Communism

I INTRODUCTION  Communism, a concept or system of society in which the major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than by individuals. In theory, such societies provide for equal sharing of all work, according to ability, and all benefits, according to need. Some conceptions of communist societies assume that, ultimately, coercive government would be unnecessary and therefore that such a society would be without rulers. Until the ultimate stages are reached, however, communism involves the abolition of private property by a revolutionary movement; responsibility for meeting public needs is then vested in the state.

As a concept of an ideal society, communism is derived from ancient sources, including Plato's Republic and the earliest Christian communes. In the early 19th century, the idea of a communist society was a response of the poor and the dislocated to the beginnings of modern capitalism. At that time communism was the basis for a number of utopian settlements; most communistic experiments, however, eventually failed. Most of these small-scale private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process.

Later the term communism was reserved for the philosophy advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto and the movement they helped create in Central Europe. Since 1917 the term has denoted those who regard the Russian Revolution as a model that all Marxists should follow. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, moreover, the center of gravity of global communism has shifted away from Central and Western Europe; from the late 1940s through the 1980s, communist movements were often linked with Third World strivings for national independence and social change.

II THE WORK OF MARX AND ENGELS  
In their writings, Marx and Engels tried to analyze contemporary society, which they described as capitalistic. They pointed out the discrepancies between ideals and reality in modern society: Rights granted to all had not done away with injustices; constitutional self-government had not abolished mismanagement and corruption; science had provided mastery over nature but not over the fluctuations of the business cycle; and the efficiency of modern production methods had produced slums in the midst of abundance.

They described all human history as the attempt of men and women to develop and apply their potential for creativity for the purpose of controlling the forces of nature so as to improve the human condition. In this ongoing effort to develop its productive forces, humanity has been remarkably successful; history has been the march of progress. Yet in developing productivity, various social institutions have been created that have introduced exploitation, domination, and other evils; the price humanity pays for progress is an unjust society.

Every social system of the past, Marx argued, had been a device by which the rich and powerful few could live by the toil and misery of the powerless many. Each system, therefore, was racked by conflict. Moreover, each method of exploitation had flaws that sooner or later destroyed it, either by slow disintegration or by revolution. Engels and Marx believed that the capitalist system, too, was flawed and therefore bound to destroy itself. They tried to show that the more productive the system became, the more difficult it would be to make it function: The more goods it accumulated, the less use it would have for these goods; the more people it trained, the less it could utilize their talents. Capitalism, in short, would eventually choke on its own wealth.

The collapse of the capitalist economy, it was thought, would culminate in a political revolution in which the masses of the poor would rebel against their oppressors. This proletarian revolution would do away with private ownership of the means of production. Run by and for the people (after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship), the economy would produce, not what was profitable, but what the people needed. Abundance would reign. Inequalities and coercive government would disappear. All this, Marx and Engels expected, would happen in the most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments.

These prophecies have not come true. Capitalism, though sometimes threatened, has not collapsed; shortages, inequalities, and coercive government have persisted in countries that called themselves Communist; and followers of Marx have come to power in nations that lacked the preconditions he and Engels considered essential. The first of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base. Its people, still largely illiterate, had no experience in political participation. In 1917, after a series of halfhearted reform measures and disastrous mismanagement of the war effort (see Russian Revolution), the antiquated mechanism of tsarist rule simply disintegrated and was swept away. It was succeeded, after a lengthy period of political upheaval, by the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxism—later known as the Communist Party—led by Lenin.