Yeah, I know. As long as Jeng Zemin treats his family well, he is a good man. Communism is just another ism.
One human is worth no more than 3 trees, max.
Offset and displacement is a myth.
Wrong!
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Communism
Outline Click to view outline and jump to a section. I. INTRODUCTION II. THE WORK OF MARX AND ENGELS III. SOVIET POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IV. THE USSR AND WORLD COMMUNISM
I. Introduction
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Communism, a concept or system of society in which the major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than by individuals. In theory, such societies provide for equal sharing of all work, according to ability, and all benefits, according to need. Some conceptions of communist societies assume that, ultimately, coercive government would be unnecessary and therefore that such a society would be without rulers. Until the ultimate stages are reached, however, communism involves the abolition of private property by a revolutionary movement; responsibility for meeting public needs is then vested in the state.
As a concept of an ideal society, communism is derived from ancient sources, including Plato's Republic and the earliest Christian communes. In the early 19th century, the idea of a communist society was a response of the poor and the dislocated to the beginnings of modern capitalism. At that time communism was the basis for a number of utopian settlements; most communistic experiments, however, eventually failed (see Communal Living; Cooperatives; Harmony Society). Most of these small-scale private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process.
Later the term communism was reserved for the philosophy advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto and the movement they helped create in Central Europe. Since 1917 the term has denoted those who regard the Russian Revolution as a model that all Marxists should follow. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, moreover, the center of gravity of global communism has shifted away from Central and Western Europe; from the late 1940s through the 1980s, communist movements were often linked with Third World strivings for national independence and social change.
II. The Work of Marx and Engels
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In their writings, Marx and Engels tried to analyze contemporary society, which they described as capitalistic. They pointed out the discrepancies between ideals and reality in modern society: Rights granted to all had not done away with injustices; constitutional self-government had not abolished mismanagement and corruption; science had provided mastery over nature but not over the fluctuations of the business cycle; and the efficiency of modern production methods had produced slums in the midst of abundance.
They described all human history as the attempt of men and women to develop and apply their potential for creativity for the purpose of controlling the forces of nature so as to improve the human condition. In this ongoing effort to develop its productive forces, humanity has been remarkably successful; history has been the march of progress. Yet in developing productivity, various social institutions have been created that have introduced exploitation, domination, and other evils; the price humanity pays for progress is an unjust society.
Every social system of the past, Marx argued, had been a device by which the rich and powerful few could live by the toil and misery of the powerless many. Each system, therefore, was racked by conflict. Moreover, each method of exploitation had flaws that sooner or later destroyed it, either by slow disintegration or by revolution. Engels and Marx believed that the capitalist system, too, was flawed and therefore bound to destroy itself. They tried to show that the more productive the system became, the more difficult it would be to make it function: The more goods it accumulated, the less use it would have for these goods; the more people it trained, the less it could utilize their talents. Capitalism, in short, would eventually choke on its own wealth.
The collapse of the capitalist economy, it was thought, would culminate in a political revolution in which the masses of the poor would rebel against their oppressors. This proletarian revolution would do away with private ownership of the means of production. Run by and for the people (after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship), the economy would produce, not what was profitable, but what the people needed. Abundance would reign. Inequalities and coercive government would disappear. All this, Marx and Engels expected, would happen in the most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments.
These prophecies have not come true. Capitalism, though sometimes threatened, has not collapsed; shortages, inequalities, and coercive government have persisted in countries that called themselves Communist; and followers of Marx have come to power in nations that lacked the preconditions he and Engels considered essential. The first of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base. Its people, still largely illiterate, had no experience in political participation. In 1917, after a series of halfhearted reform measures and disastrous mismanagement of the war effort (see Russian Revolution), the antiquated mechanism of tsarist rule simply disintegrated and was swept away. It was succeeded, after a lengthy period of political upheaval, by the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxism—later known as the Communist Party—led by Lenin. See Bolshevism; Communist Parties.
III. Soviet Political and Economic Development
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From its inception, Communist rule in the Soviet Union faced a variety of problems. In the early years the government's very existence was challenged repeatedly by its enemies within the country. When the Communist Party emerged victorious, it was faced with the need to rebuild the nation's ruined economy and to train the Russian people for life in the 20th century. Later, all efforts were concentrated on the task of transforming a backward country into a leading industrial nation and a first-rate military power.
The task was ambitious, the obstacles were formidable, and there was no time to waste—particularly after the disastrous interruption of World War II. The Soviet leadership, therefore, was ruthless in marshaling all available human and material resources for the job of modernization. The harsh discipline and economic austerity that were necessary could be imposed only by an unrelenting dictatorship that could control all citizens' activities and suppress any hint of dissent or autonomy. The resulting system of total control has been labeled totalitarianism, but others have called it Stalinism, after Joseph Stalin, the leader who shaped and controlled the government of the USSR for more than a quarter of a century after Lenin's death.
Stalinism, of course, in no way resembled the Communist utopia that Marx and Engels had envisioned. Three decades after Stalin's death, the USSR was still ruled by command, not consent; it was a society administered in authoritarian fashion by a managerial bureaucracy, which in many ways was no less conservative, no closer to the people, than huge bureaucracies tend to be everywhere. The country's cultural and intellectual life remained substantially under the control of the ruling party. Party ideology, meanwhile, stressed that socialism had been attained and genuine communism was near.
By the early 1980s, the USSR had become the world's second-ranking industrial power. Its armed might and industrial potential were backed by important scientific advances and by a generally high level of technical education. The living standard, although still low in comparison with that of Western countries, had risen appreciably since World War II. Toward the end of the decade, however, it became increasingly apparent that Soviet Communism was in crisis. An upsurge of nationalism within the Soviet republics, coupled with resentment of decades of economic scarcity and arbitrary rule, spurred a challenge both to the ideological foundations of communism and to the legitimacy of the Soviet state. By the end of 1991, the resulting political struggle had led to the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party and the dissolution of the USSR.
IV. The USSR and World Communism
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The relationship of this first Communist state with the rest of the world was consistently troubled. To the West, a Communist government always appeared as a threat, and from the very beginning there were attempts to destroy it by force of arms, attempts that may have reinforced the endeavor of the Communist government to save itself by promoting revolution everywhere. Yet in its isolated and endangered position, the Communist regime also felt the need to establish workable relations or alliances with other countries.
Between 1945 and 1975 the number of countries under Communist rule increased greatly, partly because of the way the victorious powers in World War II divided the world among them, and partly because revolutionary Communist movements gained strength in various parts of the Third World. In this manner, the former isolation of the Soviet Union has been lifted, but the hostility between the Communist and the non-Communist world has, to some extent, been complicated by deep antagonisms within world communism.
Rapid political changes in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and elsewhere between 1989 and 1991 dramatically reduced the number of Communist regimes. The Communist governments that remain pay allegiance to Marx and Lenin, but differ from each other not only in size and industrial development but also in their understanding of doctrine, in their aims, and in their style of rule. World communism also includes numerous Communist movements struggling for influence and power; they are even more heterogeneous than the established Communist regimes.
Contributed By:
Alfred G. Meyer, M.A., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Michigan. Author of Communism, The Soviet Political System, and other books. |
