communism

n.

1. A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
2. Communism
   1. A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.
   2. The Marxist-Leninist version of Communist doctrine that advocates the overthrow of capitalism by the revolution of the proletariat.

[French communisme, from commun, common, from Old French, from Latin commūnis. See commune².]

In theory, anticapitalist proposals of Karl Marx and his followers that communal ownership of the means of production is preferable; in practice, economic systems in which production facilities are state-owned and production decisions are made by official policy and not directed by market action.

n. often Communism a theory or system of social organization in which all property is vested in the community and each person contributes and receives according to his or her ability and needs.

communist n.& adj. communistic adj.

The most familiar form of communism is that established by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and it has generally been understood in terms of the system practiced by the former Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe, in China in 1949, and in some developing countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea. Communism embraced a revolutionary ideology in which the state would wither away after the overthrow of the capitalist system. In practice, however, the state grew to control all aspects of communist society.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Historically, the principle of communal ownership of all property; basic economic resources are held in common. Modern communism is grounded in the ideas of Karl Marx. He hoped to see a society with no socio-economic difference between, for example, manual and intellectual labour, or urban and rural life. Social relations would be regulated by the maxim, ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs’. Centrally planned economies have been developed in accordance with this ideology and there have been many forms of communism, all supposedly seeking the classless society.

In its usually acknowledged form, a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle, resulting in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a classless, socialist society in which private ownership has been abolished and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community.

The notion of communism has a long history. Writers such as Babeuf and Owen are sometimes regarded as communists (see also primitive communism), but ‘communist’ first appeared in English in 1841 and ‘communism’ in 1843. It is now mainly understood to mean either the end of history predicted by Marxist thinkers, or the reality of life in conditions of Communist Party rule. Though one can still hear advocates insist that communism is possible despite the experience of Eastern Europe, the utopian element has been largely discredited by the political practice.

The Marxist argument for communism has both normative and positive components. The main characteristic of human life is alienation. Communism ought to be desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as the absence of constraints but as action having moral content. Not only does communism allow people to do what they want but it puts humans in such conditions and in such relations with one another that they would not wish or have need for wrong-doing or evil. Whereas for Hegel, the unfolding of this ethical life (sittlichkeit) in history is mainly cognitively motivated—hence the importance of philosophers—for Marx, communism emerged from material, especially productive, development. Thus, he jibes that philosophers had hitherto only sought to interpret the world, when the point was to change it.

Marx himself says little about the non-alienated world of communism. It is clear that it entails superabundance in which there is no limit to the projects that humans may choose; one could be a painter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, a writer in the evening, and a lover at night. In the slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which ‘each gave according to his abilities, and received according to his needs’. Since morality had been abolished along with want, the main criteria governing the choice of life projects were aesthetic or scientific; communist society was not expected to be consumerist.

As a normative enterprise, therefore, communism appealed to many circles, uniting not only the poor person struggling under want, but also the high-minded intellectual who saw transcendental virtue in his work. Marx's achievement and lasting significance, however, was to add to this utopia a positive scientific theory of how society was moving in a law-governed way towards communism and, with some tension, a political theory that explained why human agency—revolutionary activity—was required to bring it about. These latter aspects, particularly as developed by Lenin, provided the underpinning for both the dogmatic and mobilizing features of twentieth-century Communist Parties.

In Capital and other ‘scientific’ works, Marx claims to have uncovered the laws of capitalist development. All societies must solve the problem of reproducing human life, but at each historical stage, the level of development of the productive forces shapes the pattern of human organization. The combination of productive forces and human relations comprises a ‘mode of production’, and each mode has its own distinctive laws arising from the manner in which production is accomplished and the relationship among its social elements—historically these have mainly been classes. Capitalism is characterized by commodity production or production of goods with exchange value. Profit results from the ability of those controlling the means of production to treat labour as a commodity like any other, which they can employ to produce goods with value greater than that paid in wages. There is constant competition among capitalists to extract the greatest amount of surplus value. A number of laws are deduced from these premisses: constant overproduction and underconsumption which leads to periodic economic crises in which the productive potential of capital and labour is wasted; ever greater mechanization and a diminution in the share of labour in the production process; a long-run tendency for the rate of profit to decline; the relative impoverishment of the working class in comparison to the amount of surplus value it produces; and the rise of an absolutely impoverished lumpenproletariat.

At this point, the normative and positive elements meet. The massive productive potential of capitalism, undreamt of in human history, to free people from want to pursue their own projects, increasingly comes into conflict with the reality of increased alienation. At the same time, the character of production tends to increase social interaction and homogeneity among those exploited, and on a global scale. Capitalism, therefore, creates its own ‘gravediggers’ in a working class who have ‘no country’ and ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. The overthrow of capitalism is possible because the process of production has already been socialized. However, with the expropriation of capitalists, the international, homogenous working class has neither reason nor interest to introduce another exploitative social order. Thus the productive potential of advanced machinery may be harnessed with non-exploitative social relations—in a word, communism.

Marx and Engels certainly believed that by offering a scientific explanation of the possibility, indeed necessity, of communism they were distinguishing themselves from lesser ‘utopian’ socialists. However, although periodic economic crises have taken place with enormous waste of human and other capital, there has not occurred either a tendency for the rate of profit to decline or for an inexorable fall in the share of labour as opposed to machinery across all sectors of industry. Indeed, capitalism has proved extraordinarily revolutionary and able to revitalize itself, even by Marx's own very high estimates of its capacity. Moreover the impoverishment of the working class did not take place, at least in the advanced capitalist world where Marx predicted revolution would take place, and evidence suggests that the size of the underclass is a function of political and institutional factors rather than an inevitable consequence of capitalism itself.

Perhaps the biggest problems in Marx's own theory were identified by Lenin. First, he argued, workers did not go beyond their narrow economic demands for higher pay and conditions to make explicitly political demands for the overthrow of capitalism. Only intellectuals could properly understand the emancipatory potential of communism, which was beyond workers' experience, however much production may have been socialized. A steadfast, resolute, and organized party of intellectuals, acting as the workers' vanguard, and armed with the knowledge given by Marxist theory, was therefore required if the transition to the freedom of communism was to be achieved. Secondly, not only did workers orient their demands on economic improvements, but capitalism, at least in some circumstances, was quite capable of granting concessions. Thus, the impoverishment and, more importantly for Lenin, the homogeneity of workers was not a spontaneous result of capitalist production. Imperialism allowed capitalists particular opportunities to reward workers in the metropolis with money derived from the super-exploited in the colonies. Moreover, the alliance of a ‘labour aristocracy’ with sections of imperialist capital resulted in working-class nationalism which, in Lenin's view, led to the break-up of the international socialist movement at the outbreak of the First World War. The road to communism, therefore, would take a different path in which the ‘weak links in the imperialist chain’ would be the first to break with capitalism, with Russia the first to fall in 1917 after defeat in the war.

The effort to build communism in Russia, however, raised significant further theoretical and practical problems. The theory had presumed that revolution would occur where the socialization of production, potential for abundance, and a large working class were already in place. Russia was the poorest country in Europe with an enormous, illiterate peasantry and little industry. In these circumstances, it was not only necessary for the party to educate workers beyond narrow economism, but to create the working class itself. For this reason, the socialist Mensheviks had opposed the communist Bolsheviks in their demand for socialist revolution before capitalism had been established. In seizing power, the Bolsheviks found themselves without a programme beyond their pragmatic and politically successful slogans, ‘peace, bread, and land’, which had tapped the massive public desire for an end to the war and privation, and the peasants' demand for land redistribution. As Lenin himself was fond of saying, there was no blueprint for socialism on the road to communism. Indeed, there could not have been since, to use Marx's metaphor, communism should have matured within the womb of capitalist society, ready to emerge, if not fully formed, then requiring only a short period of transition before being up and running.

Like the early Christians, the Bolsheviks acted almost immediately, as if the millennium was upon them. In the years of War Communism 1918-20, in the middle of a civil war, all property was nationalized and money for a period abolished. When mutiny and peasant unrest resulted, Lenin declared a short breathing space in 1921 (the NEP) before ‘the heavens’ of communism could once again be assaulted. However, in the last three years of his life, Lenin also showed a growing awareness of the difficulties of building communism in Russia, which necessitated a prolonged transition period in which both antagonistic social classes and commodity relations would be maintained under the watchful and guiding eyes of the Party.

Political and institutional factors conspired to foreshorten this transitional phase. While the Communist Party and industrial institutions such as the Supreme Council for the National Economy had been operationally responsible for running the country under War Communism, NEP was controlled largely by experts frequently of bourgeois origin and of Menshevik or right-wing political persuasion. When NEP ran into difficulties, it was difficult for the Party and other bodies to resist the claim that the abolition of market relations and the liquidation of ‘exploiting’ classes such as the kulaks or the small traders (NEPmen) was a better strategy. Since political power continued to rest with the Party, which was hardly content to kick its heels while capitalist relations were given time to develop, NEP was unlikely to survive. These political and institutional obstacles to NEP were magnified by personal competition in the leadership which saw Stalin using his control over personnel to shift policy to the left in 1929.

The Stalinist version of socialism, with some important modifications, ruled the Soviet Union for the next fifty-six years. It began in a spirit of enormous optimism about the possibilities of building communism via a massive industrialization and collectivization programme. The rapid development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, maintained this optimism even into the Khrushchev period, 1953-64, when the Party adopted a programme in which it promised the establishment of communism within thirty years.

However, more evidence emerged which in the end dented faith in the possibility and desirability of communism irrevocably. First, Khrushchev himself revealed the enormity of repression that had taken place. Second, industrial development had been organized by state institutions which began to act as a dead, conservative hand on further progress. As growth declined, so rent-seeking and corruption by state officials increased, which dented the legitimacy of the system. Third, the allies which the Soviet Union had won by war in Eastern Europe, and as a result of the collapse of imperialism in Africa and Asia, became a financial and military burden. Finally, while Soviet development slowed, that of the capitalist West accelerated, and introduced new technological developments that the Soviet economy could not match. No communist revolutions had occurred in the capitalist centres of the West. By the 1980s, therefore, faith in the capacity of the Soviet Union to make the transition to communism had evaporated.

— Stephen Whitefield

A socioeconomic system based on communal ownership and production of goods, communal self-government, and sometimes communal living. The slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ encapsulates the disappearance of market mechanisms of exchange.

In its broadest meaning communism describes a society in which all its members jointly (communally) own its resources and in which the society's wealth and products are distributed equally to everyone. The term has been applied to premodern social and political constructs, such as communal societies propounded in Plato's Republic and in Thomas More's Utopia; to proposals of some radicals in the French Revolution of 1787; and to ideal communities advocated by nineteenth-century reformers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, but none of these systems corresponded fully with the principles of communism.

Most often, communism designates the ultimate good society espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the ideas and Soviet system in twentieth-century Russia associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The latter usage is a misnomer: Neither Lenin nor later Soviet leaders ever claimed that communism had been established in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they willingly adopted the label, since it furthered their revolutionary and propagandistic purposes. As a result, in general discussion and writing, the Soviet state and its post-World War II offshoots in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba were generally called "communist." Correspondingly, leaders of the Soviet Union, of other similarly constituted states, and of revolutionary parties worldwide that adhered to Marxist-Leninist doctrine were known as "communists."

MARX'S VIEW OF COMMUNISM

More accurately, however, communism signifies only the very last step in the historical process and the ultimate and highly desirable goal of human development as outlined in Marx's economic, social, and political philosophy. Influenced by egalitarian ideas current in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Marx was outraged by what he saw as the unjust nature of the economic system spawned by the Industrial Revolution, which he called capitalism. Marx and Engels portrayed history as determined inevitably by "scientific" laws, which divided human social evolution into five broad stages: "gentilism," sometimes referred to as "primitive communism," with individuals living in clans and holding property in common; "slavery" based on slave labor; "feudalism" dependent on serf labor; "capitalism," in which entrepreneurs or capitalists exploited workers (the proletariat) and controlled the government; and "socialism," with public ownership replacing private capital and the emergence of a classless society providing justice, equity and freedom for all. Since conflict and class struggle, the mechanism for social change, would not exist in this new order, socialism would be the final stage of history and the highest level of human development.

Marx noted, however, that socialism would have two phases: the lower phase, also known as "socialism," and a higher phase, "communism." The latter would be the ultimate good society benefiting all mankind. In the lower, socialist phase, the whole society would own its productive forces, or the economy, but work would still be valued and paid differentially and distribution of the society's goods and wealth would not yet be equal. To reach the higher, communist phase, two requirements had to be met. First, the productive forces of society, restricted by the capitalists in a vain attempt to prop up their profits, would be liberated, and the economy, hugely expanded by modern scientific and technological inputs, would become capable of producing "a superabundance of goods." This enormous output would permit everyone to have whatever they needed. Second, in counterbalance, an individual's needs would be limited and sensible, because society would develop, through education and by example, "a new-type socialist person." Reoriented individuals would desire only what was truly necessary to sustain life, eschewing ostentation and waste. They would also contribute to the socialist society altruistically, applying their work and varied talents to the common welfare. With the superabundance of goods and the new socialist individual, society could then be organized on the principle: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Thus, communism would mark an end to coercion, want, and inequality.

LENIN AND COMMUNISM

Circulating in tsarist Russia by the 1880s, Marx's views were adopted by Vladimir Lenin, who soon led the Bolsheviks, a Marxist-oriented revolutionary party. Lenin linked his effort in Russia to the global spread of capitalism, which he labeled "imperialism," and counted on aid from successful workers' revolutions in Europe to help the Russian proletariat achieve socialism. He was dismayed, therefore, when, after the "imperialist" World War I broke out, most European workers and their Marxist leaders chose patriotism over revolution and backed their own national governments in the war.

Many Marxists in Russia also rallied to support the tsarist war effort. Determined to keep his party in control after the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917 and to discredit other Russian Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin in 1918 changed the name of the Bolsheviks to the Russian Communist Party, and a year later he founded an international revolutionary organization called the Communist International. These actions were taken to broaden the appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution and to distinguish Lenin and his followers from other Marxian socialists in Russia and throughout the world, whom he considered insufficiently revolutionary, if not collaborators with the hated imperialists.

Lenin added little to Marx's sketchy ideas on the characteristics of communism, once mentioning cooperatives as a possible organizational basis for the future and another time referring to "accounting and control" and "the administration of things" as keys to establishing a truly communist society. Stalin proclaimed in the 1930s that the Soviet Union had achieved the lower phase, socialism, of Marx's fifth stage of history, and after World War II Soviet theoreticians added that Soviet society had entered "the transition to communism." But what communism would actually look like remained vague, except for speculation about free transportation, state-run boarding schools, and communal eating.

THE DISCARDING OF COMMUNISM

In the 1980s, as the weaknesses of the Soviet economy and system became apparent, the appeal of communism, so closely linked to the Soviet experience, dimmed. In 1989 and 1991, when socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers declared that communism was dead. Although nominally communist systems still existed in North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, even these governments made concessions to nonsocialist economic activity. Moreover, none of these regimes argued that it had achieved communism, or even that it was nearing the ultimate good society envisaged by Marx.

Bibliography

Daniels, Robert V. (1993). The End of the Communist Revolution. New York: Routledge.

Heilbroner, Robert L. (1980). Marxism, For and Against. New York: Norton.

Hunt, Carew R. N. (1983). The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction, 5th rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books.

Mayo, Henry B. (1966). Introduction to Marxist Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meyer, Alfred G. (1986). Leninism, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Sowell, Thomas. (1985). Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. New York: Morrow.

—JOHN M. THOMPSON

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

A system of social organization in which goods are held in common.

Communism in the United States is something of an anomaly. The basic principles of communism are, by design, at odds with the free enterprise foundation of the U.S. government. The freedom of individuals to privately own property, start a business, and own the means of production is a basic tenet of U.S. government, and communism opposes this ideal. However, there have been, are, and always will be communists in the United States.

The roots of communism reach far back in history. As early as the fourth century b.c., Plato addressed the problems surrounding private ownership of property in the Republic. Some early Christians supported communal principles, as did the German Anabaptists during the sixteenth-century religious Reformation in Europe.

The concept of common ownership of goods gained a measure of support in France during the nineteenth century. Shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, François-Noël ("Gracchus") Babeuf was arrested and executed for plotting the violent overthrow of the new French government by revolutionary communists. Etienne Cabet inspired many social explorers with his Voyage en Icarie (1840), which promoted peaceful, idealized communities. Cabet is often credited with the spate of communal settlements that appeared in mid-nineteenth-century North America. Louis-Auguste Blanqui offered a more strident version of communism by urging French workers during the 1830s to organize insurrections and establish a dictatorship for the purpose of reorganizing the government.

Communism did not receive its first comprehensive intellectual foundation until 1848, when Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. As technology increased and industry expanded in nineteenth century Europe and America, it became clear that the general welfare of laborers was not improving. Although the new democratic governments gave new freedoms to workers, or "the proletariat," the capitalism that came with democracy had created different means of oppression. By drawing on existing theories of materialism, labor, and historical evolution, Marx and Engels were able to identify the reasons why, despite periodic drastic changes in government, common laborers had been doomed to abject poverty throughout recorded history.

In the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that human history was best understood as a continuing struggle between a small exploiting class and a larger exploited class. At any point in time, the exploiting class controlled the means of production and profited by employing the labor of the masses. In the capitalism that developed alongside democracy, Marx and Engels saw a progressive concentration of the powers of production placed in the hands of a privileged few. Although society was producing more goods and services, the general welfare of the middle class was declining. According to Marx and Engels, this was the internal contradiction of capitalism that would spell its doom. As the numbers of the middle class, or "bourgeoisie," began to decrease, the conflicts between laborers and capitalists would sharpen, and social revolution would follow. At the end of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that this transfer of power could only take place by force. Marx later retreated from this position and wrote that it was possible for this radical change to take place peacefully.

The social revolution originally envisioned by Marx and Engels would begin with a proletariat dictatorship. Once in possession of the forces of production, the dictatorship would devise the means for society to achieve the communal ownership of wealth. Once the transitional period had stabilized the state, the purest form of communism would take shape. Communism in its purest form would be a classless, propertyless societal system without the need for a coercive government. This last stage of Marxian communism has yet to be realized in any national government.

Russia

In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the Bolshevik party in a bloody revolution against Russian dictator Czar Nicholas. Lenin relied on violence and persistent aggression during his time as a Russian leader. Although he professed to be in the process of updating Marxist theory, Lenin stalled Marx's communism at its transitional phase and kept the proletariat dictatorship to himself.

Lenin's communist philosophy was designated by followers as Marxist-Leninist theory in 1928. Marxism-Leninism was highlighted by the refusal to cooperate and compromise with capitalist countries. It also included severe restrictions on human rights and the extermination of actual and supposed political opponents. In these respects, Marxist-Leninist theory was unrecognizable to democratic socialists and other followers of Marxist doctrine, and the 1920s saw a gradual split between Russian communists and other European proponents of Marxian theory. The Bolshevik party, with Lenin at the helm, renamed itself the All-Russian Communist party, and Lenin presided over a totalitarian state until his death in 1924.

Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as the Communist party ruler. In 1924, Stalin established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) by colonizing land surrounding Russia and placing the territories within the purview of the Soviet Union. The All-Russian Communist party became the All-Union Communist party, and Stalin sought to position the Soviet Union as the home base of a world revolution. In his quest to make communism safe for the rest of the world, Stalin sent political opponents such as Trotsky into exile, had thousands of political dissidents murdered, and imprisoned millions more.

Stalin saw the Soviet Union through World War II. Although it joined with the United States and other democratic countries in the fight against Nazism, the Soviet Union remained strongly opposed to capitalist principles. In the scramble for control of Europe after World War II, the Soviet Union gained power over several Eastern European countries it had helped liberate, and placed them under communist rule. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Romania developed the totalitarian characteristics of Stalin's rule. North Korea was also supported and influenced by the Soviet Union. More independent communist governments emerged in Yugoslavia and Albania after World War II.

For nearly fifty years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a cold war. So named for the absence of direct fighting between the two superpowers, the cold war was, in reality, a bloody one. The Soviet Union and the United States fought each other through other countries in an effort to control the influence and expansion of each other's form of government.

When a country was thrown into civil war, the Soviet Union and the United States aligned themselves with the competing factions by providing financial and military support. They sometimes even supplied their own troops. The United States and Soviet Union engaged in war-by-proxy in many countries, including Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Angola.

Cuba officially adopted communism in 1965 after Fidel Castro led a band of rebels in an insurrection against the Cuban government in 1959. Despite intense opposition by the United States to communism in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba became communist with the help of the Soviet Union.

China

Communism also found a home in China. In 1917, Chinese students and intellectuals, inspired by the Bolsheviks' October Revolution, began to study and promote Marxism as updated by Lenin. China had been mired in a century-long civil war, and many saw Lenin's brand of communism as the solution to China's internal problems. In 1919, at the end of World War I, China received a disappointing settlement from Western countries at the Versailles Peace Conference. This confirmed a growing suspicion of capitalist values, and strengthened the resolve of many Chinese to find an alternative basis for government.

On July 1, 1921, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) was established. Led by Chinese intellectuals and Russian advisers, the CCP initially embraced Russia's model of communism and relied on the organization of urban industrial laborers. By 1927, CCP membership had grown from less than five hundred in 1923 to over fifty-seven thousand. This increase in numbers was achieved in large part because the CCP had joined with another political party, the Kuomintang (KMT). KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek and KMT troops eventually became fearful of CCP control of the state, and in July 1927, the KMT purged communists from its ranks. CCP membership plummeted, and the party was forced to search for new ways to gain power.

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, the CCP sought to change its strategies. The party was divided between urban, Russian-trained students and a wing made up of peasants led by Mao Tse-tung. At the same time, the CCP was engaged in battles with the KMT over control of various cities, and several CCP attempts to capture urban areas were unsuccessful.

Mao was instrumental in switching the concentration of CCP membership from the city to the country. In October 1934, the CCP escaped from threatening KMT forces in southern China. Led by Mao, CCP troops conducted the Long March to Yenan in the north, recruiting rural peasants and increasing its popularity en route. In 1935, Mao was elected chairman of the CCP.

Japan's invasion of China in 1937 spurred a resurgence in CCP popularity. The CCP fought Japanese troops until their surrender in 1945. The CCP then waged civil war against the KMT. With remarkable organization and brilliant military tactics, the CCP won widespread support throughout China's rural population, and eventually its urban population as well. By 1949, the CCP had established Beijing as the capital of China and declared the People's Republic of China as the new government.

Chinese communism has been marked by a willingness to experiment. In 1957, Chairman Mao announced China's Great Leap Forward, an attempt to advance industry within rural communes. The program failed to flourish, and within two years, Mao concluded that the Soviet Union's emphasis on industry was incompatible with communal principles. Mao launched an ideological campaign in 1966 called the Cultural Revolution, in which students were employed to convert opponents of communism. This campaign also fell flat, as too many students loyal to Mao carried out their mission with violent zeal.

After Chairman Mao died in 1976, powerful CCP operatives worked to eliminate from the party Jiang Quing, Mao's widow, and three other party officials. This Gang of Four was accused of undermining the strength of the party through adherence to Mao's traditional doctrines. The Chinese version of communism placed enormous emphasis on conformity and unbridled enthusiasm for all CCP policies. With the conviction of the Gang of Four in 1981, the CCP sent a message to its members that it would not tolerate dissension within its ranks.

Also in 1981, the CCP's Central Committee declared Mao's Cultural Revolution a mistake. Hu Yaobang was named chairman of the CCP, and Deng Xiaoping was named head of the military. These changes in leadership marked the beginning of CCP reformation. The idolization of Mao was scrapped, as was the ideal of continuous class struggle. The CCP began to incorporate technological advances and Western production management techniques into Chinese society. Signs of Western culture, such as blue jeans and rock and roll music, began to appear in China's cities.

In 1987, Hu Yaobang was removed as CCP chairman and replaced by Zhao Ziyang. Zhao's political philosophy was at odds with the increasing acceptance of Western culture and concepts of capitalism, and China's urban areas began to simmer with discontent. By May 1989, students and other reformists in China had organized and were regularly staging protests against Zhao's leadership. After massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the CCP's military crushed the uprisings, executed dozens of radicals, and imprisoned thousands more.

The CCP has maintained control of China's government. At the same time, it has made attempts to participate in world politics and business.

The Demise of Communist States

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several communist states transformed their governments to free-market economies. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was named leader of the Soviet Union, and he immediately embarked on a program to liberalize and democratize the Soviet Union and its Communist party. By 1990, the campaign had won enough converts to unsettle the power of communism in the Soviet Union. In August 1991, opponents of Gorbachev attempted to oust him from power by force, but many in the Soviet military supported Gorbachev, and the coup failed.

The Soviet Union was formally dissolved in December 1991. The republics previously controlled by the All-Union Communist party held democratic elections and moved toward participation in the world business market. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and Poland also established their independence. Romania had conducted its own revolution by trying, convicting, and executing its communist dictator, Nicolae Ceau;alsescu, at the end of 1989.

Communist control of governments may be dwindling, but communist parties still exist all over the world. China, Cuba, and Nicaragua are Communist, and Spain and Italy have powerful Communist parties. In the United States, though, Communism has had a difficult time finding widespread support. The justice system in the United States has historically singled out Communists for especially harsh treatment under the law. For example, Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, led an anti-Communist campaign from 1950 to 1954 that disrupted many lives in the United States.

Communism in the United States

Anti-Communist hysteria in the United States did not begin with Senator McCarthy's campaign in 1950. In Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 47 S. Ct. 641, 71 L. Ed. 1095 (1927), Charlotte Whitney was found guilty of violating the Criminal Syndicalism Act of California for organizing the Communist Labor Party of California. Criminal syndicalism was defined to include any action even remotely related to the teaching of violence or force as a means to effect political change.

Whitney argued against her conviction on several grounds: California's Criminal Syndicalism Act violated her due process rights because it was unclear; the act violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it did not penalize those who advocated force to maintain the current system of government; and the act violated Whitney's First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and association.

The Court rejected every argument presented by Whitney. Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concurred in the result. They disagreed with the majority that a conviction for mere association with a political party that advocated future revolt was not violative of the First Amendment. However, Whitney had failed to challenge the determination that there was a clear and present danger of serious evil, and, according to Brandeis and Holmes, this omission was fatal to her defense. Forty-two years later, the decision in Whitney's case was expressly overruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 89 S. Ct. 1827, 23 L. Ed. 2d 430 (1969).

The political and social protests of the 1960s led to an increased tolerance of unconventional political parties in the United States. However, this tolerance did not reach every state in the Union. In August 1972, the Indiana State Election Board denied the Communist party of Indiana a place on the 1972 general-election ballot. On the advice of the attorney general of Indiana, the board denied the party this right because its members had refused to submit to a loyalty oath required by section 29-3812 of the Indiana Code. The oath consisted of a promise that the party's candidates did not " ‘advocate the overthrow of local, state or National Government by force or violence' " (Communist Party v. Whitcomb, 414 U.S. 441, 94 S. Ct. 656, 38 L. Ed. 2d 635 [1974]).

The Supreme Court, following its earlier Brandenburg decision, held that the loyalty oath violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. In Brandenburg, the Court had held that a statute that fails to differentiate between teaching force in the abstract and preparing a group for imminent violent action runs contrary to the constitutional rights of free speech and freedom of association.

Although the Communist party missed the deadline for entering its candidates in the 1972 general election, it succeeded in clearing the way for its participation in future elections.

In the twentieth century communism gained a hold among the world's enduring political ideologies and its popularity continues to ebb and flow with the shifting distribution of wealth and power within and between nations.

See: Cuban Missile Crisis; Dennis v. United States; Freedom of Association; Freedom of Speech; Smith Act; Socialism; Vietnam War.

An economic and social system envisioned by the nineteenth-century German scholar Karl Marx. In theory, under communism, all means of production are owned in common, rather than by individuals (see Marxism and Marxism-Leninism). In practice, a single authoritarian party controls both the political and economic systems. In the twentieth century, communism was associated with the economic and political systems of China and the Soviet Union and of the satellites of the Soviet Union. (Compare capitalism and socialism.)

IN BRIEF: A political system where everything is owned by the group of people.

The differences between communism and democracy are often debated.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - kommunisme, fælles ejendomsret

Nederlands (Dutch)
communisme

Français (French)
n. - communisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kommunismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κομουνισμός

Italiano (Italian)
comunismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - comunismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
коммунизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - comunismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kommunism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
共产主义

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 共產主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 공산주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 共産主義, 共産主義体制

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الشيوعيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קומוניזם‬

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