Communism (from Latin communis 'common, universal') is a political and economic ideology whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products in society based on need. A communist society entails the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.
Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and an authoritarian socialist, vanguardist, or party-driven approach to establish a socialist state, which is expected to wither away. Communist parties have been described as radical left or far-left.
There are many variants of communism, such as anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought (including Leninism and its offshoots), and religious communism. These ideologies share the analysis that the current order of society stems from the capitalist economic system and mode of production; they believe that there are two major social classes under capitalism, that the relationship between them is exploitative, and that it can only be resolved through social revolution. The two classes under capitalism are the proletariat (working class), who make up most of the population and sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie (owning class), a minority that derives profit from employing the proletariat through private ownership of the means of production. Some variants additionally emphasize feudal classes, such as the peasantry and feudal lords, or other classes. According to this, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a socialist mode of production.
Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered a new definition of communism in The Communist Manifesto. In the 20th century, Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism came to power, first in the Soviet Union with the 1917 Russian Revolution, then in Eastern Europe, Asia, and other regions after World War II. By the 1920s, communism had become one of the two dominant types of socialism in the world, the other being social democracy.
For much of the 20th century, more than one-third of the world's population lived under Communist governments. These were characterized by one-party rule, rejection of private property and capitalism, state control of economic activity and mass media, restrictions on freedom of religion, and suppression of opposition. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many governments abolished Communist rule. Only a few nominally Communist governments remain, such as China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Except for North Korea, these have allowed more economic competition while maintaining one-party rule. Communism's decline has been attributed to economic inefficiency and to authoritarianism and bureaucracy within Communist governments.
Although the emergence of the Soviet Union as the first state based on Marxism–Leninism led to socialism becoming widely associated with the Soviet economic model, several scholars argue that in practice this model functioned as a form of state capitalism. Public memory of 20th-century Marxist-Leninist states has been described as a battleground between anti-communism and anti anti-communism. Authors have written about mass killings under communist regimes and mortality rates, which remain controversial, polarized, and debated topics in academia, historiography, and politics when discussing communism and the legacy of Marxist-Leninist states. From the 1990s, many Communist parties adopted democratic principles and came to share power with others in government, such as the CPN UML and the Nepal Communist Party, which support People's Multiparty Democracy in Nepal.
Etymology and terminology
Communism derives from the French word communisme, a combination of the Latin word communis (which literally means common) and the suffix ‑isme (an act, practice, or process of doing something). Semantically, communis can be translated to "of or for the community", while isme is a suffix that indicates the abstraction into a state, condition, action, or doctrine. Communism may be interpreted as "the state of being of or for the community"; this semantic constitution has led to numerous usages of the word in its evolution. Prior to becoming associated with its more modern conception of an economic and political organization, it was initially used to designate various social situations. After 1848, communism came to be primarily associated with Marxism, most specifically embodied in The Communist Manifesto, which proposed a particular type of communism.
One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste ("communist author"). In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property. Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government. John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840.
Communism and socialism
Since the 1840s, the term communism has usually been distinguished from socialism. The modern definition and usage of the term socialism was settled by the 1860s, becoming predominant over alternative terms such as associationism (Fourierism), mutualism, or co-operative, which had previously been used as synonyms. Meanwhile, the term communism fell out of use during this period.
An early distinction between communism and socialism was that the latter aimed to only socialize production, whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of common access to final goods). This distinction can be observed in Marx's communism, where the distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his needs", in contrast to a socialist principle of "to each according to his contribution". Socialism has been described as a philosophy seeking distributive justice, and communism as a subset of socialism that prefers economic equality as its form of distributive justice.
In 19th century Europe, the use of the terms communism and socialism eventually accorded with the cultural attitude of adherents and opponents towards religion. In European Christendom, communism was believed to be the atheist way of life. In Protestant England, communism was too phonetically similar to the Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels stated that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first published, socialism was respectable on the continent, while communism was not; the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves communists. This latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany. While liberal democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, Marxists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat.
By 1888, Marxists employed the term socialism in place of communism, which had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for the former. It was not until 1917, with the October Revolution, that socialism came to be used to refer to a distinct stage between capitalism and communism. This intermediate stage was a concept introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution. A distinction between communist and socialist as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the adjective Communist being used to refer to socialists who supported the politics and theories of Bolshevism, Leninism, and later in the 1920s those of Marxism–Leninism. In spite of this common usage, Communist parties also continued to describe themselves as socialists dedicated to socialism.
According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, "Marx used many terms to refer to a post-capitalist society – positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free association of producers, etc. He used these terms completely interchangeably. The notion that 'socialism' and 'Communism' are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death." According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "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."
Associated usage and Communist states
In the United States, communism is widely used as a pejorative term as part of a Red Scare, much like socialism, and mainly in reference to authoritarian socialism and Communist states. The emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first Communist state led to the term's widespread association with Marxism–Leninist and the Soviet-type economic planning model. In his essay "Judging Nazism and Communism", Martin Malia defines a "generic Communism" category as any Communist political party movement led by intellectuals; this umbrella term allows grouping together such different regimes as radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's anti-urbanism. According to Alexander Dallin, the idea to group together different countries, such as Afghanistan and Hungary, has no adequate explanation.
While the term Communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and news media to refer to countries ruled by Communist parties, these socialist states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism; they referred to themselves as being a socialist state that is in the process of constructing communism. Terms used by Communist states include national-democratic, people's democratic, socialist-oriented, and workers and peasants' states.
History
Early communism
According to Richard Pipes, the idea of a classless, egalitarian society first emerged in ancient Greece. Since the 20th century, ancient Rome has been examined in this context, as well as thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Demosthenes, Plato, and Tacitus. Plato, in particular, has been considered as a possible communist or socialist theorist, or as the first author to give communism a serious consideration. The 5th-century Mazdak movement in Persia (modern-day Iran) has been described as communistic for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy, criticizing the institution of private property, and striving to create an egalitarian society. At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, generally under the inspiration of religious text.
In the medieval Christian Church, some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. Sects deemed heretical such as the Waldensians preached an early form of Christian communism. As summarized by historians Janzen Rod and Max Stanton, the Hutterites believed in strict adherence to biblical principles, church discipline, and practised a form of communism. In their words, the Hutterites "established in their communities a rigorous system of Ordnungen, which were codes of rules and regulations that governed all aspects of life and ensured a unified perspective. As an economic system, communism was attractive to many of the peasants who supported social revolution in sixteenth century central Europe." This link was highlighted in one of Marx's early writings; Marx stated that "[a]s Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty." Thomas Müntzer led a large Anabaptist communist movement during the German Peasants' War, which Friedrich Engels analyzed in his 1850 work The Peasant War in Germany. The Marxist communist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people.
Communist thought has also been traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More. In his 1516 treatise titled Utopia, More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose rulers administered it through the application of reason and virtue. Marxist communist theoretician Karl Kautsky, who popularized Marxist communism in Western Europe more than any other thinker apart from Engels, published Thomas More and His Utopia, a work about More, whose ideas could be regarded as "the foregleam of Modern Socialism" according to Kautsky. During the October Revolution in Russia, Vladimir Lenin suggested that a monument be dedicated to More, alongside other important Western thinkers.
In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, where a Puritan religious group known as the Diggers advocated the abolition of private ownership of land. In his 1895 Cromwell and Communism, Eduard Bernstein stated that several groups during the English Civil War (especially the Diggers) espoused clear communistic, agrarianist ideals and that Oliver Cromwell's attitude towards these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile. Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century through such thinkers as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. During the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine under the auspices of François-Noël Babeuf, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, and Sylvain Maréchal, all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism, according to James H. Billington.
In the early 19th century, various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. Unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the religious emphasis with a rational and philanthropic basis. Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, and Charles Fourier, whose followers organized other settlements in the United States, such as Brook Farm in 1841. In its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the proletariat – a new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Engels. In 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.
Revolutionary wave of 1917–1923
In 1917, long-standing political, social, and economic issues fueled revolutionary sentiment in Russian Empire, which was still embroiled in World War I at the time. The February Revolution overthrew the Russian Empire, and the Russian Provisional Government, which was dominated by liberals, particularly the Constitutional Democratic Party, and included some moderate socialists, came to power. Meanwhile, socialist intellectuals, soldiers, and workers in Petrograd organized the Petrograd Soviet, creating a situation of "dual power." The Provisional Government gained a notorious reputation for its inclination to continue participating in World War I, which led to a rise in popularity for various socialist parties. Russian socialists included the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, as well as the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, both of which had split from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The following October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to state power of Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, which was the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position. The October Revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in which the Bolsheviks had a majority. The Bolsheviks' successful rise to power was based upon the slogans such as "Peace, Bread, and Land", which tapped into the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in World War I, the peasants' demand for land reform, and popular support for the soviets.
After the October Revolution toppled the Russian Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks moved to hand power to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in the October Revolution; after a few weeks of deliberation, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to July 1918, while the right-wing faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party boycotted the soviets and denounced the October Revolution as an illegal coup. In the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, socialist parties totaled well over 70% of the vote. The Bolsheviks were winners in the urban centres, and took around two-thirds of the votes of soldiers on the Western Front, obtaining 23.3% of the vote; the Socialist Revolutionaries finished first on the strength of support from the country's rural peasantry, obtaining 37.6%, while the Ukrainian Socialist Bloc finished a third at 12.7%, and the Mensheviks obtained 3.0% of the vote. Most of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's seats went to the right-wing faction. Citing outdated voter-rolls, which did not acknowledge the party split, and the assembly's conflicts with the Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik–Left Socialist-Revolutionaries government moved to dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. The Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was issued by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, a committee dominated by Lenin, who had previously supported a multi-party system of free elections. Some argued this was the beginning of the development of vanguardism as an hierarchical party–elite that controls society, which resulted in a split between anarchism and Marxism, and Leninist communism assuming the dominant position for most of the 20th century, excluding rival socialist currents. A series of decrees were signed and policies were implemented: land owned by the church, the nobility, and the royal family was redistributed to the peasants, but the peasants were also required to surrender surplus grain beyond their basic needs (Prodrazverstka); the Bolsheviks called for an immediate ceasefire among the belligerents in World War I; workers were given greater control over factories; and the Bolsheviks were now able to shut down newspapers opposed to the new revolutionary government, while the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was established as a secret police force. Lenin officially changed the party's name to the Communist Party in March 1918.
In early 1918, the Bolsheviks accepted the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Soviet Russia lost vast territories in Central and Eastern Europe. With the Constituent Assembly dissolved, anti-Bolshevik forces could now only express their dissatisfaction with Bolshevik policies through extra-parliamentary means. The White Movement formed the White Army in various regions to oppose the Bolsheviks, including the Armed Forces of South Russia led by Anton Denikin, the Russian Army led by Aleksandr Kolchak, and corps organized in the Baltic region, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk. A group of leaders from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who opposed the Bolsheviks, gathered in Samara on the Volga River and formed Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly in June; they also received support from the Czechoslovak Legion, which had previously served the Russian Empire. Nationalists across Russia were seeking independence; previously, the self-proclaimed Ukrainian People's Republic had gone to war with the Bolsheviks, and both the Allies and the Central Powers supported certain anti-Bolshevik forces. The Russian Civil War broke out, and to counter the various forces opposing the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks gradually transformed their early, largely volunteer-based military into a professional Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky. War communism was the first economic system adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War as a result of the many challenges. Despite communism in the name, it had strict discipline for workers, strike actions forbidden, obligatory labor duty, and military-style control, and has been described as simple authoritarian control by the Bolsheviks to maintain power and control in the Soviet regions, rather than any coherent political ideology.
The Bolsheviks initially viewed the revolution in Russia as the beginning of a world revolution, and foreign intervention and their struggle against nationalist forces only reinforced this belief. Meanwhile, the end of World War I ushered in a period of social upheaval across Europe, with a wave of socialist revolutions sweeping through Europe. The Bolsheviks founded the Comintern in 1919, dedicated to promoting revolution throughout the world. However, the Bolsheviks suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Warsaw during the Polish-Soviet War, and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia also won their wars of independence against the Bolsheviks, all of which dampened the Bolshevik leadership's optimism about a world revolution.
The Bolsheviks defeated the White Army and won the Russian Civil War. During the final stages of the civil war, however, peasants and workers expressed dissatisfaction with Bolshevik policies, particularly their economic policies including Prodrazverstka. During the final stages of the civil war, however, peasants and workers expressed dissatisfaction with Bolshevik policies, particularly the Bolsheviks' economic policies. In March 1921, a workers' uprising broke out in Kronstadt, Petrograd, calling for more democratic policies and a reduction of repressive policies, but it was ultimately crushed by the Red Army. On April 15, 1921, at the 10th Party Congress, Lenin called for the implementation of the New Economic Policy, under which the Bolsheviks would gradually scale back revolutionary policies in order to revive the economy and ease overall tensions.
The events generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement, as Marx stated that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development; however, the Russian Empire was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry, and a minority of industrial workers. Marx warned against attempts "to transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophy theory of the arche générale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself", and stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule through the Obshchina. The moderate Mensheviks (minority) opposed Lenin's Bolsheviks (majority) plan for socialist revolution before the capitalist mode of production was more fully developed. Other communists and Marxists, especially social democrats who favored the development of liberal democracy as a prerequisite to socialism, were critical of the Bolsheviks from the beginning due to Russia being seen as too backward for a socialist revolution. Council communism and left communism, inspired by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the wide proletarian revolutionary wave, arose in response to developments in Russia and are critical of self-declared constitutionally socialist states. Some left-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain, boasted of having called the Bolsheviks, and by extension those Communist states which either followed or were inspired by the Soviet Bolshevik model of development, establishing state capitalism in late 1917, as would be described during the 20th century by several academics, economists, and other scholars, or a command economy. Before the Soviet path of development became known as socialism, in reference to the two-stage theory, communists made no major distinction between the socialist mode of production and communism; it is consistent with, and helped to inform, early concepts of socialism in which the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Monetary relations in the form of exchange-value, profit, interest, and wage labor would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism.
While Joseph Stalin stated that the law of value would still apply to socialism and that the Soviet Union was socialist under this new definition, which was followed by other Communist leaders, many other communists maintain the original definition and state that Communist states never established socialism in this sense. Lenin described his policies as state capitalism but saw them as necessary for the development of socialism, which left-wing critics say was never established, while some Marxist–Leninists state that it was established only during the Stalin era and Mao era, and then became capitalist states ruled by revisionists; others state that Maoist China was always state capitalist, and uphold People's Socialist Republic of Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin, who first stated to have achieved socialism with the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union.
Communist states
Soviet Union
In 1922, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic joined together to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly known as the USSR or the Soviet Union. Before the broad ban in 1921, there were several factions in the Communist party, more prominently among them the Left Opposition, the Right Opposition, and the Workers' Opposition, which debated on the path of development to follow. The Left and Workers' oppositions were more critical of the state-capitalist development and the Workers' in particular was critical of bureaucratization and development from above, while the Right Opposition was more supporting of state-capitalist development and advocated the New Economic Policy. Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Leninist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base. They were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline. Trotskyism overtook the left communists as the main dissident communist current, while more libertarian communisms, dating back to the libertarian Marxist current of council communism, remained important dissident communisms outside the Soviet Union. The Great Purge of 1936–1938 was Joseph Stalin's attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the Moscow trials, many old Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin, were accused, pleaded guilty of conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and were executed.
The devastation of World War II resulted in a massive recovery program involving the rebuilding of industrial plants, housing, and transportation as well as the demobilization and migration of millions of soldiers and civilians. In the midst of this turmoil during the winter of 1946–1947, the Soviet Union experienced the worst natural famine in the 20th century. There was no serious opposition to Stalin as the secret police continued to send possible suspects to the gulag. Relations with the United States and Britain went from friendly to hostile, as they denounced Stalin's political controls over eastern Europe and his Berlin Blockade. By 1947, the Cold War had begun. Stalin himself believed that capitalism was a hollow shell and would crumble under increased non-military pressure exerted through proxies in countries like Italy. He greatly underestimated the economic strength of the West and instead of triumph saw the West build up alliances that were designed to permanently stop or contain Soviet expansion. In early 1950, Stalin gave the go-ahead for North Korea's invasion of South Korea, expecting a short war. He was stunned when the Americans entered and defeated the North Koreans, putting them almost on the Soviet border. Stalin supported China's entry into the Korean War, which drove the Americans back to the prewar boundaries, but which escalated tensions. The United States decided to mobilize its economy for a long contest with the Soviets, built the hydrogen bomb, and strengthened the NATO alliance that covered Western Europe.
According to Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after 1945 was to consolidate the nation's superpower status and in the face of his growing physical decrepitude, to maintain his own hold on total power. Stalin created a leadership system that reflected historic czarist styles of paternalism and repression yet was also quite modern. At the top, personal loyalty to Stalin counted for everything. Stalin also created powerful committees, elevated younger specialists, and began major institutional innovations. In the teeth of persecution, Stalin's deputies cultivated informal norms and mutual understandings which provided the foundations for collective rule after his death.
For most Westerners and anti-communist Russians, Stalin is viewed overwhelmingly negatively as a mass murderer; for significant numbers of Russians and Georgians, he is regarded as a great statesman and state-builder.
China
After the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 as the Nationalist government headed by the Kuomintang fled to the island of Taiwan. In 1950–1953, China engaged in a large-scale, undeclared war with the United States, South Korea, and United Nations forces in the Korean War. While the war ended in a military stalemate, it gave Mao the opportunity to identify and purge elements in China that seemed supportive of capitalism. At first, there was close cooperation with Stalin, who sent in technical experts to aid the industrialization process along the line of the Soviet model of the 1930s. After Stalin's death in 1953, relations with Moscow soured – Mao thought Stalin's successors had betrayed the Communist ideal. Mao charged that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of a "revisionist clique" which had turned against Marxism and Leninism and was now setting the stage for the restoration of capitalism. The two nations were at sword's point by 1960. Both began forging alliances with communist supporters around the globe, thereby splitting the worldwide movement into two hostile camps.
Rejecting the Soviet model of rapid urbanization, Mao Zedong and his top aide Deng Xiaoping launched the Great Leap Forward in 1957–1961 with the goal of industrializing China overnight, using the peasant villages as the base rather than large cities. Private ownership of land ended and the peasants worked in large collective farms that were now ordered to start up heavy industry operations, such as steel mills. Plants were built in remote locations, due to the lack of technical experts, managers, transportation, or needed facilities. Industrialization failed, and the main result was a sharp unexpected decline in agricultural output, which led to mass famine and millions of deaths. The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1961 being the only years between 1953 and 1983 in which China's economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues: "Enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. ... In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster." Put in charge of rescuing the economy, Deng adopted pragmatic policies that the idealistic Mao disliked. For a while, Mao was in the shadows but returned to center stage and purged Deng and his allies in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
The Cultural Revolution was an upheaval that targeted intellectuals and party leaders from 1966 through 1976. Mao's goal was to purify communism by removing pro-capitalists and traditionalists by imposing Maoist orthodoxy within the Chinese Communist Party. The movement paralyzed China politically and weakened the country economically, culturally, and intellectually for years. Millions of people were accused, humiliated, stripped of power, and either imprisoned, killed, or most often, sent to work as farm laborers. Mao insisted that those he labelled revisionists be removed through violent class struggle. The two most prominent militants were Marshall Lin Biao of the army and Mao's wife Jiang Qing. China's youth responded to Mao's appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist party leadership itself. It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials who were accused of taking a "capitalist road", most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the same period, Mao's personality cult grew to immense proportions. After Mao's death in 1976, the survivors were rehabilitated and many returned to power.
Mao's government was responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims through starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions. Mao has also been praised for transforming China from a semi-colony to a leading world power, with greatly advanced literacy, women's rights, basic healthcare, primary education, and life expectancy.
Cold War
Its leading role in World War II saw the emergence of the industrialized Soviet Union as a superpower. Marxist–Leninist governments modeled on the Soviet Union took power with Soviet assistance in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. A Marxist–Leninist government was also created under Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia; Tito's independent policies led to the Tito–Stalin split and expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, and Titoism was branded deviationist. Albania also became an independent Marxist–Leninist state following the Albanian–Soviet split in 1960, resulting from an ideological fallout between Enver Hoxha, a Stalinist, and the Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev, who enacted a period of de-Stalinization and re-approached diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia in 1976. The Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong, established the People's Republic of China, which would follow its own ideological path of development following the Sino-Soviet split. Communism was seen as a rival of and a threat to Western capitalism for most of the 20th century.
In Western Europe, communist parties were part of several post-war governments, and even when the Cold War forced many of those countries to remove them from government, such as in Italy, they remained part of the liberal-democratic process. There were also many developments in libertarian Marxism, especially during the 1960s with the New Left. By the 1960s and 1970s, many Western communist parties had criticized many of the actions of communist states, distanced from them, and developed a democratic road to socialism, which became known as Eurocommunism. This development was criticized by more orthodox supporters of the Soviet Union as amounting to social democracy.
Since 1957, communists have been frequently voted into power in the Indian state of Kerala.
In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries overthrew Cuba's previous government under the dictator Fulgencio Batista. While the revolutionaries were originally not uniformly communist, after their military victory, the new rebel officials underwent a sort of radicalization alongside their political consolidation, that pushed the new government to eventually become Marxist-Leninist.
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
With the fall of the Warsaw Pact after the Revolutions of 1989, which led to the fall of most of the former Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December 1991. It was a result of the declaration number 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States, although five of the signatories ratified it much later or did not do it at all. On the previous day, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union) resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers, including control of the Cheget, to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. That evening at 7:32, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. Previously, from August to December 1991, all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had seceded from the union. The week before the union's formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, formally establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States, and declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Post-Soviet communism
As of 2026, states controlled by Communist parties under a single-party system include the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Communist parties, or their descendant parties, remain politically important in several other countries. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Fall of Communism, there was a split between those hardline Communists, sometimes referred to in the media as neo-Stalinists, who remained committed to orthodox Marxism–Leninism, and those, such as The Left in Germany, who work within the liberal-democratic process for a democratic road to socialism; other ruling Communist parties became closer to democratic socialist and social democratic parties. Outside Communist states, reformed Communist parties have led or been part of left-leaning government or regional coalitions, including in the former Eastern Bloc. In Nepal, Communists (CPN UML and Nepal Communist Party) were part of the 1st Nepalese Constituent Assembly, which abolished the monarchy in 2008 and turned the country into a federal liberal-democratic republic, and have democratically shared power with other communists, Marxist–Leninists, and Maoists (CPN Maoist), social democrats (Nepali Congress), and others as part of their People's Multiparty Democracy. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has some supporters, but is reformist rather than revolutionary, aiming to lessen the inequalities of Russia's market economy.
In China, the reform and opening up was started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, and since then China has managed to bring down the poverty rate from 53% in the Mao era to just 8% in 2001. After losing Soviet subsidies and support, Vietnam and Cuba have attracted more foreign investment to their countries, with their economies becoming more market-oriented. North Korea, the last Communist country that still practices Soviet-style Communism, is both repressive and isolationist.
Theory
Communist political thought and theory are diverse but share several core elements. The dominant forms of communism are based on Marxism or Leninism but non-Marxist versions of communism also exist, such as anarcho-communism and Christian communism, which remain partly influenced by Marxist theories, such as libertarian Marxism and humanist Marxism in particular. Common elements include being theoretical rather than ideological, identifying political parties not by ideology but by class and economic interest, and identifying with the proletariat. According to communists, the proletariat can avoid mass unemployment only if capitalism is overthrown; in the short run, state-oriented communists favor state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy as a means to defend the proletariat from capitalist pressure. Some communists are distinguished by other Marxists in seeing peasants and smallholders of property as possible allies in their goal of shortening the abolition of capitalism.
For Leninist communism, such goals, including short-term proletarian interests to improve their political and material conditions, can only be achieved through vanguardism, an elitist form of socialism from above that relies on theoretical analysis to identify proletarian interests rather than consulting the proletarians themselves, as is advocated by libertarian communists. When they engage in elections, Leninist communists' main task is that of educating voters in what are deemed their true interests rather than in response to the expression of interest by voters themselves. When they have gained control of the state, Leninist communists' main task was preventing other political parties from deceiving the proletariat, such as by running their own independent candidates. This vanguardist approach comes from their commitments to democratic centralism in which communists can only be cadres, i.e. members of the party who are full-time professional revolutionaries, as was conceived by Vladimir Lenin.
Marxist communism
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand social class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. Marxism considers itself to be the embodiment of scientific socialism but does not model an ideal society based on the design of intellectuals, whereby communism is seen as a state of affairs to be established based on any intelligent design; rather, it is a non-idealist attempt at the understanding of material history and society, whereby communism is the expression of a real movement, with parameters that are derived from actual life.
According to Marxist theory, class conflict arises in capitalist societies due to contradictions between the material interests of the oppressed and exploited proletariat – a class of wage laborers employed to produce goods and services – and the bourgeoisie – the ruling class that owns the means of production and extracts its wealth through appropriation of the surplus product produced by the proletariat in the form of profit. This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive forces against its relations of production, results in a period of short-term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness. In periods of deep crisis, the resistance of the oppressed can culminate in a proletarian revolution which, if victorious, leads to the establishment of the socialist mode of production based on social ownership of the means of production, "To each according to his contribution", and production for use. As the productive forces continued to advance, the communist society, i.e. a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership, follows the maxim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."