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Communism
Communism, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-
based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of
production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is
thus a form of socialism—a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates. Exactly
how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests
largely on the communists’ adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx.

Marx identified two phases of communism that would follow the predicted overthrow
of capitalism: the first would be a transitional system in which the working class would control the
government and economy yet still find it necessary to pay people according to how long, hard, or
well they worked; the second would be fully realized communism—a society
without class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be
based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Marx’s followers, especially the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin, took up this distinction.

In State and Revolution (1917), Lenin asserted that socialism corresponds to Marx’s first phase of
communist society and communism proper to the second. Lenin and the Bolshevik wing of
the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party reinforced this distinction in 1918, the year after
they seized power in Russia, by taking the name All-Russian Communist Party. Since then,
communism has been largely, if not exclusively, identified with the form of political and economic
organization developed in the Soviet Union and adopted subsequently in the People’s Republic of
China and other countries ruled by communist parties.

For much of the 20th century, in fact, about one-third of the world’s population lived under
communist regimes. These regimes were characterized by the rule of a single party that tolerated
no opposition and little dissent. In place of a capitalist economy, in which individuals compete for
profits, moreover, party leaders established a command economy in which the state controlled
property and its bureaucrats determined wages, prices, and production goals. The inefficiency of
these economies played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the remaining
communist countries (excepting North Korea) are now allowing greater economic competition
while holding fast to one-party rule. Whether they will succeed in this endeavour remains to be
seen. Succeed or fail, however, communism is clearly not the world-shaking force it was in the
20th century.

Historical Background

Although the term communism did not come into use until the 1840s—it is derived from the
Latin communis, meaning “shared” or “common”—visions of a society that may be considered
communist appeared as long ago as the 4th century BCE. In the ideal state described
in Plato’s Republic, the governing class of guardians devotes itself to serving the interests of the

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whole community. Because private ownership of goods would corrupt their owners by
encouraging selfishness, Plato argued, the guardians must live as a large family that shares
common ownership not only of material goods but also of spouses and children.

Other early visions of communism drew their inspiration from religion. The first Christians
practiced a simple kind of communism—as described in Acts 4:32–37, for example—both as a
form of solidarity and as a way of renouncing worldly possessions. Similar motives later inspired
the formation of monastic orders in which monks took vows of poverty and promised to share
their few worldly goods with each other and with the poor. The English humanist Sir Thomas
More extended this monastic communism in Utopia (1516), which describes an imaginary society
in which money is abolished and people share meals, houses, and other goods in common.

Other fictional communistic utopias followed, notably City of the Sun (1623), by the Italian
philosopher Tommaso Campanella, as did attempts to put communist ideas into practice. Perhaps
the most noteworthy (if not notorious) of the latter was the theocracy of the Anabaptists in the
Westphalian city of Münster (1534–35), which ended with the military capture of the city and the
execution of its leaders. The English Civil Wars (1642–51) prompted the Diggers to advocate a kind
of agrarian communism in which the Earth would be “a common treasury,” as Gerrard
Winstanley envisioned in The Law of Freedom (1652) and other works. The vision was not shared
by the Protectorate led by Oliver Cromwell, which harshly suppressed the Diggers in 1650.

It was neither a religious upheaval nor a civil war but a technological and economic revolution—
the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—that provided the impetus and
inspiration for modern communism. This revolution, which achieved great gains in economic
productivity at the expense of an increasingly miserable working class, encouraged Marx to think
that the class struggles that dominated history were leading inevitably to a society in which
prosperity would be shared by all through common ownership of the means of production.

Marxian Communism

Karl Marx was born in the German Rhineland to middle-class parents of Jewish descent who had
abandoned their religion in an attempt to assimilate into an anti-Semitic society. The young Marx
studied philosophy at the University of Berlin and received a doctorate from the University of Jena
in 1841, but he was unable, because of his Jewish ancestry and his liberal political views, to secure
a teaching position. He then turned to journalism, where his investigations disclosed what he
perceived as systematic injustice and corruption at all levels of German society. Convinced that
German (and, more broadly, European) society could not be reformed from within but instead had
to be remade from the ground up, Marx became a political radical. His views soon brought him to
the attention of the police, and, fearing arrest and imprisonment, he left for Paris. There he
renewed an acquaintance with his countryman Friedrich Engels, who became his friend and
coauthor in a collaboration that was to last nearly 40 years.

The son of the co-owner of a textile firm with factories in Germany and Britain, Engels was himself
a capitalist who helped to manage the firm’s factory in Manchester. Like Marx, Engels was deeply

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disturbed by what he regarded as the injustices of a society divided by class. Appalled by the
poverty and squalor in which ordinary workers lived and worked, he described their misery in
grisly detail in The Condition of the English Working Class (1844).

Marx and Engels maintained that the poverty, disease, and early death that afflicted
the proletariat (the industrial working class) were endemic to capitalism: they were systemic and
structural problems that could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism. Under
this alternative system, the major means of industrial production—such as mines, mills, factories,
and railroads—would be publicly owned and operated for the benefit of all. Marx and Engels
presented this critique of capitalism and a brief sketch of a possible future communist society
in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which they wrote at the commission of a small group
of radicals called the Communist League.

Marx, meanwhile, had begun to lay the theoretical and (he believed) scientific foundations of
communism, first in The German Ideology (written 1845–46, published 1932) and later in Das
Kapital (1867; Capital). His theory has three main aspects: first, a materialist conception of history;
second, a critique of capitalism and its inner workings; and third, an account of the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by communism.

Historical materialism

Without material production there would be no life and thus no human activity.

According to Marx, material production requires two things: “material forces of production”—
roughly, raw materials and the tools required to extract and process them—and “social relations
of production”—the division of labour through which raw materials are extracted and processed.
Human history is the story of both elements’ changing and becoming ever more complex.
Industrial capitalism, in Marx’s view, is an economic system in which one class—the
ruling bourgeoisie—owns the means of production while the working class
or proletariat effectively loses its independence, the worker becoming part of the means of
production, a mere “appendage of the machine.”

Revolution and communism

Marx believed that capitalism is a volatile economic system that will suffer a series of ever-
worsening crises—recessions and depressions—that will produce greater unemployment, lower
wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. These crises will convince the
proletariat that its interests as a class are implacably opposed to those of the ruling bourgeoisie.
Armed with revolutionary class consciousness, the proletariat will seize the major means of
production along with the institutions of state power—police, courts, prisons, and so on—and
establish a socialist state that Marx called “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” The
proletariat will thus rule in its own class interest, as the bourgeoisie did before, in order to prevent
a counterrevolution by the displaced bourgeoisie. Once this threat disappears, however, the need

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for the state will also disappear. Thus, the interim state will wither away and be replaced by a
classless communist society.

Chinese communism

The People’s Republic of China is the only global superpower still ruled by a communist party,
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it has been since the communists came to power in 1949.
Even so, the official Chinese version of communism—Maoism, or “Mao Zedong thought”—is a far
cry from Marx’s original vision. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic and China’s first
communist leader, claimed to have “creatively” amended Marxist theory and communist practice
to suit Chinese conditions.

Non-Marxian Communism

Although Marx remains the preeminent communist theorist, there have been several varieties of
non-Marxist communism. Among the most influential is anarchism, or anarcho-communism, which
advocates not only communal ownership of property but also the abolition of the state.
Historically important anarcho-communists include William Godwin in England, Mikhail
Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin in Russia (though both spent much of their lives in exile), and Emma
Goldman in the United States. In different ways they argued that the state and private property
are interdependent institutions: the state exists to protect private property, and the owners of
private property protect the state. If property is to be owned communally and distributed equally,
the state must be smashed once and for all.

Communism Today

In China, Maoism is given lip service but no longer is put into practice. Some large industries are
still state-owned, but the trend is clearly toward increasing privatization and a decentralized
market economy. China is now on the verge of having a full-fledged capitalist economy. Mao’s
version of Marxism-Leninism remains an active but ambiguous force elsewhere in Asia, most
notably in Nepal. After a decade of armed struggle, Maoist insurgents there agreed in 2006 to lay
down their arms and participate in national elections to choose an assembly to rewrite the
Nepalese constitution. Claiming a commitment to multiparty democracy and a mixed economy,
the Maoists emerged from the elections in 2008 as the largest party in the assembly—a party that
now appears to resemble the pragmatic CCP of recent years more closely than it resembles Maoist
revolutionaries of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, North Korea, the last bastion of old Soviet-style communism, is an isolated and
repressive regime. Long deprived of Soviet sponsorship and subsidies, Cuba and Vietnam have
been reaching out diplomatically and seeking foreign investment in their increasingly market-
oriented economies, but politically both remain single-party communist states.