Portal:Communism

THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more authoritarian vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a socialist state, followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communism is placed on the left-wing alongside socialism, and communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far-left.

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...)

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The Communist Party of Brazil (Portuguese: Partido Comunista do Brasil, PCdoB) is a communist and Marxist–Leninist political party in Brazil. It has national reach and deep penetration in the trade union and students movements. PCdoB shares the disputed title of "oldest political party in Brazil" with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). The predecessor of both parties was the Brazilian Section of the Communist International, founded on March 25, 1922. The current PCdoB was launched on February 18, 1962, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split. Outlawed after the 1964 coup d'état, PCdoB supported the armed struggle against the regime before its legalization in 1988. Its most famous action in the period was the Araguaia guerrilla (1966–1974). Since 1989, PCdoB has been allied to the Workers' Party (PT) at the federal level, and, as such, it participated in the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and joined the "With the strength of the people" coalition, which elected his successor, Dilma Rousseff.

PCdoB publishes the newspaper Working Class (Classe Operária) as well as the magazine Principles (Princípios), and is a member of the Foro de São Paulo. Its youth wing is the Union of the Socialist Youth (União da Juventude Socialista, UJS), launched in 1984, while its trade union wing is the Central of the Workers of Brazil (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil, CTB), founded in 2007 as a dissidence from the Unified Workers' Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT).

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Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg (Rosalia Luxemburg, Polish: Róża Luksemburg; 5 March 1871, Zamość, Vistula Land, Russia – 15 January 1919, Berlin, Weimar Republic) was a Polish-Jewish-German Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary for the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German SPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1914, after the SPD supported German participation in World War I, she co-founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary Spartakusbund (Spartacist League), that on 1 January 1919 became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In November 1918, during the German Revolution she founded the Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the left wing revolutionaries.

She regarded the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 in Berlin as a mistake, but supported it after it had begun. When the revolt was crushed by the Freikorps (right wing militias defending the Weimar regime and composed of World War I veterans), Luxemburg, Liebknecht and hundreds of their supporters were captured, manhandled and killed. Since their deaths, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht have achieved great symbolic status amongst both social democrats and Marxists.

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News related to communism

22 May 2024 – 2024 Vietnamese presidential election
Vietnam's security minister, General Tô Lâm, is elected President by the National Assembly, two months after the resignation of Võ Văn Thưởng amid the ruling Communist Party's anti-corruption campaign. (DW)
18 May 2024 –
The Communist Party of Vietnam nominates Minister of Public Security Tô Lâm as the next President after Võ Văn Thưởng resigned as President in March due to the party's anti-corruption campaign. (Al Jazeera)
16 May 2024 –
Permanent Member of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee's Secretariat Trương Thị Mai resigns after just over a year in office amid the Communist Party's anti-corruption campaign. (Xinhua)

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It must be said that the attitude of the crooks to us politicals had completely changed. They say that only twenty years ago the crooks used to call us fascists, rob us on prisoner transports and in transit cells, terrorize us in the camps, and so on. But now these same crooks used to volunteer to help me with my sacks of books on convoys and share their smokes and grub with me. They used to ask us to tell them what we were in jail for and what we wanted. They read the text of my sentence with enormous interest, and the only thing they couldn't believe was what we did all this for nothing, and not for money. They were absolutely astonished that people could go to prison just like that, deliberately and not for gain. In Vladimir Prison our relations with them were those of good neighbors: they constantly turned to us for answers to their questions, advice, and even help. We were the ultimate arbiters of all their quarrels, and we would help them to write complaints and explain the laws to them. And, of course, they questioned us endlessly on politics.

In prison even crooks read the newspapers, listen to the radio and-perhaps for the first time in their lives-get to thinking: Why is life such a mess in the Soviet Union? The overwhelming majority of them are violently anti-Soviet, and the word "Communist" is virtually an insult. Because of their lack of literacy and solidarity, they are incapable of sticking up for their rights. The administration takes advantage of their feuds and sets them against one another. Whenever a prison officer wants to break one of them, he does it by transferring him to a cell where the inmates hate his guts. Then it is merely a question of who would kill whom, and whoever did the murder would be sentenced to be shot.

— Vladimir Bukovsky (1942)
To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter , 1978

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