Tag: communists

Mainly attributed to the followers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' movement in the mid-19th century, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism— a higher and more advanced form. Russia's Vladimir Lenin asserted that socialism corresponds to Marx’s first phase of communist society and communism proper to the second. Lenin and the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party reinforced this distinction in 1918, the year after they seized power in Russia, by taking the name All-Russian Communist Party. Since then, communism has been largely, if not exclusively, identified with the form of political and economic organization developed in the Soviet Union and adopted subsequently in the People’s Republic of China and other countries ruled by communist parties. For much of the 20th century, in fact, about one-third of the world’s population lived under communist regimes. These regimes were characterized by the rule of a single party that tolerated no opposition and little dissent. Meanwhile, North Korea, the last bastion of old Soviet-style communism, is an isolated and repressive regime. Long deprived of Soviet sponsorship and subsidies, Cuba and Vietnam have been reaching out diplomatically and seeking foreign investment in their increasingly market-oriented economies, but politically both remain single-party communist states. Whether anyone will lead a new movement to build a communist society on Marxist lines remains to be seen.