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...)
Outside the PRC, Maoism was a term, used from the 1960s onwards, usually in a hostile sense, to describe parties or individuals who supported Mao Zedong and his form of Communism, as opposed to the form practised in the Soviet Union, which these groups denounced as "revisionist." These groups usually rejected the term Maoism, preferring to call themselves Marxist-Leninists. Since the death of Mao and the reforms of Deng, most of these parties have disappeared, but various small Communist groups in a number of countries continue to advance Maoist ideas.
Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal, who used the name Álvaro Cunhal (Portuguese pronunciation:[ˈaɫvɐɾukuˈɲaɫ]; Sé Nova, Coimbra, 10 November 1913 – Lisbon, 13 June 2005), was a Portuguese politician. He was one of the major opponents of the dictatorial regime of Estado Novo. He served as secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) from 1961 to 1992. He was one of the most pro-Soviet of all western Europe communist leaders, often supporting Soviet Union world policies, including the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Cunhal was born in Coimbra, the third child of Avelino Henriques da Costa Cunhal (Seia, Seia, 28 October 1887 Coimbra, Sé Nova, 19 December 1966) and wife (m. Coimbra, Sé Nova, 22 August 1908) Mercedes Simões Ferreira Barreirinhas (Coimbra, Sé Nova, 5 May 1888 – Lisbon, 12 September 1971). His father was a lawyer in Coimbra and Seia, and later on in Lisbon, and came from a family of rural bourgeoisie, related to a rich and more aristocratic family, the Cunhal Patrício. His mother was a devout Catholic who wished her son had also become one. He also studied Law at the University of Lisbon, where he joined the PCP, then an illegal organization, in 1931. The deaths of his younger sister Maria Mansueta Barrerinhas Cunhal (Coimbra – Seia, 13 January 1921) and of his older brother António José Barreirinhas Cunhal (Coimbra, 1910 – Lisbon, 1932) struck the grief of both his parents and brothers, but specially of his mother and Álvaro, of whom they had always been close. He visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1935 to attend the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. He joined the Central Committee of the PCP in 1936 at the age of 24. His first arrest occurred in 1937.
...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.
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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.
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