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THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis 'common, universal') is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, 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, that the relationship between them is exploitative, and that it can only be resolved through social revolution. The two classes 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. 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 most of the 20th century, a 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 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.

While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the first nominally Communist state led to communism's association 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 Communist states has been described as a battleground between anti anti-communism and 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 Communist states.[page needed][page needed] (Full article...)

Selected article

Cover of the Communist Manifesto’s initial publication in February 1848 in London
The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.

The book contains Marx and Engels' Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism.

Selected biography

Charilaos Florakis
Charilaos Florakis (also Harilaos Florakis; Greek: Χαρίλαος Φλωράκης; 20 July 1914 – 22 May 2005) was a leader of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Florakis was born on 20 July 1914 in the village of Paliozoglopi, located near Agrafa in the Itamos municipality, prefecture of Karditsa, Greece. He joined KKE, in 1941. An ELAS partisan during the resistance to the Nazi occupation in World War II, Florakis was on the losing side of the Greek Civil War that followed the liberation of the country, and subsequently left the country.

On his return to Greece in 1954 he was arrested. During his life he spent 18 years in detention or jail - including being put in internal exile by the Greek colonels in the beginning of the 1967-74 military dictatorship. First elected to parliament in 1974, Florakis led KKE as its general secretary from 1972 until 1989, when, though still fit for the job, he announced his decision to step down from the party's top post and proposed Grigoris Farakos as his successor.

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The very name of Novosti Press Agency is a beautiful example of the newspeak and reminds on either of Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" or "Evtushenko's "Ministry of Tenderness". The fact is, that there is no news as they are erroneously and non-marxistlike understood in the West-as reports about the current events. This sort of news could easily contradict the prophesies of the founders of Marxism-Leninism, and thus give a wrong and totally unscientific picture of reality.

Neihter is there any "press" in Novosti Press Agency, at least in the meaning of the word accepted in the West and related to journalistic profession. But it does not mean that the APN has no press. "Press is the most potent weapon of the Party", said the Friend and Tcacher of all the journalists Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin-and he was right. In the APN the word press is understood mainly as a technical term-printing press, or as an abstract term in a sentence: "The Soviet Press is the most truthfull press in the world", a slogan that decorates walls of many editorial offices in the USSR.

— Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993)
No "Novosti" is Good News , 1985

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