History of communism
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The History of Communism as a political system began in the middle of the 19th century, as part of a wave of social change in the post-Enlightenment and emerging Industrial Era of the Old World.
The term "Communism" has come to refer to both social movements which promoted the unification of the proletariat (i.e. working class majority) against existing aristocratic governments, as well as various types of "Communist" revolutions, organized around reformist ideologies which had populist appeal to the working majority class. The revolutionary cause is typically a dislike for existing governments (e.g. monarchies, puppet regimes of foreign powers), as they are perceived as being antiquated, corrupt, authoritarian, unresponsive, or else lacking direction toward modernisation in the public interest.
As a political doctrine and ideology, Communism is an implementation of theories proclaimed by Karl Marx — theories which were rooted in a novel concept of a utopian society, and inspired by the success of the American Revolution. Marx had said that the working classes would take over all aspects of society and would eliminate all other social classes, thereby creating a classless society — which he described as the "dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Unlike in the New World, where European expansion was unhindered by relatively primitive native peoples, the concept of social change in the established aristocratic Old World naturally implied revolution as an intrinsic concept — one which according to then-existing governments constituted treason and conspiracy. Due to the social chaos caused by hostile revolutions, Communist states have often come under the control of demagogic upstarts and authoritarian leaders. Hence, in the "Western bloc", "Communism" became largely synonymous with lofty idealism — which in its quest to overturn all social stratification, placed too many restrictions on civil freedom, and as a result brought about the rise of totalitarianism.
Early Communism
The idea of a classless, stateless society based on communal ownership of property and wealth, stretches far back in Western thought long before The Communist Manifesto. Some have traced communist ideas back to ancient times, such as in Plato's The Republic; or (perhaps with more justification) to the early Christian Church, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (see Christian communism). Other attempts to establish communistic societies were made by the Essenes and by the Judean desert sect. The medieval roman catholic church tried to end war by promoting communes (see Medieval commune#Medieval christianity).In the 16th century, the English writer St. Thomas More, in his treatise Utopia, portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose leaders administered it through the application of reason.
Several groupings in the English Civil War, but especially the Diggers (or True Levellers) espoused clear communistic, but agrarian ideals. (Cromwell and the Grandees' attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile – see Bernstein's classic book Cromwell and Communism).
Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Enlightenment era of the 18th century, through such thinkers as the deeply religious Jean Jacques Rousseau. Raised a calvinist, Rousseau was influenced by the jansenist movement within the roman catholic church. The jansenist movement originated from the most orthodox roman catholic bishops, who tried to reform the roman catholic church in the 17th century, to stop secularization and protestantism. One of the main jansenist aims was democratizing, to stop the aristocratic corruption at the top of the church hierarchy.1 "Utopian socialist" writers such as Robert Owen are also sometimes regarded as communists.
Maximilien Robespierre and his reign of terror, aimed at exterminating the nobility and conservatives was greatly admired among communists. Robespierre was in his turn a great admirer of Rousseau.1 However, Robespierre imposed the death penalty on those who supported rural communism.2
The Shakers of the 18th century praticed a communal way of living (a sort of religious communism).
Some believe that early communist-like utopias also existed outside of Europe, in Native American society, and other pre-Colonialism societies in the Western Hemisphere. Almost every member of a tribe had his or her own contribution to society, and land and natural resources would often be shared peacefully among the tribe. Some such tribes in North America and South America still existed well into the twentieth century.
Karl Marx saw communism as the original state of mankind from which it arose, through classical society, and then feudalism, to its current state of capitalism. He proposed that the next step in social evolution would be a return to communism, but at a higher level than when mankind had originally practiced primitive communism.
In its contemporary form, the ideology of communism grew out of the workers' movement of 19th century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for creating a class of poor, urban factory workers who toiled under harsh conditions, and for widening the gulf between rich and poor.
Marxism-Leninism is different to the form of Communism in China, known as Maoism, because it involved the rise of the urban proletariat, whereas Chairman Mao saw the peasant class as the grounds for revolution.
Marx, Engels, and The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto, also known as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published on February 21, 1848 is one of the world's most historically influential political tracts. Commissioned by the Communist League and written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it laid out the League's purposes and program. The Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism and, eventually, to bring about a classless society.
The introduction begins with a call to arms:
- A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
- Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
It is this concept of the transition from socialism to communism which many critics of the Manifesto, particularly during and after the Soviet era, have alighted upon. Anarchists, liberals, and conservatives all asked how an organization such as the revolutionary state could ever (as Marx put it elsewhere) "wither away". Both traditional understandings of the attraction of political power and more recent theories of organizational behavior suggest instead that a group given political power will tend to preserve its privilege rather than to permit it to wither away -- even if that privilege is given in the name of revolution and of the establishment of equality.
- When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
- The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
- Working men of all countries, unite!
The October Revolution
The October Revolution of 1917 took place in Russia. Led by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, it was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. From the outset, the new government faced counter-revolutionaries, mainly from Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Lenin and his party began to centralise control of Russia, but Lenin always assured the people that it was necessary for the transition from a capitalist economy to communism. Lenin anticipated that after the October Revolution, other countries in Europe would have similar revolutions, but the revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Finland were crushed. The governance of Lenin, during the last years of his life, occurred in the midst of civil war. The politice practice of the communists during this period has become known as War Communism. Before his death in 1924, Lenin wrote a last testament, with advice for his successor. Lenin wanted a co-operative leadership, but Stalin, who Lenin described as "too rude", gradually assumed control and centralised political power around his own persona.
Post-war era
After World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were able to gain power. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented. Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused debate about whether or not these nations were led by "true Marxists". Critics speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology was to blame for the nations' problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to blame the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had developed.The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980, seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued Leninist governments (which China remains) since the death of Lenin. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's NEP of the 1920's was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt, but especially after China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to be the case.
The Stalin Era
At the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in December 1927, Stalin expelled Trotsky and his supporters from the party and then moved against the right by abandoning Lenin's New Economic Policy which had been championed by Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov. Warning delegates of an impending capitalist encirclement, he stressed that survival and development could only occur by the rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin remarked that the Soviet Union was "fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries" (the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.), and must narrow "this distance in ten years." In a perhaps eerie foreboding of World War II, Stalin declared, "Either we do it or we shall be crushed."
To oversee the transformation of the Soviet Union, the party, under Stalin, established Gosplan (the State General Planning Commission) to guide the economy towards industrialization. In April 1929, Gosplan released a 1,700 page report that became the basis the first Five-Year Plan for National Economic Construction, or Piatiletka, calling for the doubling of Soviet capital stock between 1928 and 1933.1 The Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decisions and the stress on rapid heavy industrialization (see Economy of the Soviet Union). It began transforming a largely agrarian nation into an industrial superpower, and laid the foundations for future exponential economic growth.
The economic system put forward by the Plan entailed a complicated series of arrangements (see Overview of the Soviet economic planning process). The first Five-Year plan focused on increasing output of coal, iron, and other vital resources. At a high human cost, this process forged a capital base for industrial development more rapidly than any country in history. From 1928 to 1932, pig iron output rose from 3.3 to 10 million tons per year, Coal production from 35.4 to 75 million tons, and output of iron ore from 5.7 to 19 million tons. Many industrial complexes such as Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Moscow and Gorky automobile plants, the Urals and Kramatorsk heavy machinery plants, and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk tractor plants had been built or were under construction.
While marking a tremendous leap in industrial capacity, the Plan was harsh on industrial workers; quotas required that miners work for 16 to 18 hours a day, and failure to fulfill quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous, and by some estimates, 127,000 workers died between 1928 and 1932. Due to the allocation of resources for industry along with decreasing productivity since collectivization, a famine occurred. The use of forced labor must also not be overlooked. In the construction of the industrial complexes, inmates of labor camps were used as expendable resources. From 1921 until 1954 it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million to Gulag, and 0.7 million to expatriation. Some other estimates are much higher.
In November 1928 the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivization. This marked the end of the NEP, which had allowed peasants to sell surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified and peasants were forced to give up their private plots of land, to work for collective farms, and to sell their produce to the state for a low price set by the state. Given the goals of the First Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies for heavy-industrialization.
By 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. In many cases peasants bitterly opposed this process and slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms. Kulaks, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Siberia (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak." The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant executions, and deportation to forced labor camps.
Collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940. The upheaval was particularly severe in Ukraine and the adjoining Volga regions,which has led some to conclude that there was a deliberate policy of starving the Ukrainians. The number of people who died in the famines is estimated at between three and to ten million in Ukraine alone. The total number of casualties is bitterly disputed to this day. In 1975, Abramov and Kocharli estimated that 265,800 kulak families were sent to the Gulag in 1930. In 1979, Roy Medvedev used Abramov's and Kocharli's estimate to calculate that 2.5 million peasants were exiled between 1930 and 1931, but he suspected that he underestimated the total number.
Additionally, the Stalin era saw an attack on religion. Stalin ordered Orthodox Icons to be replaced by pictures of Lenin, and many churches were torn down or converted to other uses. Stalin expected the people of the USSR to cast away Christianity and embrace the Communist Party.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo, was elected General-Secretary in March 1985. In an attempt to revitalize the Communist Party and the economy, Gorbachev introduced reforms such as glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring"). Gorbachev believed that democratization would remove corrupt and incompetent apparatchiks from the system, but instead, many Communist Party opponents rose to prominence. At the same time, Gorbachev's liberalization of the media allowed frustration and disillusionment with the system to surface after years of repression.On February 7, 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly of power. The USSR's constituent republics began to assert their national sovereignty, and started a "war of laws" with the central government; they repudiated all-union legislation where it conflicted with local laws, asserted control over their economies and refused to pay taxes to the central government. This caused economic dislocation, and the economy declined further.
Gorbachev tried to re-assert control, notably in the Baltic Republics, but the authority of the central government had been undermined. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania announced that it was pulling out of the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union initiated an economic blockade of Lithuania and kept troops there "to secure the rights of ethnic Russians." In January 1991, clashes between Soviet troops and Lithuanian civilians left 20 dead, weakening the Soviet Union's legitimacy, internationally and domestically. On March 30, 1990, the Estonian supreme council declared Soviet power in Estonia since 1940 to have been illegal, and started to reestablish Estonia as an independent state.
On March 17, 1991, in an all-Union referendum 78% of voters voted to retain the Soviet Union in a reformed form, but the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova boycotted the referendum. In each of the other 9 republics, most of the voters supported the retention of the Soviet Union.
In June 1991, elections were held for the post of president of the Russian SFSR. Boris Yeltsin, an outspoken critic of Gorbachev, won 57% percent of the vote, defeating Gorbachev's preferred candidate, former Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, who won 16%.
Faced with growing republic separatism, Gorbachev tried to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. On August 20, 1991, the republics were to sign a new union treaty, making them independent republics in a federation with a common president, foreign policy and military. This treaty was supported by the Central Asian republics, who needed the economic power and markets of the Soviet Union to prosper. However, the more radical reformists were convinced that a rapid transition to a market economy was required and were happy to contemplate the disintegration of the USSR if that was required to achieve their aims. In contrast to the reformers' lukewarm approach to the treaty, the conservatives, still strong within the CPSU and military establishment, opposed anything which might weaken the Soviet state.
On August 19, 1991, Gorbachev's vice president Gennadi Yanayev, prime minister Valentin Pavlov, defense minister Dmitriy Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, and other senior officials acted to prevent the signing of the union treaty by forming the "State Committee on the State Emergency." (see Soviet coup attempt of 1991) The "Committee" put Gorbachev (vacationing in the Crimea) under house arrest and attempted to restore the union state. The coup leaders issued an emergency decree suspending political activity and banning most newspapers. While the coup organizers expected popular support, public sympathy in Moscow was largely against them. Thousands of people came out to defend the "White House," then the symbolic seat of Russian sovereignty. The organizers tried but failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, who rallied mass opposition to the coup. After three days, on August 21, the coup collapsed, the organizers were detained, and Gorbachev returned as president of the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev's powers were compromised, and neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands. Through the fall of 1991, the Russian government took over the union government, ministry by ministry. In November 1991, Yeltsin issued a decree banning the CPSU throughout the Russian republic.
After the coup, the Soviet republics accelerated their process towards independence. On September 6, 1991, the Soviet government recognized the independence of the three Baltic states. In December 1, 1991, Ukraine declared its independence after a popular referendum in which 90% of voters opted for independence.
On December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian republics met in Belavezhskaya Pushcha to declare that the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Gorbachev became president without a country. On December 25, 1991, he resigned as president and turned the powers of his office over to Yeltsin. The next day, the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself and repealed the 1922 declaration that had officially established the USSR. By the end of the year, all official Soviet institutions had ceased operations, ending the world's largest and most influential Communist regime.
The four main elements of the Soviet system were the hierarchy of soviets, ethnic federalism, state socialism, and Communist Party dominance. Gorbachev's program of perestroika had unanticipated effects that brought that system down. Gorbachev built a coalition of political leaders supportive of reform and created new arenas and bases of power. He implemented these measures because of economic problems and political inertia that threatened to put the Soviet Union into a state of long-term stagnation. But, by using structural reforms to widen opportunities for popular movements in the union republics to gain influence, Gorbachev also made it possible for nationalist, orthodox communist, and populist forces to oppose his attempts to liberalize and revitalize Soviet socialism. Although some of the new movements aspired to replace the Soviet system with a liberal democratic one, others demanded independence for the republics. Still others insisted on the restoration of the old Soviet ways. Ultimately, Gorbachev could not forge a compromise among these forces.
Communism Today
Meanwhile, the communist movement in the capitalist world is slowly emerging from the deep crisis of the 1990s and is drawing increasing support. In Moldova, the local communist party won the 2001 and 2005 parliamentary elections, although this self-proclaimed communist party has not particularly done anything radically different from the capitalist government that preceded it. India's Communist Party is a key coalition partner of the ruling Congress Party and retains its control over the state of West Bengal, and there are many other significant communist parties in that country as well. In Ukraine and Russia, the communists came second in the 2002 and 2003 elections, respectively. In the Czech Republic, the Communist Party came third in the 2002 elections, and so did the Communist Party of Portugal in 2005. In Venezuela, the Communist Party is closely aligned with the government under Hugo Chávez.
Communist guerrillas are actively fighting the governments of Nepal, Philippines, Colombia and Peru. As of 2006, the Maoist rebels in Nepal have ended their civil war, after the removal of King Gyanendra from power. The rebels are to be integrated within the new Nepalese government. There is also quite a strong communist opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran led by Worker-Communist Party of Iran and its offshoot, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran-Hekmatist. Both groups claim that they continue the path of Mansoor Hekmat, famous Iranian communist and founder of the worker-communist parties of Iran and Iraq. Despite being sidelined after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, these parties are still trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
See also
Notes
- Daniel Roche, La France des Lumières (Paris 1993).
- J.M. Roberts. The Penguin History of Europe
References
- Michael Lynch, Reaction and Revolution: Russia 1894-1924, Hodder Murray, 2005, ISBN 0340885890
- Robert Harvey, A Short History of Communism, Thomas Dunne Books, 2004, ISBN 0312329091
- Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, ISBN 0812968646
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