Communism
Gale Encyclopedia of American Law , 2010
A system of social organization in which goods are held in common.
COMMUNISM in
the United States is something of an anomaly. The basic principles of communism
are, by design, at odds with the free enterprise foundation of U.S. capitalism. The freedom of
individuals to privately own property, start a business, and own the means of production is a
basic tenet of U.S. government, and communism opposes this arrangement. However, there
have been, are, and probably always will be communists in the United States.
As early as the fourth century B.C., Plato addressed the problems surrounding private ownership
of property in the Republic. Some early Christians supported communal principles, as did the
German Anabaptists during the sixteenth-century religious Reformation in Europe.
The concept of common ownership of goods gained a measure of support in France during the
nineteenth century. Shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, François-Noël (“Gracchus”)
Babeuf was arrested and executed for plotting the violent overthrow of the new French
government by revolutionary communists. Etienne Cabet inspired many social explorers with
his Voyage en Icarie (1840), which promoted peaceful, idealized communities. Cabet is often
credited with the spate of communal settlements that appeared in
mid-nineteenth-century North America. Louis-Auguste Blanqui offered a more strident version
ofcommunism by urging French workers during the 1830s to organize insurrections and
establish a dictatorship for the purpose of reorganizing the government.
Communism received, however, its first comprehensive intellectual foundation in 1848, when
Germansexternal text/xml point CX1337702826 ancestor::gift-doc:document KARL MARX and Friedrich Engels
published The Communist Manifesto. As technology increased and industry expanded in
nineteenth-century Europe and America, it became clear that the external text/xml point CX1337701955
ancestor::gift-doc:document GENERAL WELFARE of laborers was not improving. Although the new
democratic governments gave new freedoms to workers, or “the proletariat,” the capitalism that
came with democracy had created different means of external text/xml point CX1337703169 ancestor::giftdoc:document OPPRESSION . By drawing on existing theories of materialism, labor, and historical
evolution, Marx and Engels were able to identify the reasons why, despite periodic drastic
changes in government, common laborers had been doomed to abject poverty throughout
recorded history.
In the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that human history
was best understood as a continuing struggle between a small exploiting class (the owners
of the means of production) and a larger exploited class (laborers in factories and mills who
worked for often starvation wages). At any point in time, the exploiting class controlled the
means of production and profited by employing the labor of the masses. In the capitalism that
developed alongside democracy, Marx and Engels saw a progressive concentration of the
powers of production placed in the hands of a privileged few. Although society was producing
more goods and services, the general welfare of the middle class, they believed, was declining.
According to Marx and Engels, this disparity or internal contradiction in capitalistic societies
predicted capitalism’s doom. Over time, as the anticipated numbers of the middle class,
or “bourgeoisie,” began to decrease, the conflicts between laborers and capitalists would
sharpen, and social revolution was inevitable. At the end of The Communist Manifesto, Marx
and Engels wrote that the transfer of power from the few to the many could only take place
by force. Marx later retreated from this position and wrote that it was possible for this radical
change to take place peacefully.
The social revolution originally envisioned by Marx and Engels would begin with a proletariat
dictatorship. Once in possession of the means of production, the dictatorship would devise the
means for society to achieve the communal ownership of wealth. Once the transitional period
had stabilized the state, the purest form of communism would take shape. Communism in its
purest form would be a classless societal system in which property and wealth were distributed
equally and without the need for a coercive government. This last stage of Marxian communism
has as of the early 2000s never been realized in any government.
Russia
In October 1917, external text/xml point CX1337702652 ancestor::gift-doc:document VLADIMIR LENIN and Leon
Trotsky led the Bolshevik party in a bloody revolution against the Russian monarch, Czar
Nicholas II. Lenin relied on violence and persistent aggression during his time as a Russian
leader. Although he professed to being in the process of modernizing Marxist theory, Lenin
stalled Marx’s communism at its transitional phase and kept the proletariat dictatorship to
himself.
Lenin’s communist philosophy was designated by followers as Marxist-Leninist theory in 1928.
Marxism-Leninism was characterized by the refusal to cooperate and compromise with capitalist
countries. It also insisted upon severe restrictions on external text/xml point CX1337702161 ancestor::giftdoc:document HUMAN RIGHTS and the extermination of actual and supposed political opponents. In
these respects, Marxist-Leninist theory was unrecognizable to democratic socialists and other
followers of Marxist doctrine, and the 1920s saw a gradual split between Russian communists
and other European proponents of Marxian theory. The Bolshevik party, with Lenin at the helm,
renamed itself the All-Russian Communist party, and Lenin presided over a totalitarian state
until his death in 1924.
JOSEPH STALIN succeeded
Lenin as the Communist party ruler. In 1924, Stalin established the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) by colonizing land surrounding Russia and
placing the territories within the purview of the Soviet Union. The All-Russian Communist
party became the All-Union Communist party, and Stalin sought to position the Soviet Union
as the home base of a world revolution. In his quest for worldwide communism, Stalin sent
political opponents such as Trotsky into exile, had thousands of political dissidents tortured and
murdered, and imprisoned millions more.
Stalin saw the Soviet Union through external text/xml point CX1337704713 ancestor::gift-doc:document
WORLD WAR II .
Although it joined with the United States and other democratic countries in the
fight against Nazism, the Soviet Union remained strongly opposed to capitalist principles. In
the scramble for control of Europe after World War II, the Soviet Union gained power over
several Eastern European countries it had helped liberate and placed them under communist
rule. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Romania were forced to
comply with the totalitarianism of Stalin’s rule. North Korea was also supported and influenced
by the Soviet Union. More independent communist governments emerged in Yugoslavia and
Albania after World War II.
For nearly 50 years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States
engaged in a “cold war.” So named for the absence of direct fighting between the two
superpowers, the external text/xml point CX1337700923 ancestor::gift-doc:document COLD WAR was, in reality, a
bloody one. The Soviet Union and the United States fought each other through other countries
in an effort to control the influence and expansion of each other’s influence.
When a country was thrown into external text/xml point CX1337700851 ancestor::gift-doc:document CIVIL WAR , the
Soviet Union and the United States aligned themselves with the competing factions by providing
financial and military support. They sometimes even supplied their own troops. The United
States and Soviet Union engaged in war-by-proxy in many countries, including Korea, Vietnam,
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Angola.
Cuba officially adopted communism in 1965 after Fidel Castro led a band of rebels in an
insurrection against the Cuban government in 1959. Despite intense opposition by the United
States to communism in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba became communist with the help of
the Soviet Union.