Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist 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 the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)
The Communist Party of Peru (Spanish: Partido Comunista del Perú), more commonly known as the Shining Path (Spanish: Sendero Luminoso), is a communist militant group in Peru. When it first launched the internal conflict in Peru in 1980, its stated goal was to replace the bourgeois democracy with "New Democracy". The Shining Path believed that by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, inducing cultural revolution, and eventually sparking world revolution, they could arrive at pure communism. Their representatives said that existing socialist countries were revisionist, and they claimed to be the vanguard of the world communist movement. The Shining Path's ideology and tactics have been influential among other Maoist insurgent groups, notably the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations.
The Shining Path is classified by the Peruvian government, the U.S., the European Union, and Canada as a terrorist organization. Since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992, the Shining Path has declined in activity.
H. N. Goshal (Burmese: သခင်ဘတင်, IPA:[θəkʰɪ̀ɴba̰tɪ̀ɴ]; also known as Thakin Ba Tin, d. 1967) was a communist politician and trade union leader in Burma, of Bengali origin. Goshal was one of the foremost leaders of the Communist Party of Burma and the most prominent theoretician of the party for several years. During the height of the Cultural Revolution (which had repercussions in the Communist Party of Burma) Goshal was marginalized and killed in an inner-party purge.
Goshal graduated from Rangoon University. In August 1939, Goshal took part in the founding of the Communist Party of Burma. He was a member of the Bengali cell of the party. During the Japanese occupation, Goshal fled to India. During the early days of the Communist Party of Burma, Goshal played an important role as a liaison between the Burmese party and the Communist Party of India (through its Bengal Provincial Committee). After the death of Thakin Ba Hein, Goshal became the head of the All Burma Trade Union Congress. Goshal's activities were mainly concentrated to Rangoon, organizing the largely Indian working class there.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
Everyone is welcome to participate in WikiProject Socialism, where editors collaborate to improve all aspects related to socialism on Wikipedia.
Selected quote
“
Beneath Comrade Trotsky’s effective formulas we can here easily distinguish the feelings inevitably involved by his original theory: On the one hand despair, pessimism, disbelief, and on the other hand exaggerated hopes in the methods of supreme administration (a term of Lenin’s), in the competent subjection of economic difficulties from above.
The last discussion is still fresh in our memories. It gave the Party a graphic survey of the totality of Comrade Trotsky’s errors, as dealt with above. But it also showed with special clearness another error, another feature of Trotskyism, and one far from being new. This is the attempt to undermine and weaken the main framework of the dictatorship, the Party. The same object was aimed at by the discrediting of the “cadres” of the Party, by the resurrected Menshevist conception of the Party as a collection of “groups and currents,” and the essentially liquidatory undermining of the authority of the leading institutions (“they are leading the country to destruction”). And has it not been under Comrade Trotsky’s banner that the idea of greater freedom from Party influence for extra-Party organizations has flourished? Has not all this, taken together, led to a weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and has it not all been based upon an under-estimation of the conditions under which we—in an agrarian country—have to realise the dictatorship? Is it not a petty bourgeois deviation?
So long as the Party is perfectly sound and everything goes well, Comrade Trotsky quietly performs every task which falls to him: but as soon as the Party encounters any obstacle, as soon as it has to adjust its rudder, then Comrade Trotsky at once springs forward in the role of saviour and teacher of the Party, but invariably points out the wrong way, since he has not absorbed the principles of Bolshevism.
.JPG)
