Adjective

communist

1. Of, relating to, supporting, or advocating communism.

Communism (from Latin: communis = "common") is a family of economic and political ideas and social movements related to the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, or stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general, as well as the name given to such a society. The term "Communism", usually spelled with the capital letter C, is also often used to refer to a Communist state, a form of government in which the state operates under a one-party system and declares allegiance to Marxism-Leninism or a derivative thereof, even if the party does not actually claim that the society has already reached communism.

Forerunners of communist ideas existed in antiquity and particularly in the 18th and early 19th century France, with thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the more radical Gracchus Babeuf. Radical egalitarianism then emerged as a significant political power in the first half of 19th century in Western Europe. In the world shaped by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, the newly established political left included many various political and intellectual movements, which are the direct ancestors of today's communism and socialism – these two then newly minted words were almost interchangeable at the time – and of anarchism or anarcho-communism. The two most influential theoreticians of communism of the 19th century were Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848), who also helped to form the first openly communist political organisations and firmly tied communism with the idea of working class revolution conducted by the exploited proletariat (or the working class). Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved after an intermediate stage called the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism in the Marxist sense refers to a classless, stateless, and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made directly and democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. Some "revisionist" Marxists of the following generations, henceforth known as reformists or social democrats, have slowly drifted away from the revolutionary views of Marx, instead arguing for a gradual parliamentary road to socialism; other communists, such as Rosa Luxemburg or Vladimir Lenin, continued to agitate and argue for world revolution.

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were brought to power by the Russia Revolution of 1917, where the Tsarist regime disrupted by World War I was smashed by the world's first workers revolution. After years of civil war (1917–1921), international isolation, erosion of the soviets (workers and peasants' councils) and internal struggle within the Bolshevik leadership, the Soviet Union was founded (1922). Lenin died after a second stroke in 1924, and despite of his warnings was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. Once in power, Stalin carried out multiple of dissidents and left communists/opposition, particularly of those around Leon Trotsky, and established the character of Communism as the totalitarian ideology it is most commonly known as and referred to today. The Soviet Union emerged as a new global superpower on the victorious side of World War II. In the five years after the World War, Communist regimes were established in many states of Central and Eastern Europe and in China. Communism began to spread its influence in the Third World while continuing to be a significant political force in many Western countries. International relations between the Soviet Bloc and the West, led by USA, quickly worsened after the end of the war and the Cold War began, a continuing state of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and those countries' respective allies. The "Iron curtain" between West and East then divided Europe and world from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. Despite many Communist successes like the victorious Vietnam War (1959-1975) or the first human spaceflight (1961), the Communist regimes were ultimately unable to keep up with their Western rivals. People under Communist regimes showed their discontent in events like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Prague Spring of 1968 or Polish Solidarity movement in early 1980s, most of which were ironically led by or included masses of workers. After 1985, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to implement market and democratic reforms under policies like perestroika ("restructuring") and glasnost ("transparency"). His reforms sharpened internal conflicts in the Communist regimes and quickly led to the Revolutions of 1989 and a total collapse of European Communist regimes outside of the Soviet Union, which itself dissolved two years later (1991). Some Communist regimes outside of Europe have survived to this day, the most important of them being the People's Republic of China, whose Socialism with Chinese characteristics attempts to introduce market reforms without western style democratization and with the introduction of new capitalist and middle classes.

Quotes about Communism

Contents

• 1 Quotes in favor of Communism
• 2 Quotes against Communism
• 3 Other quotes
• 4 See also

(in alphabetic order, by author)

Quotes in favor of Communism

• "Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist society), but as a tendency which originates in real needs. Communism does not even know what value is. The point is not that one fine day a large number of people start to destroy value and profit. All past revolutionary movements were able to bring society to a standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for 15 odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in 3-room family units - in short, it will tend to break all separations. Communism believes in equality through force." –Gilles Dauvé

• "Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it. It is used to refer to the economic power under Communist parties that have the dictatorship of the social classes." –Gilles Dauvé

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Mon Jul 6 04:37:18 2009