ETYM French communisme, from commun common.
1. A form of socialism that abolishes private ownership.
2. A political theory favoring collectivism in a classless society.
Revolutionary socialism based on the theories of the political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, emphasizing common ownership of the means of production and a planned economy. The principle held is that each should work according to his or her capacity and receive according to his or her needs. Politically, it seeks the overthrow of capitalism through a proletarian revolution. The first communist state was the USSR after the revolution of 1917. Revolutionary socialist parties and groups united to form communist parties in other countries during the interwar years. After World War II, communism was enforced in those countries that came under Soviet occupation.
China emerged after 1961 as a rival to the USSR in world communist leadership, and other countries attempted to adapt communism to their own needs. The late 1980s saw a movement for more individual freedoms in many communist countries, culminating in the abolition or overthrow of communist rule in Eastern European countries and Mongolia, and further state repression in China. The failed hard-line coup in the USSR against President Gorbachev 1991 resulted in the abandonment of communism there.
Communism as the ideology of a nation state survives in only a few countries, notably China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.
Communism and social democracy.
Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto 1848 put forward the theory that human society, having passed through successive stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, must advance to communism. This combines with a belief in economic determinism to form the central communist concept of dialectical materialism. Marx believed that capitalism had become a barrier to progress and needed to be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat (working class), which would build a socialist society. The Social Democratic parties formed in Europe in the second half of the 19th century professed to be Marxist, but gradually began to aim at reforms of capitalist society rather than at the radical social change envisaged by Marx. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, led by Lenin, remained Marxist, and after the Nov 1917 revolution changed its name to Communist Party to emphasize its difference from Social Democratic parties elsewhere. The communal basis of feudalism was still strong in Russia, and Lenin and Stalin.
Were able to impose the communist system. China’s communist revolution was completed 1949 under Mao Zedong.
China and Russia.
Both China and the USSR took strong measures to maintain or establish their own types of “orthodox” communism in countries on their borders (the USSR in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and China in North Korea and Vietnam). In more remote areas (the USSR in the Arab world and Cuba, and China in Albania) and (both of them) in the newly emergent African countries, these orthodoxies were installed as the font of doctrine and the source of technological aid.
Uprisings and dissent.
In 1956 the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, and there were uprisings in Hungary and Poland. During the late 1960s and the 1970s it was debated whether the state requires to be maintained as “the dictatorship of the proletariat” once revolution on the economic front has been achieved, or whether it may then become the state of the entire people: Engels, Lenin, Khrushchev, and Liu Shaoqi held the latter view; Stalin and Mao the former.
Communist grip weakens.
After the 1960s communist parties in many capitalist countries (for example, Japan and the Eurocommunism of France, Italy, and the major part of the British Communist Party) rejected Soviet dominance. In the 1980s there was an expansion of political and economic freedom in Eastern Europe: the USSR remained a single-party state, but with a relaxation of strict party orthodoxy and a policy of perestroika (“restructuring”), while the other Warsaw Pact countries moved toward an end to communist rule and its replacement by free elections within more democratic political systems.
Other manifestations of communism have included Libya's attempt to combine revolutionary socialism with Islam and the devastation of Cambodia (then called Kampuchea) by the extreme communist Khmer Rouge 1975–78. Latin America has suffered from the US fear of communism, with the democratically elected Marxist regime in Chile violently overthrown 1973, and the socialist government of Nicaragua (until it fell 1990) involved in a prolonged civil war against US-backed guerrillas (Contras).
Origins.
In early times property was often held in common, and in this respect the religious orders have always practiced a form of communism. Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia advocate social organisations which have many communistic elements. Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier are also generally considered to be communists, though their systems do not demand absolute equality. + prikaži više