Communism
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Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a far-left[3] philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common or social ownership of all property and the absence of social classes, money,[4][5][6] and the state.[7][8] Communism is a specific, yet distinct, form of socialism. Communists usually seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end, reflecting a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by Marx's withering away of the state.[9]
Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarcho-communism and Marxist schools of thought. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism as well as the political ideologies grouped around both, all of which share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system and mode of production, namely that in this system there are two major social classes, the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution.[10][nb 1] The two classes are the proletariat (the working class), who make up the majority of the population within society and must work to survive, and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), a small minority who derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, revolution would put the working class in power and in turn, establish common ownership of property which is the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.[12]
In the 20th century, Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power in parts of the world,[13] first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II.[14][nb 2] Along with social democracy, communism became the dominant political tendency within the international socialist movement by the 1920s.[20] Criticism of communism can be divided into two broad categories, namely that which concerns itself with the practical aspects of 20th century Communist states[21] and that which concerns itself with communist principles and theory.[22] Several academics and economists, among other scholars,[23][24] posit that the Soviet model under which these nominally Communist states in practice operated was not an actual communist economic model in accordance with most accepted definitions of communism as an economic theory but in fact a form of state capitalism,[25][26][27] or non-planned administrative-command system.[28][29][30]
Etymology and terminology
Communism derives from the French communisme, which developed out of the Latin roots communis and the suffix isme.[31] Semantically, communis can be translated to "of or for the community", while isme is a suffix that indicates the abstraction into a state, condition, action, or doctrine. Communism may be interpreted as "the state of being of or for the community"; this semantic constitution has led to numerous usages of the word in its evolution. Prior to becoming associated with its more modern conception of an economic and political organization, it was initially used in designating various social situations. Communism came to be primarily associated with Marxism, most specifically embodied in The Communist Manifesto, which proposed a particular type of communism.[1][32]
One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste ("communist author").[33] In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property.[34] Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government.[35] John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840.[31]
Communism and socialism
Since the 1840s, communism has usually been distinguished from socialism. The modern definition and usage of the latter would be settled by the 1860s, becoming predominant over alternative terms associationist (Fourierism), co-operative, and mutualist, which had previously been used as synonyms; instead, communism fell out of use during this period.[36]
An early distinction between communism and socialism was that the latter aimed to only socialize production, whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of free access to final goods).[5] By 1888, Marxists employed socialism in place of communism which had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for the former. It was not until 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution, that socialism came to refer to a distinct stage between capitalism and communism, introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution.[37] A distinction between communist and socialist as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party renamed itself to the All-Russian Communist Party, where Communist came to specifically refer to socialists who supported the politics and theories of Bolshevism, Leninism, and later in the 1920s those of Marxism–Leninism,[38] although Communist parties continued to describe themselves as socialists dedicated to socialism.[36]
Both communism and socialism eventually accorded with the cultural attitude of adherents and opponents towards religion. In European Christendom, communism was believed to be the atheist way of life. In Protestant England, communism was too phonetically similar to the Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists.[39] Friedrich Engels stated that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first published,[40] socialism was respectable on the continent, while communism was not; the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves communists. This latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.[41] While liberal democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, Marxists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat.[42]
According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, "Marx used many terms to refer to a post-capitalist society—positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free association of producers, etc. He used these terms completely interchangeably. The notion that 'socialism' and 'Communism' are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death."[43]
Associated usage and communist states
In the United States, communism is widely used as a pejorative term, much like socialism, mainly in reference to authoritarian socialism and Communist states. The emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state led to the term's widespread association with Marxism–Leninism and the Soviet-type economic planning model.[1][44][45] Marxism–Leninism is an empty term that depends on the approach and basis of ruling Communist parties, and is dynamic and open to re-definitions, being both fixed and not fixed in meaning.[46] In his essay "Judging Nazism and Communism",[47] Martin Malia defines a "generic Communism" category as any Communist political party movement led by intellectuals; this umbrella term allows grouping together such different regimes as radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's anti-urbanism.[48] The idea to group together different countries such as Afghanistan and Hungary has no adequate explanation.[49]
While the term Communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and news media to refer to countries ruled by Communist parties, these states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism: they referred to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing communism.[50][51][52][53] Terms used by Communist states include national-democratic, people's democratic, socialist-oriented, and workers and peasants' states.[54]
History
Early communism
According to Richard Pipes,[55] the idea of a classless, egalitarian society first emerged in Ancient Greece; since the 20th century, Ancient Rome has also been discussed, among them thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Demosthenes, Plato, and Tacitus, with Plato in particular being discussed as a possible communist or socialist theorist,[56] or as the first author to give communism a serious consideration.[57] The 5th-century Mazdak movement in Persia (modern-day Iran) has been described as communistic for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy, criticizing the institution of private property, and striving to create an egalitarian society.[58][59] At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, generally under the inspiration of Scripture.[60] In the Medieval Christian Church, some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. As summarized by Janzen Rod and Max Stanton, the Hutterites believed in strict adherence to biblical principles, church discipline, and practiced a form of communism. The Hutterites "established in their communities a rigorous system of Ordnungen, which were codes of rules and regulations that governed all aspects of life and ensured a unified perspective. As an economic system, communism was attractive to many of the peasants who supported social revolution in sixteenth century central Europe."[61] This link was highlighted in one of Karl Marx's early writings; Marx stated that "[a]s Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty."[62] Thomas Müntzer led a large Anabaptist communist movement during the German Peasants' War, which Friedrich Engels analyzed in his 1850 work The Peasant War in Germany. The Marxist communist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people.[63]
Communist thought has also been traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More.[64] In his 1516 treatise titled Utopia, More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose rulers administered it through the application of reason and virtue.[65] Marxist communist theoretician Karl Kautsky, who popularized Marxist communism in Western Europe more than any other thinker apart from Engels, published Thomas More and His Utopia, a work about More, whose ideas could be regarded as "the foregleam of Modern Socialism" according to Kautsky. During the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Vladimir Lenin suggested that a monument be dedicated to More, alongside other important Western thinkers.[66] In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, where a Puritan religious group known as the Diggers advocated the abolition of private ownership of land. In his 1895 Cromwell and Communism,[67] Eduard Bernstein stated that several groups during the English Civil War (especially the Diggers) espoused clear communistic, agrarian ideals and that Oliver Cromwell's attitude towards these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile.[68][69] Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century through such thinkers as Abbé de Mably, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France.[70] During the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine under the auspices of Gracchus Babeuf, Restif de la Bretonne, and Sylvain Maréchal, all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism according to James H. Billington.[71]
In the early 19th century, various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. Unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the religious emphasis with a rational and philanthropic basis.[72] Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, and Charles Fourier, whose followers organized other settlements in the United States, such as Brook Farm in 1841.[1] In its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the proletariat—a new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. In 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.[1]
Revolutionary wave of 1917–1923
In 1917, the October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to state power of Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, which was the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in which the Bolsheviks had a majority.[73][74][75] The event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement, as Marx stated that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development; however, Imperial Russia was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry, and a minority of industrial workers. Marx warned against attempts "to transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophy theory of the marche générale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself",[76] and stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule through the Obshchina.[77][nb 3] The moderate Mensheviks (minority) opposed Lenin's Bolsheviks (majority) plan for socialist revolution before the capitalist mode of production was more fully developed. The Bolsheviks' successful rise to power was based upon the slogans such as "Peace, Bread, and Land", which tapped into the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in World War I, the peasants' demand for land reform, and popular support for the soviets.[81]
By November 1917, the Russian Provisional Government had been widely discredited by its failure to withdraw from World War I, implement land reform, or convene the Russian Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution, leaving the soviets in de facto control of the country. The Bolsheviks moved to hand power to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in the October Revolution; after a few weeks of deliberation, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to July 1918, while the right-wing faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party boycotted the soviets and denounced the October Revolution as an illegal coup. In the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, socialist parties totalled well over 70% of the vote. The Bolsheviks were clear winners in the urban centres, and took around two-thirds of the votes of soldiers on the Western Front, obtaining 23.3% of the vote; the Socialist Revolutionaries finished first on the strength of support from the country's rural peasantry, who were for the most part single issue voters, that issue being land reform, obtaining 37.6%, while the Ukrainian Socialist Bloc finished a distant third at 12.7%, and the Mensheviks obtained a disappointing fourth place at 3.0%.[82] Most of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's seats went to the right-wing faction. Citing outdated voter-rolls, which did not acknowledge the party split, and the assembly's conflicts with the Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik–Left Socialist-Revolutionaries government moved to dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. The Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was issued by the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets, a committee dominated by Lenin, who had previously supported multi-party free elections. After the Bolshevik defeat, Lenin started referring to the assembly as a "deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism."[82] This would lead to the development of vanguardism in which an hierarchical party–elite controlled society,[83] resulting in a split between anarchism and Marxism, and Leninist communism assuming the dominant position for most of the 20th century, excluding rival socialist currents.[84]
Other communists and Marxists, especially social democrats who favored the development of liberal democracy as a prerequisite to socialism, were critical of the Bolsheviks from the beginning due to Russia being seen as too backward for a socialist revolution.[37] Council communism and left-communism, inspired by the November Revolution in Germany and the proletarian revolutionary wave, arose in response to developments in Russia and are critical of self-declared constitutionally socialist states. Some left-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain, boasted of having called the Bolsheviks, and by extension those Communist states which either followed or were inspired by the Soviet Bolshevik model of development, establishing state capitalism in late 1917, as would be described during the 20th century by several academics, economists, and other scholars,[25][26][27] or a command economy.[28][29][30] Before the Soviet path of development became known as socialism, reminiscenting the two-stage theory, communists made no major distinction between the socialist mode of production and communism;[43] it is consistent with, and helped to inform, early concepts of socialism in which the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Monetary relations in the form of exchange-value, profit, interest, and wage labor would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism.[85]
While Joseph Stalin stated that the law of value would still apply to socialism and that the Soviet Union was socialist under this new definition, which was followed by other Communist leaders, many other communists maintain the original definition and state that Communist states never established socialism in this sense. Lenin described his policies as state capitalism but saw them as necessary for the development of socialism, which left-wing critics say was never established, while some Marxist–Leninists state that it was established only during the Stalin era and Mao era, and then became capitalist states ruled by revisionists; others state that Maoist China was always state capitalist, and uphold Communist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin,[86][87] who first stated to have achieved socialism with the 1936 Soviet Constitution.[88]
Soviet Union
War communism was the first system adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War as result of the many challenges.[89] Despite communism in the name, it had nothing to do with communism, with strict discipline for workers, strike actions forbidden, obligatory labor duty, and military-style control, and has been described as simple authoritarian control by the Bolsheviks to maintain power and control in the Soviet regions, rather than any coherent political ideology.[90] The Soviet Union was established in 1922. Before the broad ban in 1921, there were several factions in the Communist party, more prominently among them the Left Opposition, the Right Opposition, and the Workers' Opposition, which debated on the path of development to follow. The Left and Workers' oppositions were more critical of the state-capitalist development and the Workers' in particular was critical of bureaucratization and development from above, while the Right Opposition was more supporting of state-capitalist development and advocated the New Economic Policy.[89] Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Leninist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base. They were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline.[91] Trotskyism overtook the left communists as the main dissident communist current, while more libertarian communisms, dating back to the libertarian Marxist current of council communism, remained important dissident communisms outside the Soviet Union. In the Moscow Trials, many old Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin, were accused, pleaded guilty of conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and were executed.[92]
The academic field after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union, stressing the absolute nature of Joseph Stalin's power. The "totalitarian model" was first outlined in the 1950s by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who stated that the Soviet Union and other Communist states were totalitarian systems, with the personality cult and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin. The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level.[93] Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces."[94] These "revisionist school" historians such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola challenged the "totalitarian model" approach, which was considered to be outdated,[95] and were most active in the former Communist states' archives, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation related to the Soviet Union.[93][96]
According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the historiography is characterized by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists" characterize themselves as objective reporters of an alleged totalitarian nature of communism and Communist states. They are criticized by their opponents as being anti-communist, even fascist, in their eagerness on continuing to focus on the issues of the Cold War. Alternative characterizations for traditionalists include "anti-Communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper), "orthodox", and "right-wing";[97] Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to them as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship." "Revisionists", characterized by Haynes and Klehr as historical revisionists, are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians would describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist "traditionalists", whom they would term biased and unscholarly.[98]
Cold War
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Following its leading role in World War II saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as an industrialized superpower, with strong influence over Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The European and Japanese empires were shattered and communist parties played a leading role in many independence movements. Marxist–Leninist governments modeled on the Soviet Union took power with Soviet assistance in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. A Marxist–Leninist government was also created under Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, but Tito's independent policies led to the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, which had replaced the Comintern, and Titoism was branded deviationist. Albania also became an independent Marxist–Leninist state after World War II.[99] Communism was seen as a rival of and a threat to Western capitalism for most of the 20th century.[100]
The socio-economic nature of Communist states, especially that of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, has been much debated. Some Communist supporters, scholars, and anti-communists agree that socialism was established, albeit for different reasons; often using the term real socialism or actually-existing socialism, the former state that workers had control of the means of production through the party, the state, and trade unions, while the former see any planned economy as socialism. Other scholars, and left-wing critics have variously labelled it a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.[24] The Eastern Bloc, including states in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Third World socialist regimes, have been described, at times, as "bureaucratic-authoritarian systems",[23] and China's socio-economic structure has been referred to, in some instances, as "nationalistic state capitalism" by critics [101]
The concept of totalitarianism gained prominent influence in Western anti-communist and McCarthyist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-World War II anti-fascism into post-war anti-communism.[102][103][104] The popular, yet criticized [95] perspective of equating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin is not conceivable and is a misunderstanding[citation needed] of the two distinct natures of the regimes, which is why they were enemies[citation needed]. Stalin's main goal was to create a socialist state, under the banner of socialism in one country, that was autarkic, industrialized, and multiethnic. Genocide was not in Stalin's plans, rather nationalism and nation-building were, and it was not inherent in the building of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state.[105] In this sense, Stalinism, which stopped Nazi genocide alongside the other Allies of World War II, was non-intrinsically genocidal, and Marxist communism was a restraining factor that did not allow Stalin to unleash a true genocide.[106][107][nb 4]
Some academics and journalists have stated that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under Communist rule, or have drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War. They include Mark Aarons,[110] Vincent Bevins,[111] Noam Chomsky,[112] Jodi Dean,[113] Kristen Ghodsee,[114] Seumas Milne,[115] and Michael Parenti.[116] Mark Bradley and Rudolph Rummel have written that, while the exact numbers have been in dispute, the order of magnitude is not.[117][118] Ghodsee and Scott Sehon wrote that "quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many people were killed by communist regimes."[114] About 20th-century Communism, Nathan J. Robinson wrote: "It's incredibly easy to be both in favor of socialism and against the crimes committed by 20th century communist regimes. All it takes is a consistent, principled opposition to authoritarianism."[119] Some of those academics wrote about the merits of taking an anti anti-communist position that does not deny the events and the loss of life but make a distinction between anti-authoritarian communist and other socialist currents, both of which have been victims of repression,[114] and reject 20th-century Communist economies.[120]
In Western Europe, Communist parties were part of several post-war governments, and even when the Cold War forced many of those countries to remove them from government, such as in Italy, they remained part of the liberal-democratic process. There were also many developments in libertarian Marxism, especially during the 1960s with the New Left. By the 1960s and 1970s, many Western Communist parties had criticized many of the actions of Communist states, distanced from them, and developed a democratic road to socialism, which became known as Eurocommunism.[121] This development was criticized by more orthodox supporters of the Soviet Union as amounting to social democracy.[122]
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
With the fall of the Warsaw Pact after the Revolutions of 1989, which led to the fall of most of the former Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December 1991. It was a result of the declaration number 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.[123] The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States, although five of the signatories ratified it much later or did not do it at all. On the previous day, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union) resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers, including control of the Cheget, to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. That evening at 7:32, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. Previously from August to December 1991, all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had seceded from the union. The week before the union's formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, formally establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States, and declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.[124][125]
Some scholars such as Jodi Dean and Kristen Ghodsee posit that the triumphalist attitudes of Western powers at the end of the Cold War, and the fixation with linking all leftist and socialist political ideals with the horrors of Stalinism, allowed neoliberalism to fill the void, which undermined democratic institutions and reforms, leaving a trail of economic misery, unemployment, hopelessness and rising inequality throughout the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West in the following decades that has fueled the rise of extremist right-wing nationalism in both the former and the latter.[126] For Dean, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats agree that 20th-century Communist states were unqualified failures, thereby limiting the scope of discussion around political alternatives to free markets and liberal democracy, a fusion of which constitutes Dean's conception of neoliberalism. According to Jodi Dean, when people think of capitalism, they do not consider what are its worst results (climate change, economic inequality, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the robber barons, and unemployment) because the history of capitalism is viewed as dynamic and nuanced; the history of communism is not considered dynamic or nuanced, and there is a fixed historical narrative of communism that emphasizes authoritarianism, the gulag, starvation, and violence.[127][128]
Post-Soviet communism
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Walter Scheidel stated that despite wide-reaching government actions, Communist states failed to achieve long-term economic, social and political success.[129] The experience of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the North Korean famine, and alleged economic underperformance when compared to developed free market systems are cited as examples of Communist states failing to build a successful state while relying entirely on what they view as orthodox Marxism.[130][131][page needed] Despite those shortcomings, Philipp Ther [de] stated that there was a general increase in the standard of living throughout Eastern Bloc countries as the result of modernization programs under Communist governments.[132] Branko Milanović wrote that following the end of the Cold War many of those countries economies declined to such an extent during the transition to capitalism that they have yet to return to the point they were prior to the collapse of communism.[133] According to anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee and philosopher Scott Sehon, there is a "victims of Communism" narrative which seeks to equate communism with murder, for instance by erecting billboards in Times Square which declare "100 years, 100 million killed" and "Communism kills";[114] for Ghodsee, conservative and anti-communist organizations seek to institutionalize the "victims of Communism" narrative as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and those killed by Communist states (class murder). According to this view, these are suspect efforts to distract from the global financial crisis and the failures of neoliberalism.[134]
As of 2022, states controlled by Marxist–Leninist parties under a single-party system include the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.[nb 5] Communist parties, or their descendant parties, remain politically important in several other countries. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Fall of Communism, there was a split between those hardline Communists, sometimes referred to in the media as neo-Stalinists, who remained committed to orthodox Marxism–Leninism, and those, such as The Left in Germany, who work within the liberal-democratic process for a democratic road to socialism,[140] while other ruling Communist parties became closer to democratic socialist and social-democratic parties.[141] Outside Communist states, reformed Communist parties have led or been part of left-leaning government or regional coalitions, including in the former Eastern Bloc. In Nepal, Communists (CPN UML and Nepal Communist Party) were part of the 1st Nepalese Constituent Assembly, which abolished the monarchy in 2008 and turned the country into a federal liberal-democratic republic, and have democratically shared power with other communists, Marxist–Leninists, and Maoists (CPN Maoist), social democrats (Nepali Congress), and others as part of their People's Multiparty Democracy.[142][143]
China has reassessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy, and along with Laos, Vietnam, and to a lesser degree Cuba, has decentralized state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. These reforms are described by scholars as progress, and by some left-wing critics as a regression to capitalism, or as state capitalism, but the ruling parties describe it as a necessary adjustment to existing realities in the post-Soviet world in order to maximize industrial productive capacity.[citation needed] In these countries, the land is a universal public monopoly administered by the state, and so are natural resources and vital industries and services. The public sector is the dominant sector in these economies and the state plays a central role in coordinating economic development.[citation needed] Chinese economic reforms were started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, and since then China has managed to bring down the poverty rate from 53% in the Mao era to just 6% in 2001.[144]
Theory
Communist political thought and theory are diverse but share several core elements. The dominant forms of communism are based on Marxism or Leninism but non-Marxist versions of communism, such as anarcho-communism and Christian communism, which remain partly influenced by Marxist theories and libertarian and humanist Marxism in particular, also exist. Common elements include being theoretical rather than ideological, identifying political parties not by ideology but by class and economic interest, and share an identify with the proletariat. According to communists, the proletariat can avoid mass unemployment only if capitalism is overthrown; in the short run, state-oriented communists favor state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy as a means to defend the proletariat from capitalist pressure. Some communists are distinguished by other Marxists in seeing peasants and smallholders of property as possible allies in their goal of shortening the abolition of capitalism.[145]
For Leninist communism, such goal, including short-term proletarian interests to improve their political and material conditions, can only be achieved through vanguardism, an elitist form of socialism from above which relies on theoretical analysis to identify proletarian interests rather than consulting the proletarians themselves,[145] as is advocated by libertarian communists.[9] When they engage in elections, Leninist communists' main task is that of educating voters in what are deemed their true interests rather than in response to the expression of interest by voters themselves. When they have gained control of the state, Leninist communists' main task was preventing other political parties from deceiving the proletariat, such as by running their own independent candidates. This vanguardist approach comes from their commitments to democratic centralism in which communists can only be cadres, i.e. members of the party who are full-time professional revolutionaries, as was conceived by Vladimir Lenin.[145]
Marxist communism
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Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation, analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and takes a dialectical view of social transformation. Marxism uses a materialist methodology, referred to by Marx and Engels as the materialist conception of history and now better known as historical materialism, to analyze and critique the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic economic, social and political change. First developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century, it has been the foremost ideology of the communist movement. Marxism does not lay out a blueprint of a communist society per se and it merely presents an analysis that concludes the means by which its implementation will be triggered, distinguishing its fundamental characteristics as based on the derivation of real-life conditions. Marxism considers itself to be the embodiment of scientific socialism but does not model an ideal society based on the design of intellectuals, whereby communism is seen as a state of affairs to be established based on any intelligent design; rather, it is a non-idealist attempt at the understanding of material history and society, whereby communism is the expression of a real movement, with parameters that are derived from actual life.[146]
According to Marxist theory, class conflict arises in capitalist societies due to contradictions between the material interests of the oppressed and exploited proletariat—a class of wage laborers employed to produce goods and services—and the bourgeoisie—the ruling class that owns the means of production and extracts its wealth through appropriation of the surplus product produced by the proletariat in the form of profit. This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive forces against its relations of production, results in a period of short-term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness. In periods of deep crisis, the resistance of the oppressed can culminate in a proletarian revolution which, if victorious, leads to the establishment of the socialist mode of production based on social ownership of the means of production, "To each according to his contribution", and production for use. As the productive forces continued to advance, the communist society, i.e. a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership, follows the maxim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."[43]
While it originates from the works of Marx and Engels, Marxism has developed into many different branches and schools of thought, with the result that there is now no single definitive Marxist theory.[147] Different Marxian schools place a greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while rejecting or modifying other aspects. Many schools of thought have sought to combine Marxian concepts and non-Marxian concepts, which has then led to contradictory conclusions.[148] There is a movement toward the recognition that historical materialism and dialectical materialism remains the fundamental aspect of all Marxist schools of thought.[59] Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots are the most well-known of these and have been a driving force in international relations during most of the 20th century.[149]
Classical Marxism is the economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Marx and Engels as contrasted with later developments in Marxism, especially Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.[150] Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxism thought that emerged after the death of Marx and which became the official philosophy of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until World War I in 1914. Orthodox Marxism aims to simplify, codify, and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying the perceived ambiguities and contradictions of classical Marxism. The philosophy of orthodox Marxism includes the understanding that material development (advances in technology in the productive forces) is the primary agent of change in the structure of society and of human social relations and that social systems and their relations (e.g. feudalism, capitalism and so on) become contradictory and inefficient as the productive forces develop, which results in some form of social revolution arising in response to the mounting contradictions. This revolutionary change is the vehicle for fundamental society-wide changes and ultimately leads to the emergence of new economic systems.[151] As a term, orthodox Marxism represents the methods of historical materialism and of dialectical materialism, and not the normative aspects inherent to classical Marxism, without implying dogmatic adherence to the results of Marx's investigations.[152]
Marxist concepts
Class conflict and historical materialism
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At the root of Marxism is historical materialism, the materialist conception of history which holds that the key characteristic of economic systems through history has been the mode of production and that the change between modes of production has been triggered by class struggle. According to this analysis, the Industrial Revolution ushered the world into capitalism as a new mode of production. Before capitalism, certain working classes had ownership of instruments utilized in production; however, because machinery was much more efficient, this property became worthless and the mass majority of workers could only survive by selling their labor to make use of someone else's machinery, and making someone else profit. Accordingly, capitalism divided the world between two major classes, namely that of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. These classes are directly antagonistic as the latter possesses private ownership of the means of production, earning profit via the surplus value generated by the proletariat, who have no ownership of the means of production and therefore no option but to sell its labor to the bourgeoisie.[153]
According to the materialist conception of history, it is through the furtherance of its own material interests that the rising bourgeoisie within feudalism captured power and abolished, of all relations of private property, only the feudal privilege, thereby taking the feudal ruling class out of existence. This was another key element behind the consolidation of capitalism as the new mode of production, the final expression of class and property relations that has led to a massive expansion of production. It is only in capitalism that private property in itself can be abolished.[154] Similarly, the proletariat would capture political power, abolish bourgeois property through the common ownership of the means of production, therefore abolishing the bourgeoisie, ultimately abolishing the proletariat itself and ushering the world into communism as a new mode of production. In between capitalism and communism, there is the dictatorship of the proletariat; it is the defeat of the bourgeois state but not yet of the capitalist mode of production, and at the same time the only element which places into the realm of possibility moving on from this mode of production. This dictatorship, based on the Paris Commune's model,[155] is to be the most democratic state where the whole of the public authority is elected and recallable under the basis of universal suffrage.[156]
Marxian economics
Marxian economics and its proponents view capitalism as economically unsustainable and incapable of improving the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit by cutting employee's wages, social benefits and pursuing military aggression. The communist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through workers' revolution. According to Marxian crisis theory, communism is not an inevitability but an economic necessity.[157]
Socialization versus nationalization
An important concept in Marxism is socialization versus nationalization. Nationalization is state ownership of property whereas socialization is control and management of property by society. Marxism considers the latter as its goal and considers nationalization a tactical issue, as state ownership is still in the realm of the capitalist mode of production. In the words of Friedrich Engels, "the transformation ... into State-ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. ... State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."[a][158] This has led some Marxist groups and tendencies to label states based on nationalization such as the Soviet Union as state capitalist.[25][26][27][28][30]
Leninist communism
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"We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called 'socialism'."
Vladimir Lenin, To the Rural Poor (1903)[159]
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Leninism is the body of political theory, developed by and named after the Russian revolutionary and later-Soviet premier Vladimir Lenin, for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party and the achievement of a dictatorship of the proletariat as political prelude to the establishment of the socialist mode of production. Leninism comprises socialist political and economic theories developed from orthodox Marxism as well as Lenin's interpretations of Marxist theory for practical application to the socio-political conditions of the early-20th-century agrarian society in the Russian Empire. Leninism was composed for revolutionary praxis and originally was neither a rigorously proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. After the Russian Revolution and in History and Class Consciousness (1923), György Lukács developed and organized Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices and ideology into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution. As a political-science term, Leninism entered common usage in 1922 after infirmity ended Lenin's participation in governing the Russian Communist Party. At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in July 1924, Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term Leninism to denote vanguard-party revolution.
Within Leninism, democratic centralism is a practice in which political decisions reached by voting processes are binding upon all members of the communist party. The party's political vanguard is composed of professional revolutionaries that elect leaders and officers as well as to determine policy through free discussion, then this is decisively realized through united action. In the context of the theory of Leninist revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby the most class-conscious and politically advanced sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form organizations in order to draw larger sections of the working class towards revolutionary politics and serve as manifestations of proletarian political power against its class enemies. From 1917 to 1922, Leninism was the Russian application of Marxian economics and political philosophy as effected and realized by the Bolsheviks, the vanguard party who led the fight for the political independence of the working class. In the 1925–1929 period, Joseph Stalin established his interpretation of Leninism as the official and only legitimate form of Marxism in Russia by amalgamating the political philosophies as Marxism–Leninism which then became the state ideology of the Soviet Union.
Marxism–Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a political ideology developed by Joseph Stalin.[160] According to its proponents, it is based in Marxism and Leninism. It describes the specific political ideology which Stalin implemented in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in a global scale in the Comintern. There is no definite agreement between historians of about whether Stalin actually followed the principles of Marx and Lenin.[161] It also contains aspects which according to some are deviations from Marxism such as socialism in one country.[162][163] Marxism–Leninism was the official ideology of 20th-century Communist parties (including Trotskyist), and was developed after the death of Lenin; its three principles were dialectical materialism, the leading role of the Communist party through democratic centralism, and a planned economy with industrialization and agricultural collectivization. As a term, Marxism–Leninism is misleading because Marx and Lenin never sanctioned or supported the creation of an -ism after them, and is reveling because, being popularized after Lenin's death by Stalin, it contained those three doctrinal and institutionalized principles that became a model for later Soviet-type regimes; its global influence, having at its height covered at least one-third of the world's population, has made Marxist–Leninist a convenient label for the Communist bloc as a dynamic ideological order.[164][b]
During the Cold War, Marxism–Leninism was the ideology of the most clearly visible communist movement and is the most prominent ideology associated with communism.[149][nb 6] Social fascism was a theory supported by the Comintern and affiliated communist parties during the early 1930s which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism because it stood in the way of a dictatorship of the proletariat, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model.[166] At the time, leaders of the Comintern such as Stalin and Rajani Palme Dutt stated that capitalist society had entered the Third Period in which a proletariat revolution was imminent but could be prevented by social democrats and other fascist forces.[166][167] The term social fascist was used pejoratively to describe social-democratic parties, anti-Comintern and progressive socialist parties and dissenters within Comintern affiliates throughout the interwar period. The social fascism theory was advocated vociferously by the Communist Party of Germany which was largely controlled and funded by the Soviet leadership from 1928.[167] Within Marxism–Leninism, anti-revisionism is a position which emerged in the 1950s in opposition to the reforms and Khrushchev Thaw of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Where Khrushchev pursued an interpretation that differed from Stalin, the anti-revisionists within the international communist movement remained dedicated to Stalin's ideological legacy and criticized the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and his successors as state capitalist and social imperialist due to its hopes of achieving peace with the United States. The term Stalinism is also used to describe these positions but is often not used by its supporters who opine that Stalin simply synthesized and practiced orthodox Marxism and Leninism. Because different political trends trace the historical roots of revisionism to different eras and leaders, there is significant disagreement today as to what constitutes anti-revisionism. Modern groups which describe themselves as anti-revisionist fall into several categories. Some uphold the works of Stalin and Mao Zedong and some the works of Stalin while rejecting Mao and universally tend to oppose Trotskyism. Others reject both Stalin and Mao, tracing their ideological roots back to Marx and Lenin. In addition, other groups uphold various less-well-known historical leaders such as Enver Hoxha, who also broke with Mao during the Sino-Albanian split. Social imperialism was a term used by Mao to criticize the Soviet Union post-Stalin. Mao stated that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a socialist façade.[168] Hoxha agreed with Mao in this analysis, before later using the expression to also condemn Mao's Three Worlds Theory.[169]
Stalinism
Stalinism represents Stalin's style of governance as opposed to Marxism–Leninism, the socioeconomic system and political ideology implemented by Stalin in the Soviet Union and later adapted by other states based on the ideological Soviet model, such as central planning, nationalization, and one-party state, along with public ownership of the means of production, accelerated industrialization, pro-active development of society's productive forces (research and development), and nationalized natural resources. Marxism–Leninism remained after de-Stalinization whereas Stalinism did not. In the last letters before his death, Lenin warned against the danger of Stalin's personality and urged the Soviet government to replace him.[59] Until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Communist party referred to its own ideology as Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism.[145]
Marxism–Leninism has been criticized by other communist and Marxist tendencies, which state that Marxist–Leninist states did not establish socialism but rather state capitalism.[25][26][27][28][30] According to Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat represents the rule of the majority (democracy) rather than of one party, to the extent that co-founder of Marxism Friedrich Engels described its "specific form" as the democratic republic.[170] According to Engels, state property by itself is private property of capitalist nature[a] unless the proletariat has control of political power, in which case it forms public property.[d][158] Whether the proletariat was actually in control of the Marxist–Leninist states is a matter of debate between Marxism–Leninism and other communist tendencies. To these tendencies, Marxism–Leninism is neither Marxism nor Leninism nor the union of both but rather an artificial term created to justify Stalin's ideological distortion,[171] forced into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. In the Soviet Union, this struggle against Marxism–Leninism was represented by Trotskyism, which describes itself as a Marxist and Leninist tendency.[172]
Trotskyism
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Trotskyism, developed by Leon Trotsky in opposition to Stalinism,[173] is a Marxist and Leninist tendency that supports the theory of permanent revolution and world revolution rather than the two-stage theory and Stalin's socialism in one country. It supported proletarian internationalism[174] and another communist revolution in the Soviet Union. Rather than representing the dictatorship of the proletariat, Trotsky claimed that the Soviet Union had become a degenerated workers' state under the leadership of Stalin in which class relations had re-emerged in a new form. Trotsky's politics differed sharply from those of Stalin and Mao, most importantly in declaring the need for an international proletarian revolution—rather than socialism in one country—and support for a true dictatorship of the proletariat based on democratic principles. Struggling against Stalin for power in the Soviet Union, Trotsky and his supporters organized into the Left Opposition, the platform of which became known as Trotskyism. Stalin eventually succeeded in gaining control of the Soviet regime and Trotskyist attempts to remove Stalin from power resulted in Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. While in exile, Trotsky continued his campaign against Stalin, founding in 1938 the Fourth International, a Trotskyist rival to the Comintern. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin's orders. Trotskyist currents include orthodox Trotskyism, third camp, Posadism, Pabloism, and neo-Trotskyism.
In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class's democratic control over the state has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and in other works. Deformed workers' states are states where the capitalist class has been overthrown, the economy is largely state-owned and planned, but there is no internal democracy or workers' control of industry. In a deformed workers' state, the working class has never held political power like it did in Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. These states are considered deformed because their political and economic structures have been imposed from the top (or from outside) and because revolutionary working class organizations are crushed. Like a degenerated workers' state, a deformed workers' state cannot be said to be a state that is transitioning to socialism. Most Trotskyists cite examples of deformed workers' states today as including Cuba, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and Vietnam. The Committee for a Workers' International has also included at times states such as Burma and Syria when they have had a nationalized economy.
Maoism
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Maoism is the theory derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong. Developed from the 1950s until the Deng Xiaoping Chinese economic reform in the 1970s, it was widely applied as the guiding political and military ideology of the Communist Party of China and as the theory guiding revolutionary movements around the world. A key difference between Maoism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism is that peasants should be the bulwark of the revolutionary energy which is led by the working class.[175] Three common Maoist values are revolutionary populism, being practical, and dialectics.[176]
The synthesis of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism,[e] which builds upon the two individual theories as the Chinese adaption of Marxism–Leninism, did not occur during the life of Mao. After de-Stalinization, Marxism–Leninism was kept in the Soviet Union, while certain anti-revisionist tendencies such as Hoxhaism and Maoism stated that such had deviated from its original concept. Different policies were applied in Albania and China which became more distanced from the Soviet Union. From the 1960s, groups who called themselves Maoists, or those who upheld Maoism, were not unified around a common understanding of Maoism, instead having their own particular interpretations of the political, philosophical, economical and military works of Mao. Its adherents claim that as a unified, coherent higher stage of Marxism, it was not consolidated until the 1980s, first being formalized by the Peruvian communist party Shining Path in 1982.[177] Through the experience of the people's war waged by the party, the Shining Path were able to posit Maoism as the newest development of Marxism.[177]
Proponents of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism refer to the theory as Maoism itself, whereas Maoism is referred to as either Mao Zedong Thought or Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought. Maoism–Third Worldism is concerned with the infusion and synthesis of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism with concepts of non-Marxist Third-Worldism such dependency theory and world-systems theory.
Eurocommunism
Eurocommunism was a revisionist trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties, claiming to develop a theory and practice of social transformation more relevant to their region. Especially prominent in France, Italy, and Spain, communists of this nature sought to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union and its Communist party during the Cold War.[121] Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, was widely considered the father of Eurocommunism.[178]
Libertarian Marxist communism
Libertarian Marxism is a broad range of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism,[179] emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism[180] and its derivatives such as Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism.[181] Libertarian Marxism is also critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats.[182] Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Marx and Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France,[183] emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.[184] Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main derivatives of libertarian socialism.[185]
Aside from left communism, libertarian Marxism includes such currents as autonomism, communization, council communism, De Leonism, the Johnson–Forest Tendency, Lettrism, Luxemburgism Situationism, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Solidarity, the World Socialist Movement, workerism as well as parts of Freudo-Marxism and the New Left.[186] Moreover, libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Antonie Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Daniel Guérin, and Yanis Varoufakis,[187] the latter of whom claims that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.[188]
Council communism
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Council communism is a movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s, whose primary organization was the Communist Workers Party of Germany. It continues today as a theoretical and activist position within both libertarian Marxism and libertarian socialism.[189] The core principle of council communism is that the government and the economy should be managed by workers' councils, which are composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. Council communists oppose the perceived authoritarian and undemocratic nature of central planning and of state socialism, labelled state capitalism, and the idea of a revolutionary party, since council communists believe that a revolution led by a party would necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers' democracy, produced through a federation of workers' councils.
In contrast to those of social democracy and Leninist communism, the central argument of council communism is that democratic workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural form of working-class organization and governmental power.[190][191] This view is opposed to both the reformist[192] and the Leninist communist ideologies,[193] which respectively stress parliamentary and institutional government by applying social reforms on the one hand, and vanguard parties and participative democratic centralism on the other.
Left communism
Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas and practices espoused, particularly following the series of revolutions that brought World War to an end by Bolsheviks and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its first congress (March 1919) and during its second congress (July–August 1920).[180]
Left communists represent a range of political movements distinct from Marxist–Leninists, whom they largely view as merely the left-wing of capital, from anarcho-communists, some of whom they consider to be internationalist socialists, and from various other revolutionary socialist tendencies, such as De Leonists, whom they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances.[194] Bordigism is a Leninist left-communist current named after Amadeo Bordiga, who has been described as being "more Leninist than Lenin", and considered himself to be a Leninist.[195]
Other types of communism
Anarcho-communism
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Anarcho-communism is a libertarian theory of anarchism and communism which advocates the abolition of the state, private property and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production;[196][197] direct democracy; and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need";[198][199] anarcho-communism differs from Marxism in that it rejects its view about the need for a state socialism phase prior to establishing communism. Peter Kropotkin, the main theorist of anarcho-communism, stated that a revolutionary society should "transform itself immediately into a communist society", that it should go immediately into what Marx had regarded as the "more advanced, completed, phase of communism".[200] In this way, it tries to avoid the reappearance of class divisions and the need for a state to be in control.[200]
Some forms of anarcho-communism such as insurrectionary anarchism are egoist and strongly influenced by radical individualism,[201][202][203] believing that anarchist communism does not require a communitarian nature at all. Most anarcho-communists view anarchist communism as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.[f][204][205] In human history to date, the best-known examples of an anarcho-communist society, i.e. established around the ideas as they exist today and that received worldwide attention and knowledge in the historical canon, are the anarchist territories during the Free Territory during the Russian Revolution, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria and the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
During the Russian Civil War, anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked through the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine to create and defend anarcho-communism in the Free Territory of the Ukraine from 1919 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921. In 1929, anarcho-communism was achieved in Korea by the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAFM) and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF), with help from anarchist general and independence activist Kim Chwa-chin, lasting until 1931, when Imperial Japan assassinated Kim and invaded from the south while the Chinese Nationalists invaded from the north, resulting in the creation of Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War, starting in 1936 anarcho-communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante, and Andalusia, and in the stronghold of Revolutionary Catalonia, before being brutally crushed.
Christian communism
Christian communism is a theological and political theory based upon the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ compel Christians to support religious communism as the ideal social system.[60] Although there is no universal agreement on the exact dates when communistic ideas and practices in Christianity began, many Christian communists state that evidence from the Bible suggests that the first Christians, including the apostles, established their own small communist society in the years following Jesus' death and resurrection.[206] Many advocates of Christian communism state that it was taught by Jesus and practiced by the apostles themselves.[207] Some historians confirm its existence.[60][208][209][210][211]
Christian communism enjoys some support in Russia. Russian musician Yegor Letov was an outspoken Christian communist and in a 1995 interview was quoted as saying: "Communism is the Kingdom of God on Earth."[212]
Analysis
Reception
Emily Morris from University College London wrote that because Karl Marx's writings have inspired many movements, including the Russian Revolution of 1917, communism is "commonly confused with the political and economic system that developed in the Soviet Union" after the revolution.[32][g] Historian Andrzej Paczkowski summarized communism as "an ideology that seemed clearly the opposite, that was based on the secular desire of humanity to achieve equality and social justice, and that promised a great leap forward into freedom."[213]
Anti-communism developed as soon as communism became a conscious political movement in the 19th century, and anti-communist mass killings have been reported against alleged communists, or their alleged supporters which were committed by anti-communists and political organizations or governments which opposed communism. The communist movement has faced opposition since it was founded and the opposition to it has often been organized and violent. Many of these anti-communist mass killing campaigns, primarily during the Cold War,[110][111] were supported by the United States and its Western Bloc allies,[214][215] including those who were formally part of the Non-Alligned Movement, such as the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and Operation Condor in South America.[216][217]
Excess deaths under communist states
Many authors[nb 7] have written about excess deaths under Communist states and mortality rates, such as excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.[nb 8] Some authors posit that there is a Communist death toll, whose death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them, ranging from lows of 10–20 million to highs over 100 million. The higher estimates have been criticized by several scholars as ideologically motivated and inflated; they are also criticized for being inaccurate due to incomplete data, inflated by counting any excess death, making an unwarranted link to communism, and the grouping and body-counting itself. Higher estimates account for actions that Communist governments committed against civilians, including executions, man-made famines, and deaths that occurred during, or resulted from, imprisonment, and forced deportations and labor. Higher estimates are criticized for being based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable, skewed to higher possible values, and victims of civil wars, the Holodomor and other famines, and war-related events should not be included.[223][224][225][226][227][228]
There is no consensus among genocide scholars[nb 9] and scholars of Communism about whether some or all the events constituted a mass killing. There is also no consensus on a common terminology,[241] and the events have been variously referred to as excess mortality or mass deaths; other terms used to define some of such killings include classicide, crimes against humanity, democide, genocide, politicide, holocaust, and repression.[222][nb 10] Scholars state that most Communist states did not engage in mass killings;[243][nb 11] some in particular, such as Benjamin Valentino,[248] propose the category of Communist mass killing, alongside colonial, counter-guerrilla, and ethnic mass killing, as a subtype of dispossessive mass killing to distinguish it from coercive mass killing. Scholars do not consider ideology[242] or regime-type as an important factor that explains mass killings.[249]
Some authors have connected killings in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao Zedong's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia on the basis that Stalin influenced Mao, who influenced Pol Pot; in all cases, killings were carried out as part of a policy of an unbalanced modernization process of rapid industrialization.[222][nb 12] Other authors allege that genocide was dictated in otherwise forgotten works of Karl Marx.[251][252]
According to Dovid Katz and other historians, a historical revisionist view of the double genocide theory,[253][254] equating mass deaths under Communist states with the Holocaust, is popular in Eastern European countries and the Baltic states, and their approaches of history have been incorporated in the European Union agenda,[255] among them the Prague Declaration in June 2008 and the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, which was proclaimed by the European Parliament in August 2008 and endorsed by the OSCE in Europe in July 2009. Among many scholars in Western Europe, the comparison of the two regimes and equivalence of their crimes has been and still is widely rejected.[255]
Many commentators on the political right point to the mass killings under communist regimes, claiming them as an indictment of communism.[256][257][258] Opponents of this view, including those on the political left, state that these killings were aberrations caused by specific authoritarian regimes, and not caused by communism itself, and point to mass deaths in wars that they claim were caused by capitalism and anti-communism as a counterpoint to those killings.[111][114][257]
Memory and legacy
Memory studies have been done on how the events are memorized.[259] The "victims of Communism" concept,[260] has become accepted scholarship, as part of the double genocide theory, in Eastern Europe and among anti-communists in general;[261] it is rejected by some Western European[255] and other scholars, especially when it is used to equate Communism and Nazism, which is seen by scholars as a long-discredited perspective.[105] The narrative posits that famines and mass deaths by Communist states can be attributed to a single cause and that communism, as "the deadliest ideology in history", or in the words of Jonathan Rauch as "the deadliest fantasy in human history",[262] represents the greatest threat to humanity.[257] Proponents posit an alleged link between communism, left-wing politics, and socialism with genocide, mass killing, and totalitarianism,[263] with authors such as George Watson advocating a common history stretching from Marx to Adolf Hitler.[251] Some right-wing authors allege that Marx was responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust.[264]
Authors such as Stéphane Courtois propose a theory of equivalence between class and racial genocide.[265] It is supported by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, with 100 million being the most common estimate used from The Black Book of Communism despite some of the authors of the book distancing themselves from the estimates made by Stephen Courtois.[114] Various museums and monuments have been constructed in remembrance of the victims of Communism, with support of the European Union and various governments in Canada, Eastern Europe, and the United States.[134][266] Works such as The Black Book of Communism and Bloodlands legitimized debates on the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism,[265][267] and by extension communism, and the former work in particular was important in the criminalization of communism.[134][266]
See also
- American Communist History
- Anti anti-communism
- Commons-based peer production
- Communism by country
- Communist bandit
- Crimes against humanity under communist regimes
- Criticism of communist party rule
- Criticism of Marxism
- Crypto-communism
- List of communist parties
- Outline of Marxism
- Post-scarcity economy
- Sociocultural evolution
- Twentieth Century Communism
References
Notes
- ^ Earlier forms of communism (utopian socialism and some earlier forms of religious communism), shared support for a classless society and common ownership but did not necessarily advocate revolutionary politics or engage in scientific analysis; that was done by Marxist communism, which has defined mainstream, modern communism, and has influenced all modern forms of communism. Such communisms, especially new religious or utopian forms of communism, may share the Marxist analysis, while favoring evolutionary politics, localism, or reformism. By the 20th century, communism has been associated with revolutionary socialism.[11]
- ^ Communism is capitalized by scholars of communism when referring to Communist party-ruling states and governments, which are considered to be proper nouns as a result.[15] Following scholar Joel Kovel, sociologist Sara Diamond wrote: "I use uppercase 'C' Communism to refer to actually existing governments and movements and lowercase 'c' communism to refer to the varied movements and political currents organized around the ideal of a classless society."[16] The Black Book of Communism also adopted such distinction, stating that communism exists since millennia, while Communism (used in reference to Leninist and Marxist–Leninist communism as applied by Communist states in the 20th century) only began in 1917.[17] Alan M. Wald wrote: "In order to tackle complex and often misunderstood political-literary relationships, I have adopted methods of capitalization in this book that may deviate from editorial norms practiced at certain journals and publishing houses. In particular, I capitalize 'Communist' and 'Communism' when referring to official parties of the Third International, but not when pertaining to other adherents of Bolshevism or revolutionary Marxism (which encompasses small-'c' communists such as Trotskyists, Bukharinists, council communists, and so forth)."[18] In 1994, CPUSA activist Irwin Silber wrote: "When capitalized, the International Communist Movement refers to the formal organizational structure of the pro-Soviet Communist Parties. In lower case, the international communist movement is a more generic term referring to the general movement for communism."[19]
- ^ While the Bolsheviks rested on hope of success of the 1917–1923 wave of proletarian revolutions in Western Europe before resulting in the socialism in one country policy after their failure, Marx's view on the mir was shared not by self-professed Russian Marxists, who were mechanistic determinists, but by the Narodniks[78] and the Socialist Revolutionary Party,[79] one of the successors to the Narodniks, alongside the Popular Socialists and the Trudoviks.[80]
- ^ As summarized by Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Nazism did not kill its own citizens except Jews, while Stalinism was killing mainly its own people, and Nazism was killing people by their biological traits and its genocidal activity was stopped; the scale of potential Nazi mass murders is unknown, whereas the murderous potential of Stalinism had already reached its natural limit.[108][109]
- ^ The Democratic People's Republic of Korea refers to its leading ideology as Juche, which is portrayed as a development of Marxism–Leninism. In North Korea, Marxism–Leninism was superseded by Juche in the 1970s and was made official in 1992 and 2009, when constitutional references to Marxism–Leninism were dropped and replaced with Juche.[135] In 2009, the constitution was quietly amended so that not only did it remove all Marxist–Leninist references present in the first draft but also dropped all references to communism.[136] Juche has been described by some observers as a version of "Korean ultranationalism",[137] which eventually developed after losing its original Marxist–Leninist elements.[138] Marxism–Leninism was largely abandoned after the start of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union and has been totally replaced by Juche since at least 1974.[139]
- ^ According to their proponents, Marxist–Leninist ideologies have been adapted to the material conditions of their respective countries and include Castroism (Cuba), Ceaușism (Romania), Gonzalo Thought (Peru), Guevarism (Cuba), Ho Chi Minh Thought (Vietnam), Hoxhaism (anti-revisionist Albania), Husakism (Czechoslovakia), Juche (North Korea), Kadarism (Hungary), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia), Khrushchevism (Soviet Union), Prachanda Path (Nepal), Shining Path (Peru), and Titoism (anti-Stalinist Yugoslavia).[165][c]
- ^ Most scholars write about individual events, and make estimates of any deaths like any other historical event; some events are categorized by a Communist state's particular era, such as Stalinist repression,
[109][218] rather than a connection to all Communist states, which came to cover one-third the world's population by 1985.[60]
Historians such as Robert Conquest and J. Arch Getty mainly wrote and focused on the Stalin era; they wrote about people who died in the Gulag or as a result of Stalinist repression, and discussed estimates about those specific events, as part of the excess mortality debate in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, without connecting them to communism as a whole. They have vigorously debated, including on the Holodomor genocide question,[219][220] but the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Fall of Communism, and the release of state archives put some of the heat out of the debate.[93] Some historians, among them Michael Ellman, have questioned "the very category 'victims of Stalinism'" as "a matter of political judgement" because mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil" and were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.[221] There exists very little literature that compares excess deaths under "the Big Three" of Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao Zedong's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and that which does exist mainly enumerates the events rather than explain their ideological reasons. One such example is Crimes Against Humanity Under Communist Regimes – Research Review by Klas-Göran Karlsson and Michael Schoenhals, a review study summarizing what others have stated about it, mentioning some authors who saw the origins of the killings in Karl Marx's writings; the geographical scope is "the Big Three", and the authors state that killings were carried out as part of an unbalanced modernizing policy of rapid industrialization, asking "what marked the beginning of the unbalanced Russian modernisation process that was to have such terrible consequences?"[222]
Notable scholarly exceptions are historian Stéphane Courtois and political scientist Rudolph Rummel, who have attempted a connection between all Communist states; however, Rummel's analysis was done within the framework of his proposed concept of democide, which includes any direct and indirect deaths by government, and did not limit himself to Communist states, which were categorized within the framework of totalitarianism alongside other regime-types. Rummel's estimates are on the high-end of the spectrum, have been criticized and scrutinized, and are rejected by most scholars. Courtois' attempts, as in the introduction to The Black Book of Communism, which have been described by some critical observers as a crudely anti-communist and antisemitic work, are controversial; many reviewers of the book, including scholars, criticized such attempts of lumping all Communist states and different sociological movements together as part of a Communist death toll totalling more than 94 million.[223][224][225][226][227][228] Reviewers also distinguished the introduction from the book proper, which was better received and only presented a number of chapters on single-country studies, with no cross-cultural comparison, or discussion of mass killings; historian Andrzej Paczkowski wrote that only Courtois made the comparison between communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations", and stated that the book is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon."[213] More positive reviews found most of the criticism to be fair or warranted, with political scientist Stanley Hoffmann stating that "Courtois would have been far more effective if he had shown more restraint",[229] and Paczkowski stating that it has had two positive effects, among them stirring a debate about the implementation of totalitarian ideologies and "an exhaustive balance sheet about one aspect of the worldwide phenomenon of communism."[225]
A Soviet and Communist studies example is Steven Rosefielde's Red Holocaust, which is controversial due to Holocaust trivialization; nonetheless, Rosefielde's work mainly focused on "the Big Three" (Stalin era, Mao era, and the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia), plus Kim Il-sung's North Korea and Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam. Rosefielde's main point is that Communism in general, although he focuses mostly on Stalinism, is less genocidal and that is a key distinction from Nazism, and did not make a connection between all Communist states or communism as an ideology. Rosefielde wrote that "the conditions for the Red Holocaust were rooted in Stalin's, Kim's, Mao's, Ho's and Pol Pot's siege-mobilized terror-command economic systems, not in Marx's utopian vision or other pragmatic communist transition mechanisms. Terror-command was chosen among other reasons because of legitimate fears about the long-term viability of terror-free command, and the ideological risks of market communism."[230] - ^ Some authors, such as Stéphane Courtois in The Black Book of Communism, stated that Communism killed more than Nazism and thus was worse; several scholars have criticized this view.[231] After assessing twenty years of historical research in Eastern European archives, lower estimates by the "revisionist school" of historians have been vindicated,[232] despite the popular press continuing to use higher estimates and containing serious errors.[108] Historians such as Timothy D. Snyder stated it is taken for granted that Stalin killed more civilians than Hitler; for most scholars, excess mortality under Stalin was about 6 million, which rise to 9 million if foreseeable deaths arising from policies are taken into account. This estimate is less than those killed by Nazis, who killed more noncombatants than the Soviets did.[233]
- ^ Most genocide scholars do not lump Communist states together, and do not treat genocidical events as a separate subjects, or by regime-type, and compare them to genocidical events which happened under vastly different regimes. Examples include Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts,[234] The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing,[235] Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide,[236] Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue,[237] and Final Solutions.[238] Several of them are limited to the geographical locations of "the Big Three", or mainly the Cambodian genocide, whose culprit, the Khmer Rouge regime, was described by genocide scholar Helen Fein as following a xenophobic ideology bearing a stronger resemblance to "an almost forgotten phenomenon of national socialism", or fascism, rather than communism,[239] while historian Ben Kiernan described it as "more racist and generically totalitarian than Marxist or specifically Communist",[240] or do not discuss Communist states, other than passing mentions. Such work is mainly done in an attempt to prevent genocides but has been described by scholars as a failure.[241]
- ^ Genocide scholar Barbara Harff maintains a global database on mass killings, which is intended mostly for statistical analysis of mass killings in attempt to identify the best predictors for their onset and data is not necessarily the most accurate for a given country, since some sources are general genocide scholars and not experts on local history;[228] it includes anticommunist mass killings, such as the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 (genocide and politicide), and some events which happened under Communist states, such as the 1959 Tibetan uprising (genocide and politicide), the Cambodian genocide (genocide and politicide), and the Cultural Revolution (politicide), but no comparative analysis or communist link is drawn, other than the events just happened to take place in some Communist states in Eastern Asia. The Harff database is the most frequently used by genocide scholars.[242] Rudolph Rummel operated a similar database, but it was not limited to Communist states, it is mainly for statistical analysis, and in a comparative analysis has been criticized by other scholars, over that of Harff,[228] for his estimates and statistical methodology, which showed some flaws.[227]
- ^ In their criticism of The Black Book of Communism, which popularized the topic, several scholars have questioned, in the words of Alexander Dallin, "[w]hether all these cases, from Hungary to Afghanistan, have a single essence and thus deserve to be lumped together—just because they are labeled Marxist or communist—is a question the authors scarcely discuss."[49] In particular, historians Jens Mecklenburg and Wolfgang Wippermann stated that a connection between the events in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Pol Pot's Cambodia are far from evident and that Pol Pot's study of Marxism in Paris is insufficient for connecting radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's murderous anti-urbanism under the same category.[244] Historian Michael David-Fox criticized the figures as well as the idea to combine loosely connected events under a single category of Communist death toll, blaming Stéphane Courtois for their manipulation and deliberate inflation which are presented to advocate the idea that communism was a greater evil than Nazism. David-Fox criticized the idea to connect the deaths with some "generic Communism" concept, defined down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals.[48] A similar criticism was made by Le Monde.[245] Allegation of a communist or red Holocaust is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally,[246] and is considered a form of softcore antisemitism and Holocaust trivialization.[247]
- ^ The Cambodia case is particular because it is different from the emphasis Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China gave to heavy industry. The goal of Khmer Rouge's leaders goal was to introduce communism in an extremely short period of time through collectivization of agriculture in the effort to remove social differences and inequalities between rural and urban areas.[222] As there was not much industry in Cambodia at that time, Pol Pot's strategy to accomplish this was to increase agricultural production in order to obtain money for rapid industrialization.[250]
In analyzing the Khmer Rouge regime, scholars place it within the historical context. The Khmer Rouge came to power through the Cambodian Civil War (where unparalleled atrocities were executed on both sides) and Operation Menu, resulting in the dropping of more than half a million tonnes of bombs in the country during the civil-war period; this was mainly directed to Communist Vietnam but it gave the Khmer Rouge a justification to eliminate the pro-Vietnamese faction and other communists.[222] The Cambodian genocide, which is described by many scholars as a genocide and by others such as Manus Midlarsky as a politicide,[249] was stopped by Communist Vietnam, and there have been allegations of United States support for the Khmer Rouge. South East Asian communism was deeply divided, as China supported the Khmer Rouge, while the Soviet Union and Vietnam opposed it. The United States supported Lon Nol, who seized power in the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état, and research has shown that everything in Cambodia was seen as a legitimate target by the United States, whose verdict of its main leaders at that time (Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger) has been harsh, and bombs were gradually dropped on increasingly densely populated areas.[222]
Quotes
- ^ a b Engels, Friedrich (1970) [1880]. "Historical Materialism". Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. "But, the transformation—either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership—does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine—the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."
- ^ (Morgan 2015): "'Marxism–Leninism' was the formal name of the official state ideology adopted by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), its satellite states in Eastern Europe, the Asian communist regimes, and various 'scientific socialist' regimes in the Third World during the Cold War. As such, the term is simultaneously misleading and revealing. It is misleading, since neither Marx nor Lenin ever sanctioned the creation of an eponymous 'ism'; indeed, the term Marxism–Leninism was formulated only in the period of Stalin's rise to power after Lenin's death. It is revealing, because the Stalinist institutionalization of Marxism–Leninism in the 1930s did contain three identifiable, dogmatic principles that became the explicit model for all later Soviet-type regimes: dialectical materialism as the only true proletarian basis for philosophy, the leading role of the communist party as the central principle of Marxist politics, and state-led planned industrialization and agricultural collectivization as the foundation of socialist economics. The global influence of these three doctrinal and institutional innovations makes the term Marxist–Leninist a convenient label for a distinct sort of ideological order—one which, at the height of its power and influence, dominated one-third of the world's population."
- ^ (Morgan 2001): "As communist Parties emerged around the world, encouraged both by the success of the Soviet Party in establishing Russia’s independence from foreign domination and by clandestine monetary subsidies from the Soviet comrades, they became identifiable by their adherence to a common political ideology known as Marxism–Leninism. Of course from the very beginning Marxism–Leninism existed in many variants. The conditions were themselves an effort to enforce a minimal degree of uniformity on diverse conceptions of communist identity. Adherence to the ideas of 'Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky' characterized the Trotskyists who soon broke off in a 'Fourth International.'"
- ^ Engels, Friedrich (1970) [1880]. "Historical Materialism". Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out."
- ^ (Morgan 2001, p. 2332): '"Marxism–Leninism–Maoism' became the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and of the splinter parties that broke off from national communist parties after the Chinese definitively split with the Soviets in 1963. Italian communists continued to be influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, whose independent conception of the reasons why the working class in industrial countries remained politically quiescent bore far more democratic implications than Lenin’s own explanation of worker passivity. Until Stalin’s death, the Soviet Party referred to its own ideology as 'Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism.'"
- ^ Kropotkin, Peter. "Communism and Anarchy". Archived from the original on 29 July 2011. "Communism is the one which guarantees the greatest amount of individual liberty—provided that the idea that begets the community be Liberty, Anarchy ... Communism guarantees economic freedom better than any other form of association, because it can guarantee wellbeing, even luxury, in return for a few hours of work instead of a day's work."
- ^ (Morgan 2015): "Communist ideas have acquired a new meaning since 1918. They became equivalent to the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, that is, the interpretation of Marxism by Lenin and his successors. Endorsing the final objective, namely, the creation of a community owning means of production and providing each of its participants with consumption 'according to their needs', they put forward the recognition of the class struggle as a dominating principle of a social development. In addition, workers (i.e., the proletariat) were to carry out the mission of reconstruction of the society. Conducting a socialist revolution headed by the avant-garde of the proletariat, that is, the party, was hailed to be a historical necessity. Moreover, the introduction of the proletariat dictatorship was advocated and hostile classes were to be liquidated."
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One widespread distinction was that socialism socialised production only while communism socialised production and consumption.
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... communism (noun) ... 2. The economic and political system instituted in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Also, the economic and political system of several Soviet allies, such as China and Cuba. (Writers often capitalize Communism when they use the word in this sense.) These Communist economic systems often did not achieve the ideals of communist theory. For example, although many forms of property were owned by the government in the USSR and China, neither the work nor the products were shared in a manner that would be considered equitable by many communist or Marxist theorists.
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'Although Stalin was the system's prime architect, the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship,' Gregory writes. 'This study pinpoints the reasons for the failure of the system—poor planning, unreliable supplies, the preferential treatment of indigenous enterprises, the lack of knowledge of planners, etc.—but also focuses on the basic principal agent conflict between planners and producers, which created a sixty-year reform stalemate.'
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In the USSR in the late 1980s the system was normally referred to as the 'administrative-command' economy. What was fundamental to this system was not the plan but the role of administrative hierarchies at all levels of decision making; the absence of control over decision making by the population ... .
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The decisive distinction between socialist and communist, as in one sense these terms are now ordinarily used, came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) as the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism.
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By 1888, the term 'socialism' was in general use among Marxists, who had dropped 'communism', now considered an old fashioned term meaning the same as 'socialism'. ... At the turn of the century, Marxists called themselves socialists. ... The definition of socialism and communism as successive stages was introduced into Marxist theory by Lenin in 1917 ..., the new distinction was helpful to Lenin in defending his party against the traditional Marxist criticism that Russia was too backward for a socialist revolution.
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In a modern sense of the word, communism refers to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
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- ^ Busky, Donald F. (2000). Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. pp. 6–8. ISBN 978-0-275-96886-1.
In a modern sense of the word, communism refers to the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. ... [T]he adjective democratic is added by democratic socialists to attempt to distinguish themselves from Communists who also call themselves socialists. All but communists, or more accurately, Marxist–Leninists, believe that modern-day communism is highly undemocratic and totalitarian in practice, and democratic socialists wish to emphasise by their name that they disagree strongly with the Marxist–Leninist brand of socialism.
- ^ "Communism". The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed.). 2007.
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Contrary to Western usage, these countries describe themselves as 'Socialist' (not 'Communist'). The second stage (Marx's 'higher phase'), or 'Communism' is to be marked by an age of plenty, distribution according to needs (not work), the absence of money and the market mechanism, the disappearance of the last vestiges of capitalism and the ultimate 'withering away' of the State.
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Among Western journalists the term 'Communist' came to refer exclusively to regimes and movements associated with the Communist International and its offspring: regimes which insisted that they were not communist but socialist, and movements which were barely communist in any sense at all.
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Ironically, the ideological father of communism, Karl Marx, claimed that communism entailed the withering away of the state. The dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a strictly temporary phenomenon. Well aware of this, the Soviet Communists never claimed to have achieved communism, always labeling their own system socialist rather than communist and viewing their system as in transition to communism.
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The decisive distinction between socialist and communist, as in one sense these terms are now ordinarily used, came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) as the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism.
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Narodniki had opposed the often mechanistic determinism of Russian Marxism with the belief that non-economic factors such as the human will act as the motor of history. The SRs believed that the creative work of ordinary people through unions and cooperatives and the local government organs of a democratic state could bring about social transformation. ... They, along with free soviets, the cooperatives and the mir could have formed the popular basis for a devolved and democratic rule across the Russian state.
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According to nineteenth-century socialist views, socialism would function without capitalist economic categories – such as money, prices, interest, profits and rent – and thus would function according to laws other than those described by current economic science. While some socialists recognized the need for money and prices at least during the transition from capitalism to socialism, socialists more commonly believed that the socialist economy would soon administratively mobilize the economy in physical units without the use of prices or money.
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The 1936 Constitution described the Soviet Union for the first time as a 'socialist society', rhetorically fulfilling the aim of building socialism in one country, as Stalin had promised.
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... the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
- ^ Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 11–57. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
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- ^ Georgakas, Dan (1992). "The Hollywood Blacklist". Encyclopedia of the American Left (paperback ed.). Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252062506.
- ^ Morgan 2001, p. 661.
- ^ Siegel, Achim (1998). The Totalitarian Paradigm After the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment (hardback ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 200. ISBN 9789042005525.
- ^ Guilhot, Nicholas (2005). The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (hardcover ed.). New York City, New York: Columbia University Press. p. 33. ISBN 9780231131247.
- ^ Defty, Brook (2007). "2. Launching the New Propaganda Policy, 1948. 3. Building a Concerted Counter-offensive: Co-operation with other powers. 4. Close and Continuous Liaison: British and American co-operation, 1950–51. 5. A Global Propaganda Offensive: Churchill and the revival of political warfare". Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department (1st paperback ed.). London, England: Routledge. ISBN 9780714683614.
- ^ a b Doumanis, Nicholas, ed. (2016). The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (E-book ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 377–378. ISBN 9780191017759.
- ^ Martin, Tery Dean (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (paperback ed.). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801486777 – via Google Books.
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- ^ a b Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (March 1999). "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 340–342. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. JSTOR 153614. Retrieved 17 August 2021 – via Soviet Studies.
- ^ a b Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word". Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 315–345. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. ISSN 0966-8136. JSTOR 153614.
- ^ a b Aarons, Mark (2007). "Justice Betrayed: Post-1945 Responses to Genocide". In Blumenthal, David A.; McCormack, Timothy L. H. (eds.). The Legacy of Nuremberg: Civilising Influence or Institutionalised Vengeance? (International Humanitarian Law). Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. pp. 71, 80–81. ISBN 978-9004156913. Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
- ^ a b c Bevins, Vincent (2020). The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs. p. 240. ISBN 978-1541742406.
... we do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin's purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. Even Mao's Great Leap Forward was quickly abandoned and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party, though the party is still very much around. We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence. ... Washington's anticommunist crusade, with Indonesia as the apex of its murderous violence against civilians, deeply shaped the world we live in now ... .
- ^ Chomsky, Noam. "Counting the Bodies". Spectrezine. Archived from the original on 21 September 2016. Retrieved 18 September 2016.
- ^ Dean, Jodi (2012). The Communist Horizon. Verso. pp. 6–7. ISBN 978-1844679546.
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- ^ Milne, Seumas (16 February 2006). "Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 September 2018.
- ^ Parenti, Michael (1997). Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. p. 58. ISBN 978-0872863293.
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- ^ Bradley, Mark Philip (2017). "Human Rights and Communism". In Fürst, Juliane; Pons, Silvio; Selden, Mark (eds.). The Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 3, Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. p. 152. ISBN 978-1-108-50935-0.
- ^ Robinson, Nathan J. (25 October 2017). "How To Be A Socialist Without Being An Apologist For The Atrocities Of Communist Regimes". Current Affairs. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
- ^ Klein, Ezra (7 January 2020). "Nathan Robinson's case for socialism". Vox. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
- ^ a b Kindersley, Richard, ed. (1981). In Search of Eurocommunism. Macmillan Press. ISBN 978-1-349-16581-0.
- ^ Deutscher, Tamara (January–February 1983). "E. H. Carr—A Personal Memoir". New Left Review. I (137): 78–86. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
- ^ Alimzhanov, Anuarbek (1991). "Deklaratsiya Soveta Respublik Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR v svyazi s sozdaniyem Sodruzhestva Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv" Декларация Совета Республик Верховного Совета СССР в связи с созданием Содружества Независимых Государств"]. [Declaration of the Council of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in connection with the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States]. Archived 20 December 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Vedomosti (in Russian). No. 52. Declaration № 142-Н (in Russian) of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, formally establishing the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state and subject of international law.
- ^ "The End of the Soviet Union; Text of Declaration: 'Mutual Recognition' and 'an Equal Basis'". The New York Times. 22 December 1991. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
- ^ "Gorbachev, Last Soviet Leader, Resigns; U.S. Recognizes Republics' Independence". The New York Times. 26 December 1991. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
- ^ Ghodsee, Kristen (2017). Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. Duke University Press. pp. xix–xx, 134, 197–200. ISBN 978-0822369493.
- ^ Ehms, Jule (9 March 2014). "The Communist Horizon". Marx & Philosophy Society. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
- ^ Ghodsee, Kristen (2015). The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Duke University Press. p. xvi–xvii. ISBN 978-0822358350.
- ^ Scheidel, Walter (2017). "Chapter 7: Communism". The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691165028.
- ^ Scheidel, Walter (2017). The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press. p. 222. ISBN 978-0691165028.
- ^ Natsios, Andrew S. (2002). The Great North Korean Famine. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 1929223331.
- ^ Ther, Philipp (2016). Europe Since 1989: A History. Princeton University Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-691-16737-4.
Stalinist regimes aimed to catapult the predominantly agrarian societies into the modern age by swift industrialization. At the same time, they hoped to produce politically loyal working classes by mass employment in large state industries. Steelworks were built in Eisenhüttenstadt (GDR), Nowa Huta (Poland), Košice (Slovakia), and Miskolc (Hungary), as were various mechanical engineering and chemical combines and other industrial sites. As a result of communist modernization, living standards in Eastern Europe rose. Planned economies, moreover, meant that wages, salaries, and the prices of consumer goods were fixed. Although the communists were not able to cancel out all regional differences, they succeeded in creating largely egalitarian societies.
- ^ Milanović, Branko (2015). "After the Wall Fell: The Poor Balance Sheet of the Transition to Capitalism". Challenge. 58 (2): 135–138. doi:10.1080/05775132.2015.1012402. S2CID 153398717.
So, what is the balance sheet of transition? Only three or at most five or six countries could be said to be on the road to becoming a part of the rich and (relatively) stable capitalist world. Many of the other countries are falling behind, and some are so far behind that they cannot aspire to go back to the point where they were when the Wall fell for several decades.
- ^ a b c Ghodsee, Kristen (2014). "A Tale of 'Two Totalitarianisms': The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism" (PDF). History of the Present. 4 (2): 115–142. doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115. JSTOR 10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115.
- ^ Dae-Kyu, Yoon (2003). "The Constitution of North Korea: Its Changes and Implications". Fordham International Law Journal. 27 (4): 1289–1305. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
- ^ Park, Seong-Woo (23 September 2009). "북 개정 헌법 '선군사상' 첫 명기" Bug gaejeong heonbeob 'seongunsasang' cheos myeong-gi [First stipulation of the 'Seongun Thought' of the North Korean Constitution] (in Korean). Radio Free Asia. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
- ^ Seth, Michael J. (2019). A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 159. ISBN 9781538129050. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
- ^ Fisher, Max (6 January 2016). "The single most important fact for understanding North Korea". Vox. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
- ^ Worden, Robert L., ed. (2008). North Korea: A Country Study (PDF) (5th ed.). Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-8444-1188-0. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
- ^ Sargent, Lyman Tower (2008). Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis (14th ed.). Wadsworth Publishing. p. 117. ISBN 9780495569398.
Because many communists now call themselves democratic socialists, it is sometimes difficult to know what a political label really means. As a result, social democratic has become a common new label for democratic socialist political parties.
- ^ Lamb, Peter (2015). Historical Dictionary of Socialism (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. p. 415. ISBN 9781442258266.
In the 1990s, following the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, social democracy was adopted by some of the old communist parties. Hence, parties such as the Czech Social Democratic Party, the Bulgarian Social Democrats, the Estonian Social Democratic Party, and the Romanian Social Democratic Party, among others, achieved varying degrees of electoral success. Similar processes took place in Africa as the old communist parties were transformed into social democratic ones, even though they retained their traditional titles ... .
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- ^ Ravallion, Martin (2005). "Fighting Poverty: Findings and Lessons from China's Success". World Bank. Archived from the original on 1 March 2018. Retrieved 10 August 2006.
- ^ a b c d Morgan 2001, p. 2332.
- ^ Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1845. "Idealism and Materialism." Part 1A in The German Ideology I, transcribed by T. Delaney, B. Schwartz, and B. Baggins. § 5. "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
- ^ Resnick, Stephn; Wolff, Richard D. (1987). Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 130. ISBN 978-0-8018-3480-6.
The German Marxists extended the theory to groups and issues Marx had barely touched. Marxian analyses of the legal system, of the social role of women, of foreign trade, of international rivalries among capitalist nations, and the role of parliamentary democracy in the transition to socialism drew animated debates. ... Marxian theory (singular) gave way to Marxian theories (plural).
- ^ O'Hara, Phillip (2003). Encyclopedia of Political Economy, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-415-24187-8.
Marxist political economists differ over their definitions of capitalism, socialism and communism. These differences are so fundamental, the arguments among differently persuaded Marxist political economists have sometimes been as intense as their oppositions to political economies that celebrate capitalism.
- ^ a b "Communism". The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed.). 2007.
- ^ Gluckstein, Donny (26 June 2014). "Classical Marxism and the question of reformism". International Socialism. Retrieved 19 December 2019.
- ^ Rees, John (1998). The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-19877-6.
- ^ Lukács, György (1967) [1919]. "What is Orthodox Marxism?". History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Livingstone, Rodney. Merlin Press. Retrieved 22 September 2021 – via Marxists Internet Archive. "Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method."
- ^ Engels, Friedrich (1969). "Principles of Communism". No. 4 – "How did the proletariat originate?" Marx & Engels Selected Works. I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 81–97.
- ^ Engels, Friedrich. [1847] (1969). ""Was not the abolition of private property possible at an earlier time?" Principles of Communism. Marx/Engels Collected Works. I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 81–97.
- ^ Priestland, David (January 2002). "Soviet Democracy, 1917–91" (PDF). European History Quarterly. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. 32 (1): 111–130. doi:10.1177/0269142002032001564. S2CID 144067197. Retrieved 19 August 2021 – via Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Lenin defended all four elements of Soviet democracy in his seminal theoretical work of 1917, State and Revolution. The time had come, Lenin argued, for the destruction of the foundations of the bourgeois state, and its replacement with an ultra-democratic 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' based on the model of democracy followed by the communards of Paris in 1871. Much of the work was theoretical, designed, by means of quotations from Marx and Engels, to win battles within the international Social Democratic movement against Lenin's arch-enemy Kautsky. However, Lenin was not operating only in the realm of theory. He took encouragement from the rise of a whole range of institutions that seemed to embody class-based, direct democracy, and in particular the soviets and the factory committees, which demanded the right to 'supervise' (kontrolirovat') (although not to take the place of) factory management.
- ^ Twiss, Thomas M. Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy. Brill. pp. 28–29.
- ^ Free will, non-predestination and non-determinism are emphasized in Marx's famous quote "Men make their own history". The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
- ^ a b Engels, Friedrich (1970) [1880]. "Historical Materialism". Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Aveling, Edward. Marx/Engels Selected Works. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers pp. 95–151.
- ^ "To the Rural Poor" (1903). Collected Works. vol. 6. p. 366.
- ^ Lisichkin, G. 1989. "Мифы и реальность, Новый мир" (in Russian). Novy Mir 3. p. 59.
- ^ Александр Бутенко (Aleksandr Butenko), Социализм сегодня: опыт и новая теория// Журнал Альтернативы, №1, 1996, pp. 2–22 (in Russian).
- ^ Contemporary Marxism (4–5). Synthesis Publications. 1981. p. 151: "[S]ocialism in one country, a pragmatic deviation from classical Marxism."
- ^ Erik, Cornell. "North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise." p. 169. "Socialism in one country, a slogan that aroused protests as not only it implied a major deviation from Marxist internationalism, but was also strictly speaking incompatible with the basic tenets of Marxism."
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... [leaves out] most of the 40-60,000,000 lives lost in the Second World War, for which arguably Hitler and not Stalin was principally responsible.
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- ^ Charny, Israel W.; Parsons, William S.; Totten, Samuel (2004). Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-94430-4. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ Mann, Michael (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-53854-1. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ Sémelin, Jacques (2007). Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14282-3. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ Andrieu, Claire; Gensburger, Sarah; Sémelin, Jacques (2011). Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-80046-4. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ Valentino, Benjamin (2013). Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-6717-2. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
- ^ Fein, Helen (1993). "Soviet and Communist Genocides and 'Democide'". Genocide: A Sociological Perspective; Contextual and Comparative Studies I: Ideological Genocides. Sage Publications. ISBN 978-0-8039-8829-3. Retrieved 13 August 2021 – via Google Books.
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- ^ a b Weiss-Wendt, Anton (2008). "Problems in Comparative Genocide Scholarship". In Stone, Dan (ed.). The Historiography of Genocide. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 42. doi:10.1057/9780230297784_3. ISBN 978-0-230-29778-4.
There is barely any other field of study that enjoys so little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe. Considering that scholars have always put stress on prevention of genocide, comparative genocide studies have been a failure. Paradoxically, nobody has attempted so far to assess the field of comparative genocide studies as a whole. This is one of the reasons why those who define themselves as genocide scholars have not been able to detect the situation of crisis.
- ^ a b Atsushi, Tago; Wayman, Frank W. (2010). "Explaining the onset of mass killing, 1949–87". Journal of Peace Research. 47 (1): 3–13. doi:10.1177/0022343309342944. ISSN 0022-3433. JSTOR 25654524. S2CID 145155872.
- ^ Valentino, Benjamin (2005). Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 91. ISBN 978-0-801-47273-2.
Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing.
- ^ Mecklenburg, Jens; Wippermann, Wolfgang, eds. (1998). 'Roter Holocaust'? Kritik des Schwarzbuchs des Kommunismus [A 'Red Holocaust'? A Critique of the Black Book of Communism] (in German). Hamburg: Konkret Verlag Literatur. ISBN 3-89458-169-7.
- ^ Malia, Martin (October 1999). "Preface". The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. p. xiv. ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2. Retrieved 12 August 2021 – via Google Books.
... commentators in the liberal Le Monde argue that it is illegitimate to speak of a single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the rampage of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda, or the 'rural' Communism of Asia is radically different from the 'urban' Communism of Europe; or Asian Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism. ... conflating sociologically diverse movements is merely a stratagem to obtain a higher body count against Communism, and thus against all the left.
- ^ Hackmann, Jörg (March 2009). "From National Victims to Transnational Bystanders? The Changing Commemoration of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe". Constellations. 16 (1): 167–181. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00526.x.
- ^ Heni, Clemens (Fall 2008). "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah". Jewish Political Studies Review. Jerusalem. 20 (3/4): 73–92. JSTOR 25834800.
- ^ Valentino, Benjamin (2005). Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 66. ISBN 978-0-801-47273-2.
I contend mass killing occurs when powerful groups come to believe it is the best available means to accomplish certain radical goals, counter specific types of threats, or solve difficult military problem.
- ^ a b Straus, Scott (April 2007). "Review: Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide". World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 59 (3): 476–501. doi:10.1017/S004388710002089X. JSTOR 40060166. S2CID 144879341.
- ^ Mann, Michael (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (illustrated, reprint ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 343. ISBN 9780521538541. Retrieved 28 August 2021 – via Google Books.
As in other Communist development plans, this agricultural surplus, essentially rice, could be exported to pay for the import of machinery, first for agriculture and light industry, later for heavy industry (Chandler, 1992: 120–8).
- ^ a b Grant, Robert (November 1999). "Review: The Lost Literature of Socialism". The Review of English Studies. 50 (200): 557–559. doi:10.1093/res/50.200.557.
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To present Karl Marx as the 'progenitor of modern genocide' is simply to lie.
- ^ Liedy, Amy Shannon; Ruble, Blair (7 March 2011). "Holocaust Revisionism, Ultranationalism, and the Nazi/Soviet 'Double Genocide' Debate in Eastern Europe". Wilson Center. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
- ^ Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016). "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust". Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 15 (44): 52–110.
- ^ a b c "Latvia's 'Soviet Story'. Transitional Justice and the Politics of Commemoration". Satory. 26 October 2009. Retrieved 6 August 2021.
- ^ Piereson, James. "Socialism as a hate crime". newcriterion.com. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
- ^ a b c Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore; et al. (4 May 2021). "Anti-Communism and the Hundreds of Millions of Victims of Capitalism". Capitalism Nature Socialism. 32 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603.
- ^ Satter, David (6 November 2017). "100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
- ^ Kaprāns, Mārtiņš (2 May 2015). "Hegemonic representations of the past and digital agency: Giving meaning to 'The Soviet Story' on social networking sites". Memory Studies. 9 (2): 156–172. doi:10.1177/1750698015587151. S2CID 142458412.
- ^ Neumayer, Laure (November 2017). "Advocating for the Cause of the 'Victims of Communism' in the European Political Space: Memory Entrepreneurs in Interstitial Fields". Nationalities Papers. Cambridge University Press. 45 (6): 992–1012. doi:10.1080/00905992.2017.1364230.
- ^ Dujisin, Zoltan (July 2020). "A History of Post-Communist Remembrance: From Memory Politics to the Emergence of a Field of Anticommunism". Theory and Society. 50 (January 2021): 65–96. doi:10.1007/s11186-020-09401-5. S2CID 225580086.
This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian 'collective memory' of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), ... [and is proposed by] anticommunist memory entrepreneurs.
- ^ Rauch, Jonathan (December 2003). "The Forgotten Millions". The Atlantic. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
- ^ Mrozick, Agnieszka (2019). Kuligowski, Piotr; Moll, Łukasz; Szadkowski, Krystian (eds.). "Anti-Communism: It's High Time to Diagnose and Counteract". Praktyka Teoretyczna. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. 1 (31, Anti-Communisms: Discourses of Exclusion): 178–184. Retrieved 26 December 2020 – via Central and Eastern European Online Library.
First is the prevalence of a totalitarian paradigm, in which Nazism and Communism are equated as the most atrocious ideas and systems in human history (because communism, defined by Marx as a classless society with common means of production, has never been realised anywhere in the world, in further parts I will be putting this concept into inverted commas as an example of discursive practice). Significantly, while in the Western debate the more precise term 'Stalinism' is used – in 2008, on the 70th anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, the European Parliament established 23 August as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism – hardly anyone in Poland is paying attention to niceties: 'communism', or simply the left, is perceived as totalitarian here. A homogenizing sequence of associations (the left is communism, communism is totalitarianism, ergo the left is totalitarian) and the ahistorical character of the concepts used (no matter if we talk about the USSR in the 1930s under Stalin, Maoist China from the period of the Cultural Revolution, or Poland under Gierek, 'communism' is murderous all the same) not only serves the denigration of the Polish People's Republic, expelling this period from Polish history, but also – or perhaps primarily – the deprecation of Marxism, leftist programs, and any hopes and beliefs in Marxism and leftist activity as a remedy for capitalist exploitation, social inequality, fascist violence on a racist and anti-Semitic basis, as well as homophobic and misogynist violence. The totalitarian paradigm not only equates fascism and socialism (in Poland and the countries of the former Eastern bloc stubbornly called 'communism' and pressed into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, which should additionally emphasize its foreignness), but in fact recognizes the latter as worse, more sinister (the Black Book of Communism (1997) is of help here as it estimates the number of victims of 'communism' at around 100 million; however, it is critically commented on by researchers on the subject, including historian Enzo Traverso in the book L'histoire comme champ de bataille (2011)). Thus, anti-communism not only delegitimises the left, including communists, and depreciates the contribution of the left to the breakdown of fascism in 1945, but also contributes to the rehabilitation of the latter, as we can see in recent cases in Europe and other places. (Quote at pp. 178–179)
- ^ Moll, Łukasz (2019). Kuligowski, Piotr; Moll, Łukasz; Szadkowski, Krystian (eds.). "Erasure of the Common: From Polish Anti-Communism to Universal Anti-Capitalism". Praktyka Teoretyczna. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. 1 (31, Anti-Communisms: Discourses of Exclusion): 178–184. Retrieved 26 December 2020 – via Central and Eastern European Online Library.
As we have learned lately from public television, when the two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx's birthday was celebrated abroad, according to right-wing journalists Marx was responsible even for Nazism and the Holocaust (Leszczyński 2018). As former Foreign Minister in Law and Justice's government Witold Waszczykowski elaborated in an interview with German daily newspaper Bild:
It is hard to find a better manifestation of right-wing all-encompassing anti-communism, which mixes together nearly all possible progressive discourses. (Quote at pp. 126–127)We just want to heal our country of certain diseases. The previous government applied a left-wing concept. As if the world, according to the Marxist model, must move in only one direction, towards a mixture of cultures and a world of cyclists and vegetarians, which stands only for renewable energy and combating all forms of religion. This has nothing in common with traditional Polish values (Cienski 2017).
- ^ a b Jaffrelot, Christophe; Sémelin, Jacques, eds. (2009). Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies. Translated by Schoch, Cynthia. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-231-14283-0.
- ^ a b Neumayer, Laure (2018). The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War. Routledge. ISBN 9781351141741.
- ^ Kühne, Thomas (May 2012). "Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing". Contemporary European History. 21 (2): 133–143. doi:10.1017/S0960777312000070. ISSN 0960-7773. JSTOR 41485456. S2CID 143701601.
Bibliography
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Further reading
Library resources about Communism |
- Adami, Stefano; Marrone, G. ed. (2006). "Communism". In Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (1st ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-390-3.
- Brown, Archie (2009). The Rise and Fall of Communism. Bodley Head. ISBN 978-022407-879-5.
- Daniels, Robert Vincent (1994). A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse. University Press of New England. ISBN 978-0-87451-678-4.
- Daniels, Robert Vincent (2007). The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-30010-649-7.
- Dean, Jodi (2012). The Communist Horizon. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-84467-954-6.
- Dirlik, Arif (1989). Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-505454-5.
- Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl (1998). [1848]. The Communist Manifesto (reprint ed.). Signet Classics. ISBN 978-0-451-52710-3.
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2007). "Revisionism in Soviet History". History and Theory. 46 (4): 77–91. JSTOR 4502285. Historiographical essay that covers the scholarship of the three major schools: totalitarianism, revisionism, and post-revisionism.
- Forman, James D. (1972). Communism: From Marx's Manifesto to 20th-century Reality. Watts. ISBN 978-0-531-02571-0.
- Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola, Schündeln, Matthias (2020). "The Long-Term Effects of Communism in Eastern Europe" (PDF version). Journal of Economic Perspectives. 34 (2): 172–91. doi:10.1257/jep.34.2.172.
- Furet, Francois; Kan, D., trans. (2000). The Passing of An Illusion: The Idea of Communism In the Twentieth Century (English ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-27341-9.
- Fürst, Juliane; Pons, Silvio; Selden, Mark, eds. (2017). Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present. The Cambridge History of Communism. 3 Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-31650-159-7.
- Gerlach, Christian; Six, Clemens, eds. (2020). The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3030549657.
- Gregor, A. J. (2014). Marxism and the Making of China: A Doctrinal History. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-37949-8.
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- Laybourn, Keith; Murphy, Dylan (1999). Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain (illustrated, hardcover ed.). Sutton Publishing. ISBN 978-0-75091-485-7.
- Lovell, Julia (2019). Maoism: A Global History. Bodley Head. ISBN 978-184792-250-2.
- Morgan, W. John (2003). Communists on Education and Culture 1848–1948. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-48586-6.
- Morgan, W. John, guest ed. (December 2005). "Communism, Post-Communism, and Moral Education". The Journal of Moral Education. 34 (4). ISSN 0305-7240 (print). ISSN 1465-3877 (online).
- Naimark, Norman; Silvio Pons, eds. (2017). The Socialist Camp and World Power 1941–1960s. The Cambridge History of Communism. 2. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-31645-985-0.
- Pipes, Richard (2003). Communism: A History (reprint ed.). Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-81296-864-4.
- Pons, Silvio (2014). The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 (English, hardcover ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19965-762-9.
- Pons, Silvio, Service, Robert (2010). A Dictionary of 20th Century Communism (hardcover ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-69113-585-4.
- Pons, Silvio; Smith, Stephen A., eds. (2017). World Revolution and Socialism in One Country 1917–1941. The Cambridge History of Communism. 1. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-31613-702-4.
- Pop-Eleches, Grigore; Tucker, Joshua A. (2017). Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (hardcover ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-69117-558-4.
- Priestland, David (2009). The Red Flag: A History of Communism. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-80214-512-3.
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- Service, Robert (2010). Comrades!: A History of World Communism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-67404-699-3.
- Shaw, Yu-ming (2019). Changes And Continuities In Chinese Communism: Volume I: Ideology, Politics, and Foreign Policy (hardcover ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-36716-385-3.
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External links
- Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. Retrieved 18 August 2021. .
- "Communism". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
- Libertarian Communist Library at Libcom.org contains almost 20,000 articles, books, pamphlets, and journals on libertarian communism. Archived 11 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 18 August 2021. One example being "Marx on the Russian Mir, and misconceptions by Marxists".
- Lindsay, Samuel McCune (1905). New International Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18 August 2021. .
- The Radical Pamphlet Collection at the Library of Congress contains materials on the topic of communism. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
- Winstanley, Gerrard (1649). "The True Levellers Standard Advanced, the Diggers' Manifesto". Archived from the original on 9 July 2011. Retrieved 18 August 2021 – via Roger Lovejoy. See also "The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men" from Kingston University London's Faculty of Business and Social Sciences at Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 18 August 2021.