Communism connotes any societal arrangement based on communal ownership, production, consumption, self-government, perhaps even communal sexual mating. The term refers both to such societies and practices and to any theory advocating them. Examples of the former can be found in religious orders throughout history and in radical communities, from the sixteenth-century Anabaptists to the contemporary ‘counterculture’; and the most famous example of advocacy of communism may well be the regime proposed for the guardian caste in Plato’s Republic.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the most radical schools of the growing socialist movement, including that of Marx and Engels, called themselves communists in order to dissociate themselves from other, allegedly less consistent, socialist groups. Hence when reference is made to that period, communism often is synonymous with the system of ideas developed by Engels and Marx, even though they often used the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. Communism in this sense connotes the sum-total of Marxist doctrines; hence it is the Marxist critique of capitalism and liberal theory and the project for the proletarian revolution, though at times it connotes specifically the ultimate goal of that revolution—the society visualized as emerging out of it, which is dimly foreseen as a society without property, without classes or a division of labour, without institutions of coercion and domination. The precise features of this society are not delineated in the writings of Marx and Engels, and among Marxists there are controversies about the degree of residual alienation and oppression (if any) that one ought to expect in the communist society of the future. Some of the hints Marx and Engels themselves gave come from their notion of a primitive communism allegedly prevailing among the savage early ancestors of the human race.
Among the earliest followers of Engels and Marx, the term fell into disuse; most Marxists around the turn of the century called themselves Social-Democrats. The term was revived after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by V.I.Lenin, who renamed his faction of the Russian Marxist movement the Communist Party and compelled all those parties who wished to join the newly-created Third (or Communist) International to adopt the same designation, so as to dissociate themselves from the Social-Democratic parties. As a consequence, communism since then connotes that interpretation of Marxism which considers the ideas and actions of Lenin and his Bolshevik faction to be the only correct interpretation of Marxism, and the sum-total of parties that subscribe to this interpretation.
Leninism is characterized by the insistence that meaningful social change can come only through revolution, while reforms threaten to corrupt the oppressed. Further, it implies the application of Marxism to countries where capitalism is underdeveloped, hence the development of flexible political strategies, including the mobilization of peasants and ethnic minorities for revolution. Foremost, it insists on the need for a ‘vanguard party’ of revolutionaries-by-profession to whom correct knowledge of the laws of history and politics (‘consciousness’) is attributed. Within the party and its numerous auxiliary organizations designed to mobilize the working class and its presumed allies, the vanguard is expected to ensure the prevalence of enlightened consciousness over blind passion by a combination of mass initiative and bureaucratic control that Lenin called ‘democratic centralism’. Finally, Leninism implies the accumulated experience of the Russian Communist Party in governing their country. Communism thus connotes the theory and practice of rule by communist parties.
Although the leaders of ruling communist parties have generally refrained from claiming that the systems they were ruling were communist, it has become customary in the western world to refer to them as communist systems. Communism thus refers to any society or group of societies governed by communist parties.
The mature form of communist rule was developed in the USSR under the rule of J.V.Stalin. Hence communism since the 1930s has become synonymous with Stalinism or Neo-Stalinism. This is a system in which the communist party proclaims itself the enlightened leadership and claims authority to speak for the entire nation. It enforces this claim through control over all organizations and associations, all forms of communication, education, and entertainment, individual appointments and careers. The chief aim of these systems is rapid economic growth through crash programmes of industrialization, carried out through a centralized command economy. Communism in its Stalinist form thus is a species of entrepreneurship.
Contemporary communist societies thus bear no resemblance to the vision of communism sketched by Marx and Engels or even to that provided by Lenin in his unfinished work, The State and Revolution. Yet the memory of that vision lingers and has repeatedly led to attempts within communist parties to define alternatives to Leninist and Stalinist theories and practices. Contemporary communism therefore is not one single orthodoxy, but an ever growing cluster of orthodoxies and heresies, all of them backing up their arguments by reference to Engels and Marx, yet fiercely contending with each other.
Twentieth-century communism began as a dream to create an ideal society and an empowered human being. It turned into a clumsy crash programme of anti-capitalist capital accumulation, of westernization despite the west. That project has now collapsed in the European part of the communist world; the command economies have yielded to various modes of privatization and the market, doctrinal orthodoxy and the leadership claims of communist parties have been replaced by a multiplicity of parties and ideologies. Ethnic hatreds long tabooed and suppressed have erupted into the open, tearing empires and states apart in bloody conflict. The agony of this revolutionary process has led many citizens of the formerly communist countries to look back to the rule of the communist parties with nostalgia, while for others everything connected with communism has been thoroughly and irreversibly discredited. General opinion in the ‘west’ considers communism to be dead; but that may be premature.
Alfred G.Meyer
University of Michigan
Further reading
Claudin, F. (1975) The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, London.
Daniels, R.V. (ed.) (1965) Marxism and Communism: Essential Readings, New York.
(1993) The End of the Communist Revolution, London and New York.
Kolakowski, L. (1978) Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols, Oxford.
Meyer, A.G. (1984) Communism, 4th edn, New York.
Rosenberg, A. (1967) A History of Bolshevism, New York.
