin Malia, is crucial to comprehending communist violence. Under communist administrations in the 20th century, there were numerous mass murders. Mass murder, democide, politicide, classicide, a broad meaning of "genocide," and "crimes against humanity" are terms used to describe these killings. Some academics contend that tens of millions or possibly hundreds of millions of people died as a result of communist regimes.
The number of fatalities believed to have occurred during communist control varies greatly. Estimates of the entire death toll brought on by communist rule have been made by the Black Book of Communism and others. Because there are no concrete facts available and all estimates include biases, the issue is difficult. Stephen G. Wheatcroft has put the death toll under Stalin's administration between 1-3 million as of the time of his death in 1953. The communist regimes in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Mao's China are responsible for between 21 and 70 million deaths.
According to Jasper Becker, the total number of people who perished as a result of famines brought on by communist governments in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Mozambique could be close to 90 million. These figures are the three greatest victim counts attributed to communism in any noteworthy study. The number of people believed to have died under communist rule varies greatly. There is disagreement about whether and to what extent communist regimes should be held accountable for their demise. Nearly all researchers have at some point been accused of having a pro- or anti-communist bias in this highly politicized area.
Many communist governments exploited agriculture as a weapon and forced collectivization, which led to famines. The allegation that the Soviet leadership purposefully committed genocide against the Ukrainian people is rejected by academics. Mao's direct accountability for the Great Chinese Famine is contested by Pankaj Mishra. Journalists and historians have challenged the focus on communism when determining who is to blame for famines. According to Martin Shaw, it is possible to understand why there were so many deaths if a leader knew their actions would ultimately cause a famine and nonetheless carried them through.
Because the G8 failed to take clear steps to reduce mass deaths, they are responsible for mass manslaughter or mass deaths as a result of criminal negligence. One of the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang, was a Red Guard when she was younger. A lot of historical study has been done on political repression during communist administration. Under Stalin's leadership, political repression in the Soviet Union was more pervasive and brutal in its practices than at any other time. According to writers like Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes and books like the Black Book of Communism, a reign of terror started in Russia following the October Revolution.
The purges carried out by Stalin were a logical outcome of the Leninist system, not a violation of its tenets. The abandoning of civil rights by these collectivist regimes, according to historian Stephen Hicks, is what led to the violence that was a hallmark of communist party rule in the 20th century. Mass murders in communist countries are a logical result of the absence of the rule of law. According to Soviet and Communist studies expert Steven Rosefielde, communist leaders had to decide between modifying their policies and using "terror-command." According to scholar Michael Mann, the absence of formalized power structures resulted in a chaotic confluence of centralized control and party factionalism that contributed to the events.
Some former citizens of Communist nations who now reside in Western capitalist governments have been observed to exhibit ostalgie, or nostalgia for life under Soviet control. After 1965, life expectancy started to plateau or drop in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, particularly for men, while it kept rising in Western Europe. In the Soviet Union, a third of homes lacked running water altogether, and two-thirds lacked hot water. In Soviet hospitals, paying off doctors and nurses to receive quality care was commonplace. Numerous actions made by the dominant Communist parties during the 20th century are contested by many communists.
Due to de-Stalinization, Maoists label the Soviet Union and the majority of its satellite states as "state capitalists." The German-Dutch left communists were some of Leninism's earliest detractors. Stalin, according to Trotskyists, turned the Soviet Union into an oppressive, bureaucratic one-party state. The agriculture sector was emphasized in Amadeo Bordiga's essays on the capitalism of the Soviet economy. Some Marxists completely reject Leninism, contending that the Soviet Union's retreat from communism was caused by the Leninist ideal of democratic centralism.
Some contend that the degree of political repression and censorship in nations governed by the communist party has been exaggerated in anti-communist tales. The argument put up in opposition to criticism is that communist regimes' economies developed more rapidly than they otherwise would have or that their leaders were compelled to employ harsh tactics to protect their nations during the Cold War.
== Criticism of Marxism ==
Marxism has drawn criticism from a range of political ideologies and academic fields. Some contend that Marxism requires the destruction of individual rights or is a form of historical determinism. Others have rejected the principles of Marxist philosophy and used alternative justifications to criticize capitalism and promote socialism. Marx believed that the creation and replication of real life will ultimately determine the course of history. The nature of society has been oversimplified, according to several critics.
They contend that the impact of ideas, culture, and other elements of what Marx referred to as the superstructure is at least as significant as the economic foundation for the direction of society. Due to his dependence on dialectical materialism, Karl Marx's historical theory has been compared to a form of historical determinism. The ancient Greek philosophers' conversations are where the idea of dialectic first appeared, but Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought it back to life in the 19th century. The majority of academics believe that historical determinism is a theory that will never be financially sound again. The fundamental argument in favor of the Sarkarian theory is that it is founded on the entirety of human experience and nature, rather than emphasizing one single aspect to the exclusion of all others.
Centralized communism, according to anarchists, would invariably result in coercion and governmental dominance. Mikhail Bakunin thought that under Marxist rule, the people would be subject to the dictatorial rule of a brand-new, insignificant nobility. According to David Harvey, socialism permits individual freedom but necessitates jointly creating a society in which each of us has sufficient opportunities for a fulfilling life. Marx's theory of value was criticized by British economist Alfred Marshall. Marshall maintained that consumer demand also influences pricing or value, in addition to supply.
Marx's economic theories are undermined when the focus is shifted from labor as the source of all value to subjective individual judgments as the source of all value. The free market, according to Mises, Hayek, and Mises, is the sole way to decide how to distribute resources. The socialist calculation argument, which raged in the 1920s and 1930s, is named for it. In reality, socialist countries like the Soviet Union used mathematical methods to set and decide pricing, with varying degrees of success. He also made the extreme suggestion in this revised text that the entire wage system be eliminated in favor of a co-operative wage structure.
Marx's political economics criticism in Capital, according to his detractors, is inherently incoherent. Marxian and/or Sraffian economists like Paul Sweezy, Nobuo Okishio, Ian Steedman, John Roemer, Gary Mongiovi, and David Laibman have been criticized in the past and present. Many eminent academics contend that Marx's forecasts were largely wrong. Marx was unable to place Asian civilization in the stages of evolution of slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist, according to the British historian Robert Conquest, and as a result, Asian society was "out of balance." The idea and supporting data were reinterpreted by Karl Marx's adherents to make them appear unchallengeable.
They undermined the theory's claim to be scientific by giving it a "conventionalist twist." V.A. Popper argued against centralized planning by claiming that the social sciences are not falsifiable. Lektorsky contends that the dialectic method has supplanted Popper's anti-dogmatic stance toward philosophy in favor of a dogmatistic Marxism that is flexible enough to fend off any additional criticism by utilizing its dialectic technique. Marxists like Bertrand Russell have questioned Marx's view of progress as a universal law as being unscientific.
== Disadvantages of Communism ==
* In a communist system, severe regulations are imposed on businesses as well as the methods and volume of production.
* Since there is no competition among the businesses, each is given an equal sum of money, and each employee receives an equal wage with an equal set of expectations.
* The government ultimately owns all enterprises.
* Because populations are typically treated uniformly, not all portions of the population or community will be subject to the same goals or standards.
* It is challenging for supply and demand to balance exactly over time without a price mechanism.
* All companies and properties are owned by the government (the means of production).
* Freedom of expression does not exist.
* The diversity of large or widely dispersed populations makes it challenging to uphold a shared objective or set of guidelines for the allocation of resources and labor.
* It is challenging to implement central planning.
* The needs of the consumer are not taken into account.
* Without a profit-motivated workforce, productivity and efficiency are challenging to attain.
* Without a price mechanism, it is challenging to achieve internal supply and demand balances.
Price negotiation between buyers and sellers, which is based on supply and demand, is referred to as the "price mechanism" in economics. There are numerous ways to match customers and sellers through price rationing, and these methods are referred to as price mechanisms or market-based mechanisms.
Ho Chi Minh recruited guerilla fighters in Vietnam by promising them a communist utopia in which the people would control the world and live in peace. But what actually happened was a country without rights or civil liberties, controlled by dishonest Party officials. Once Ho Chi Minh was elected, the theory he promoted had little to do with communism's actual practice. There are numerous such instances where Communism failed the citizens of a nation. Many academics disagree as to whether this is due to communism's inherent flaws or merely to corrupt leaders.
What can and cannot be done in the corporate world is effectively dictated by the Communist economic and political system. The quantity of goods and money that a business can make are subject to set limits.
Communism imposes stringent regulations on how enterprises run in addition to directly controlling the means of production, creating a classless society from the ground up. The same amount of money will be granted to each business, regardless of its area of specialization, and each employee will be paid the same amount. Employees who want to be given special recognition for their work may get emotionally disturbed as a result. In a society without hierarchy or diverse specialties, it may serve to make working circumstances disagreeable for employees. The entrepreneurial spirit, which is essential for a nation's economic progress, can also be stifled by it. That small company and entrepreneurial environment, which served as a setting for the American dream, has been extremely beneficial to the United States as a capitalistic country.