Communism can mean one of two things: a theoretical ideal found in the writings of Marx, or the actual governing principles of the self-described communist states in the modern world. When used, for example, in the communist parties of France, Italy, Britain, etc., it has typically referred to a combination of Marxist ideals and support for the communist governments. Clearly the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1991, hitherto the leading party, had severe repercussions on communist parties elsewhere. As far as Marxist theory goes, communism is a slightly shadowy state in which private property has been abolished, equality reigns, and the state has ‘withered away’ because all men live in harmony and co-operation, without classes or any social divisions requiring the exercise of authority. Most post-Marxist writers, and especially the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, have believed that there had to be an intermediary phase between the overthrow of capitalism and the full realization of communism. This phase is variously described, often as socialism, but also as the period in which it will be necessary to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat or where the communist party will have to act as the vanguard of the proletariat. This idea was strengthened by the Bolsheviks in 1917 largely because they could not pretend that their revolution, unlike the earlier one of that year, was a popular revolution at all. Because it was so clearly a coup d’état or putsch, elements in Marxism which seemed to legitimize the rule of the mass by the enlightened few were highlighted. This intermediate phase is, roughly speaking, where the leaders of the Soviet Union, before Gorbachev, and its then Eastern European allies would have located themselves.
When used as a description of the former societies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or, adding yet another complexity, the continuing ones of China and its Asian communist allies, the term indicates a set of political practices that may not, necessarily, have very much to do with the Marxist theory of communism. Communism in this second sense is a system where there is little or no private ownership of major property, this being replaced with state-owned and -run enterprises, and where the communist party rules, non-democratically, both in its own right and through its control, de facto, of the official state administration. Values of equality and social co-operation are stressed, as opposed to individual self-seeking or betterment.
The economy will be entirely a planned one, with no serious element of competition, although, especially in agriculture, this is often relaxed in minor ways. A characteristic feature of communism as we have seen it develop is an inequality based on position in the ruling party, but a genuine equality, and a very thorough social welfare system, throughout the mass of the population.
Other aspects of a communist state are incidentals, more or less present in different societies. Thus the communist attitude to religion, something scorned by Marxist theory, has varied from hostility in the Soviet Union to a major role for Roman Catholicism in Poland, and the extent of industrial democracy varied from Yugoslavia’s famous experiments to a minimum in East Germany. From the mid-1950s there was an increasingly bitter conflict between the Eastern European and the Chinese brands of communism, first with the development of Mao Zedong’s communist views. The reason for this, apart from purely nationalistic territorial conflicts, was that the Chinese communists were, originally, much less prepared to use the techniques, and the associated professional hierarchies, of modern Western industrial production. So while, to take one example, the Soviet Union continued to make steel in huge industrial plants, giving great authority to professional engineers and planning the overall production of steel in a centralized and authoritative way (see command economies), the Chinese encouraged all their communes to build their own small-scale steel plants, and treated professional engineers as undemocratic examples of class status. The Soviet Union remained quite strongly hierarchical, even if the criteria for hierarchy differed from the societies of capitalism, being based on party or professional rank rather than inherited wealth, but the Chinese communists, at least under Mao, worked for a much more total equality. During the cultural revolution this rose to a height in which anyone occupying a professional or technocratic job was in danger of being sent to work as a peasant, or, if less fortunate, for thought reform. The only generalizations possible about communism as an actual political and social system are that communist regimes are totally controlled by an undemocratic party, abolish most inequalities arising from economic differences, for most citizens, and practise a high degree of economic planning with an extensive welfare state but very little freedom of expression.
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a judgement on the failure of one institutional attempt to realize an ideal that retains great emotional, and respectable, theoretical power. The notion that it is possible and desirable for people to live in a non-competitive, non-authoritarian, property-less state of brotherhood and equality has no more been disproved by events than has any other ideal. Most Western admirers of Soviet communism have been cut off from their own Marxist colleagues since the obvious distortion of these ideals by Stalin: from the 1940s, at the latest, Western Marxists regarded communist regimes as examples of state capitalism, not of communism.
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