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 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.

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Mao's official portrait at Tiananmen gate
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung, (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was the chairman of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China from 1943 and the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1945 until his death. Under his leadership, the CCP became the ruling party of mainland China as the result of its victory in the Chinese Civil War. On 1 October 1949, Mao declared the formation of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square.

Mao developed a brand of Sinified Marxism-Leninism communism known as Maoism, paralleling the political ideology known as Stalinism. While in power, he started a series of experiments aimed at speeding up China's economic development known as the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward sought to rely on labour instead of capital to help agriculture and industries succeed. Unfortunately, as a result of the Great Leap Forward, at least 20 million people starved to death. He forged, and later split, an alliance with the Soviet Union and launched the Cultural Revolution, with its stated goal of purging Chinese society of bourgeoisie elements and enforcing socialism.

Mao is widely credited for creating a mostly unified China free of foreign domination for the first time since the First and Second Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Mao has also been criticized for his inefficient response to the famine of 1958–1961 and the violence of the Cultural Revolution.

Mao Zedong is commonly referred to as Chairman Mao (毛主席). At the height of his personality cult, Mao was commonly known in China as the "Four Greats": "Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, Great Helmsman".

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Photo credit: Lilian Wagdy

News related to communism

22 May 2024 – 2024 Vietnamese presidential election
Security Minister 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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Soviet newsstands do not sell foreign anti-Communist papers, and it is not even possible to buy every issue of the Communist periodicals. Even informative periodicals such as America are in very short supply. They are on sale only in a very small number of kiosks, and are immediately snapped up by eager buyers, generally with a "makeweight" of non-saleable printed matter.

Any person wishing to emigrate from the Soviet Union must have a formal invitation from a close relative. For many people this is an insoluble problem, e.g. for 300,000 Germans who wish to travel to the German Federal Republic (the emigration quota for Germans is 5,000 a year, which means that one's plans would have to cover a sixty-year period!). This is an enormous tragedy. The position of persons who wish to be reunited with relatives in non-Socialist countries is particularly tragic. They have no one to plead their case, and on such occasions the arbitrary behavior of the authorities knows no bounds.

Freedom to travel, freedom to choose where one wishes to work and live, these are still violated in the case of millions of kolkhoz workers, and in the case of hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars, who thirty years ago were cruelly and brutally deported from the Crimea and who to this day have been denied the right to return to the land of their fathers.

— Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989)
Peace, Progress, Human Rights , 1975

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