Communism
A classless, stateless society reached through revolution — and, in its twentieth-century state form, a single-party government directing the whole economy.
What does this mean?
As Marx set it out, communism is the end point of a historical process: private ownership of the means of production is abolished, classes disappear, and the state — understood as an instrument of class rule — eventually becomes unnecessary. Distribution follows need rather than ownership or bargaining power. This is a theory of where history is going, not a programme of government.
The governments that called themselves communist in the twentieth century worked very differently. Following Lenin, they held that a disciplined vanguard party had to take and hold state power, which in practice meant one-party rule, comprehensive central planning, and the suppression of independent unions, press and opposition. These states industrialised rapidly and expanded literacy and basic health care; they were also responsible for famines, mass imprisonment and executions on an enormous scale, including the Soviet famine of 1932–33 and China’s Great Leap Forward. Any honest account of this tradition has to hold both records at once.
Where did it come from?
Set out by Marx and Engels in 1848 and given its state form by the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917. Communist parties governed the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. In India, communist parties have operated within electoral democracy since independence and have formed elected state governments in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura.
Major thinkers
- Karl Marx
- Friedrich Engels
- Vladimir Lenin
- Antonio Gramsci
- Rosa Luxemburg
Historical figures
- Vladimir Lenin
- Mao Zedong
- Fidel Castro
- E. M. S. Namboodiripad
What it looks like today
- China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos, all governed by communist parties, with widely differing economic systems
- CPI(M) and CPI, which contest elections within India’s constitutional framework
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
At the far redistributive end: private ownership of productive assets is abolished rather than taxed.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
In its Leninist state form, near the concentrated-authority pole: one party, no competitive elections, no independent press.
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- Its analysis of how ownership shapes political power remains influential well beyond communist politics.
- Communist states achieved rapid industrialisation and large gains in literacy and basic health care from very low starting points.
- Communist movements were a major force in anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa.
Its strongest criticisms
- Every state that has attempted it at national scale has concentrated power in a single party and suppressed political opposition.
- Central planning without market prices produced chronic shortages, misallocation and, in several cases, catastrophic famine.
- The human cost of the twentieth-century communist states — mass deaths from famine, forced labour and execution — is on a scale that no account can set aside.
Common misconceptions
- That communism and socialism are interchangeable. Most socialists reject one-party rule and revolutionary seizure of power outright.
- That Marx designed the Soviet system. He wrote very little about how a post-revolutionary state should be organised; that structure is Lenin’s.
- That communist states were economically identical. China after 1978 and Cuba today run very different systems under the same party label.
A caveat
Overlap with communism on this quiz reflects agreement on specific measured dimensions — usually economic ones — and says nothing about the political systems that governed in its name. It is not an endorsement, and the historical record above is part of the entry for that reason.
Sources
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto · 1848
- Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution · 1917
- Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism · Harvard University Press · 2007