Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Communism is a political and economic ideology that positions itself in opposition to liberal democracy and capitalism, advocating instead for a classless system in which the means of production are owned communally and private property is nonexistent or severely curtailed.
The term's modern usage originated with Victor d'Hupay, an 18th-century French aristocrat who advocated living in "communes" in which all property would be shared, and "all may benefit from everybody's work.
Modern communist ideology began to develop during the French Revolution, and its seminal tract, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' "Communist Manifesto," was published in That pamphlet rejected the Christian tenor of previous communist philosophies, laying out a materialist and—its proponents claim—scientific analysis of the history and future trajectory of human society.
The Communist Manifesto presented the French Revolution as a major historical turning point, when the "bourgeoisie" —the merchant class that was in the process of consolidating control over the "means of production" —overturned the feudal power structure and ushered in the modern, capitalist era. That revolution replaced the medieval class struggle, which pitted the nobility against the serfs, with the modern one pitting the bourgeois owners of capital against the "proletariat," the working class who sell their labor for wages.
In the Communist Manifesto and later works, Marx, Engels, and their followers advocated and predicted as historically inevitable a global proletarian revolution, which would usher in first an era of socialism , then of communism. This final stage of human development would mark the end of class struggle and therefore of history: all people would live in social equilibrium, without class distinctions, family structures, religion, or property.
The state, too, would "wither away. Marx and Engels' theories would not be tested in the real world until after their deaths. In , during World War I, an uprising in Russia toppled the czar and sparked a civil war that eventually saw a group of radical Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin gain power in The Bolsheviks, as this group was called, founded the Soviet Union on former Imperial Russian territory and attempted to put communist theory into practice.
Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had developed the Marxist theory of vanguardism, which argued that a close-knit group of politically enlightened elites was necessary to usher in the higher stages of economic and political evolution: socialism and finally communism.
Lenin died shortly after the civil war ended, but the "dictatorship of the proletariat," led by his successor Joseph Stalin, would pursue brutal ethnic and ideological purges as well as forced agricultural collectivization. Tens of millions died during Stalin's rule, from to , on top of the tens of millions who died as a result of the war with Nazi Germany.
Rather than withering away, the Soviet state became a powerful one-party institution that prohibited dissent and occupied the "commanding heights" of the economy. Agriculture, the banking system, and industrial production were subject to quotas and price controls laid out in a series of Five Year Plans. This system of central planning enabled rapid industrialization, and from to growth in Soviet gross domestic product GDP outpaced that of the U.
In general, however, the Soviet economy grew at a much slower pace than its capitalist, democratic counterparts. Weak consumer spending was a particular drag on growth. Central planners' emphasis on heavy industry led to chronic underproduction of consumer goods, and long lines at understocked grocery stores were a fixture of Soviet life even during periods of relative prosperity.
Thriving underground markets — termed the "second economy" by some academics — catered to demand for cigarettes, shampoo, liquor, sugar, milk, and especially prestige goods such as jeans smuggled in from the West. While these networks were illegal, they were essential to the party's functioning: they alleviated shortages that, left unchecked, threatened to spark another Bolshevik Revolution; they provided party propagandists with a scapegoat for shortages; and they lined the pockets of party officials, who would either take payoffs to look the other way or grow rich running illegal market operations themselves.
The Soviet Union collapsed in , following a push to reform the economic and political system and provide greater room for private enterprise and free expression. These reform pushes, known as perestroika and glasnost , respectively, did not halt the economic decline the Soviet Union suffered in the s and likely hastened the Communist state's end by loosening its grip on sources of dissent. Mao allied the country with the Soviet Union, but the Soviets' policies of de-Stalinization and "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist West led to a diplomatic split with China in Mao's rule in China resembled Stalin's in its violence, deprivation, and insistence on ideological purity.
During the Great Leap Forward from to , the Communist Party ordered the rural population to produce enormous quantities of steel in an effort to jumpstart an industrial revolution in China. Families were coerced into building backyard furnaces, where they smelted scrap metal and household items into low-quality pig iron that offered little domestic utility and held no appeal for export markets. Since rural labor was unavailable to harvest crops, and Mao insisted on exporting grain to demonstrate his policies' success, food became scarce.
They changed their name to the Communist Party, and sent their ideals to all European socialist parties. They then nationalized all public property as well as putting factories and railroads under government control.
Stalin continued leading by the communist philosophies, and extended the growth of the the USSR. This example of Communism has been followed in many countries since then, including China. Communism and Computer Ethics. History and Backround of Communism Foundation , Goals, and Priorities Communism was an economic-political philosophy founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the second half of the 19 th century.
Under communism, there is no such thing as private property. All property is communally owned, and each person receives a portion based on what they need. A strong central government—the state—controls all aspects of economic production, and provides citizens with their basic necessities, including food, housing, medical care and education.
By contrast, under socialism, individuals can still own property. But industrial production, or the chief means of generating wealth, is communally owned and managed by a democratically elected government.
Another key difference in socialism versus communism is the means of achieving them. In communism, a violent revolution in which the workers rise up against the middle and upper classes is seen as an inevitable part of achieving a pure communist state. Socialism is a less rigid, more flexible ideology. Its adherents seek change and reform, but often insist on making these changes through democratic processes within the existing social and political structure, not overthrowing that structure.
Unlike in communism, a socialist economic system rewards individual effort and innovation. Social democracy, the most common form of modern socialism, focuses on achieving social reforms and redistribution of wealth through democratic processes, and can co-exist alongside a free-market capitalist economy. Communism existed in the Soviet Union until its fall in Today, communism and socialism exist in China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam—although in reality, a purely communist state has never existed.
Such countries can be classified as communist because in all of them, the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system. But none of them have achieved the elimination of personal property, money or class systems that the communist ideology requires.
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