History of communism
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History of Communism as a political movement begins in the middle of the 19th century.
Communism is a branch of the broader socialist movement. The communist movement differentiates itself from other branches of the socialist movement through various things - such as, a commitment to revolutionary strategies for overthrowing capitalism.
Early Communism
The notion of communism - the idea of a classless, stateless society based on communal ownership of property and wealth, stretches far back in Western thought long predating The Communist Manifesto. Some have even traced communist ideas back to ancient times, such as in Plato's The Republic; or (perhaps with more justification) in the life of the early Christian Church, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (see Christian communism).
In the 16th century, 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 Jean Jacques Rousseau. "Utopian socialist" writers such as Robert Owen are also sometimes regarded as communists.
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 then 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. At that time, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for creating a new class of poor, urban factory workers who toiled under harsh conditions, and for widening the gulf between rich and poor.
Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto
Although Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggle, summed up in the famous line from the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle".
The Communist Manifesto, also known as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, first published on February 21, 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is one of the world's most historically influential political tracts. Commissioned by the Communist League and written by founding Communist theorists 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?
The program described in the Manifesto -- that is to say, the policies the Communists of its day sought to implement -- is termed socialism or communism. These policies included, among others, the abolition of land ownership and the right to inheritance, the progressive income tax, and the nationalization of means of production and transport. These policies, which would be implemented by a revolutionary government (the dictatorship of the proletariat), would (the authors believed) be a precursor to the stateless and classless society envisioned by the socialists. The term "Communism" is also used to refer to the beliefs and practices of the Communist Party, including that of the Soviet Union which differed substantially from Marx and Engels' conception.
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 have 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 or organization given political power will tend to preserve its privilege rather than to permit it to wither away into a state of no privilege -- 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 famous last lines of The Manifesto
- 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 1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed and the Soviet Union was on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals for power. He instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering.
Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution.
Following 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 eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. 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 certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society.
Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously 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 himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s 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 attacked the left by expelling Trotsky and his supporters from the party and then moving 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 pursuing 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 thus 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 radical transformation of the Soviet Union, the party, under Stalin's direction, established Gosplan (the State General Planning Commission), a state organ responsible for guiding the socialist economy toward accelerated industrialization. In April 1929 Gosplan released two joint drafts that began the process that would industrialize the primarily agrarian nation. This 1,700 page report 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
Shifting from Lenin's NEP, the first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making and the stress on rapid heavy industrialization (see Economy of the Soviet Union). It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth.
The new economic system put forward by the first Five-Year plan entailed a complicated series of planning arrangements (see Overview of the Soviet economic planning process). The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal, iron, and other vital resources. At a high human cost, this process was largely successful, forging a capital base for industrial development more rapidly than any country in history.
The mobilization of resources by state planning augmented the country's industrial base. From 1928 to 1932, pig iron output, necessary for development of nonexistent industrial infrastructure rose from 3.3 million to 10 million tons per year. Coal, the integral product fueling modern economies and Stalinist industrialization, successfully rose from 35.4 million to 75 million tons, and output of iron ore rose from 5.7 million to 19 million tons. A number of 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.
Based largely on these figures the Five Year Industrial Production Plan had been fulfilled by 93.7 percent in only four years, while parts devoted to heavy-industry part were fulfilled by 108%. Stalin in December 1932 declared the plan a success to the Central Committee, since increases in the output of coal and iron would fuel future development.
While undoubtedly marking a tremendous leap in industrial capacity, the Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were extremely difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18-hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 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, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camps, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation. Some other estimates put these figures much higher. Much like with the famines, the evidence supporting these high numbers is disputed by some historians, although this is a minority view.
In November 1928 the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivization. This marked the end of the NEP, which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified and peasants were forced to give up their private plots of land and property, to work for collective farms, and to sell their produce to the state for a low price set by the state itself.
Given the goals of the First Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy-industrialization.
By 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. In many cases peasants bitterly opposed this process and often 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.
Despite the expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization was particularly severe in Ukraine, and the heavily Ukrainian adjoining Volga regions, a fact which has led many Ukrainian scholars to argue 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, not counting the adjoining regions. Soviet sources vary between denying the existence of the famine and estimating much smaller numbers of dead. The actual 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.
The Cold War
After World War II, the Soviet Union became a world superpower with its leader Joseph Stalin. This resulted in a great rivalry between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the Cold War. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R., communism and capitalism fought for influence and power over the world and in this struggle, numerous revolutions happened around the world, in countries as diverse as Cuba, China, Korea, Vietnam and Laos.
Eastern Europe
East Germany
At the Yalta Conference, held in February 1945 before the capitulation of the Third Reich, the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed on the division of Germany into occupation zones. Following Germany's surrender, the Allied Control Council, representing the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, assumed governmental authority in post-war Germany. Economic demilitarization however (especially the stripping of industrial equipment) was the responsibility of each zone individually.
The Potsdam Conference of July/August 1945 officially recognized the zones and confirmed jurisdiction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, SMAD) from the Oder and Neisse rivers to the demarcation line. The Soviet occupation zone included the former states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. The city of Berlin was placed under the control of the four powers.
Over time however the Western zones and the Soviet zone drifted apart economically, not least because of the Soviets' much greater use of disassembly of German industry under its control as a form of reparations. Agrarian reform in the Soviet zone expropriated all land belonging to former Nazis and war criminals and generally limited ownership to 1 km². Some 500 Junker estates were converted into collective people's farms, and more than 30,000 km² were distributed among 500,000 peasant farmers, agricultural laborers, and refugees.
Growing economic differences combined with developing political tensions between the USA and the USSR manifested in the refusal in 1947 of the SMAD to take part in the USA's Marshall Plan. In March 1948, the United States, Britain, and France met in London and agreed to unite the Western zones and to establish a West German republic. The Soviet Union responded by leaving the Allied Control Council and prepared to create an East German state.
A SMAD decree of June 10 granted permission for the formation of antifascist democratic political parties in the Soviet zone; elections to new state legislatures were scheduled for October 1946. A democratic-antifascist coalition, which included the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the new Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union--CDU), and the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (Liberal Demokratische Partei Deutschlands --LDPD), was formed in July 1945. The KPD (with 600,000 members) and the SPD (with 680,000 members), which was under strong pressure from the Communists, merged in April 1946 to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands--SED).
The SED modelled itself as a Soviet-style "party of the new type." To that end, German communist Walter Ulbricht became first secretary of the SED, and the Politburo, Secretariat, and Central Committee were formed. According to the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, each party body was controlled by its members. Ulbricht, as party chief, carried out the will of the members of his party. The SED committed itself ideologically to Marxism-Leninism and the international class struggle.
In November 1948, the German Economic Commission (Deutsche Wirtschaftskomission--DWK), dominated by the SED, assumed administrative authority. Five weeks after declaration of the western Federal Republic of Germany, on October 7, 1949, the DWK formed a provisional government and proclaimed establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Wilhelm Pieck, a SED party leader, was elected first president.
On March 18, 1990, the SED lost its previously guaranteed majority in the Volkskammer (the parliament of the GDR) following free and fair elections. On August 23 the Volkskammer decided that the territory of East Germany including East Berlin would accede to the ambit of the basic law of the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990. As a result of German reunification on that date, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist.
Albania
The communists took over after World War II, in November 1944, under the leader of the resistance, Enver Hoxha. From 1945 until 1990 Albania had one of the most repressive governments in Europe. The communist party was created in 1941 with the direction of Bolshevik Communist Parties. All those who opposed it were eliminated. Hoxha, a strict Stalinist, became the leader of this party. For many decades of his domination, Hoxha created and destroyed relationships with Belgrade, Moscow, and China, always in his personal interests. The country was isolated, first from the West (Western Europe, Canada, USA) and later even from the communist East.
In 1985, Enver Hoxha died and Ramiz Alia took his place. Initially, Alia tried to follow in Hoxha's footsteps, but in Eastern Europe the changes had already started: Mikhail Gorbachev had appeared in the Soviet Union with new policies (Glasnost and perestroika). The totalitarian regime was pressured by the US and Europe and the hate of its own people. After Nicolae Ceauşescu (the communist leader of Romania) was executed in a revolution, Alia knew he would be next if changes were not made. He signed the Helsinki Agreement (which was signed by other countries in 1975) that respected some human rights. He also allowed pluralism, and even though his party won the election of 1991 it was clear that the change would not be stopped. In 1992 the general elections were won by the Democratic Party with 62% of the votes.
Bulgaria
Bulgaria fell within the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II and became a People's Republic in 1946. Todor Zhivkov, First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1954 until 1989, became the longest serving leader of any of the Eastern bloc nations. Communist domination ended in 1990, when Bulgaria again held multiparty elections.
Czechoslovakia
After World War II, the pre-war Czechoslovakia was reestablished, the Germans were expelled from the country and Ruthenia was occupied by (officially "given to") the Soviet Union. Three years later the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power (1948 to 1989) and the country came under the influence of the Soviet Union. Except for a short period in the late 1960s (the Prague Spring) the country was characterized by the absence of democracy and relative economic backwardness compared to Western Europe. In the religious sphere, atheism was officially promoted and taught. In 1969, Czechoslovakia was turned into a federation of the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic.
On November 17, 1989, a peaceful student demonstration in Prague was severely beaten back by the Communist riot police. That event sparked a set of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December, and a general two-hour strike of the population on November 27. By November 20 the number of peaceful protestors assembled in Prague had swelled from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million. With other Eastern European communist regimes falling all around it, and with growing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 they would give up their monopoly on political power. On December 10, the Communist President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. The peaceful uprising that toppled the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia became known as the "Velvet Revolution."
Hungary
Following the fall of Nazi Germany, Hungary became part of the Soviet area of influence and was appropriated into a communist state following a short period of democracy in 1946–1947. After 1948 Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi established a Stalinist rule in the country, which was barely bearable for the war torn country. This led to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution/revolt and announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with military intervention by the Soviet Union and the deposition and execution of the reform-minded communist prime minister Imre Nagy. From the 1960's on to the late 1980's Hungary enjoyed a distinguished status of "the happiest barrack" within the Eastern Bloc, under the rule of late controversial communist leader János Kádár, who exercised autocratic rule at most of this era. In the late 1980s, Hungary led the movement to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and shifted toward multiparty democracy and a market-oriented economy.
Moldova
At the end of World War I, Bessarabia proclaimed independence from Russia in 1918, and united with the Kingdom of Romania the same year. The Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia in June 1940 in an agreement with Germany expressed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and though forced out again in 1941, Soviet troops reoccupied the area in August 1944. Under Soviet rule the southern and northern parts (inhabited by Ukrainians and Romanians) were transferred to Ukraine and Transnistria (largely inhabited by Russians) joined with the remainder in a Soviet republic called the "Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic" covering Moldova's current territory. Under Stalin, ethnic Russians were brought into the new republic, especially into urbanized areas, while many ethnic Romanians were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
The republic's name was changed to the Republic of Moldova on May 23, 1991, and it declared independence from the Soviet Union on August 27, 1991. After an initial desire to unify with Romania, a civil war began in the separatist Transnistria region in 1992 and since, the Moldovan government has no control of this region. In 2001, the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, the ideological successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party, was elected into power.
Poland
The Second Polish Republic lasted until the start of World War II when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and split the Polish territory between them from (September 28 1939). Poland was completely unprepared for the swiftness and ferocity of the attacks because of a failure to modernize her military. Poland suffered greatly in this period (see General Government). Of all the countries involved in the war, Poland lost the highest percentage of its citizens: over 6 million perished, half of them Polish Jews. Poland's borders shifted westwards; pushing the eastern border to the Curzon line and the western border to the Oder-Neisse line. After the shift Poland emerged smaller by 76 000 km² or by 20% of its pre-war size. The shifting of borders also involved the migration of millions of people – Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Jews. Eventually, Poland became, for the first time in history, an ethnically unified country. The Soviet Union occupation brought a new communist government to Poland, analogously to much of the rest of the Eastern Bloc.
In 1948 a turn towards Stalinism brought in the beginning of the next period of totalitarian rule. The People's Republic of Poland was officially proclaimed in 1952. In 1956 the régime became more liberal, freeing many people from prison and expanding some personal freedoms. Labour turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union, "Solidarity", which over time became a political force. It eroded the dominance of the Communist Party; by 1989 it had triumphed in parliamentary elections, and Lech Wałęsa a Solidarity candidate eventually won the presidency.
Romania
In August 1944 Romania turned against Germany and joined the Red Army, but its role in the defeating of Germany was not recognised by the 1946 Treaty of Paris. In 1947 king Michael I Hohenzollern abdicated, and Romania became a communist state - under direct military and economic control of the U.S.S.R. until 1958.
The decades-long reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu ended in late 1989 (see Romanian Revolution of 1989), and the elections of 1990 were won by FSN.
Yugoslavia
Democratic Federative Yugoslavia was reconstituted at the AVNOJ conference in Jajce (November 29 to December 4 1943) while negotiations with the royal government in exile continued. On November 29 1945 the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia was established as a socialist state (also by AVNOJ in Jajce). On January 31, 1946, the new constitution of FPR Yugoslavia established the six constituent republics.
The first president was Ivan Ribar and prime minister Josip Broz Tito. In 1953, Tito was elected as president and later in 1963 named "President for life".
Yugoslavia, unlike other Eastern and Central European communist countries, chose a course independent of the Soviet Union (see Informbiro), and was not a member of the Warsaw pact nor NATO, but rather than that initiated a Non-Aligned Movement in 1956.
Following the "fall of Communism" in the rest of Eastern Europe, nationalism replaced communism as the dominant force in Yugoslav politics as each of the six constituent republics elected a new government democratically.
China
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After World War II, the Chinese Civil War between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang ended in 1949 with the Communists in control of mainland China and the Kuomintang in control of Taiwan and some outlying islands of Fujian. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic of China and established a communist state.
Under Mao, China's unity and sovereignty was assured for the first time in decades, and there was development of infrastructure, industry, healthcare, and education, which they believe helped in raising living standards. However, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution came with severe economic costs. The Great Leap, in particular, was at least partly responsible in igniting a massive famine in which, according to some Western sources tern sources, 20 - 30 million people died. Most Western and some Chinese analysts attribute this to the Great Leap Forward. Others, including Mao at the time, attribute this famine to natural disasters and question the high death rate.
Following the dramatic economic failures of the early 1960s, Mao began to step down from some of his leadership roles. Mao remained head of the Party but was removed from day to day management of economic affairs, which came under the control of a more moderate leadership under the dominant influence of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others who initiated economic reforms.
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which is viewed by his opponents (including both Western analysts and many Chinese people who were youth at the time) as a strike back at his rivals by mobilizing the youth of the country in support of his thought and purging the moderate leadership, but is viewed by his supporters as an experiment in direct democracy and a genuine attempt at purging Chinese society of corruption and other negative influences. Serious disorder followed and Mao was forced to stop the revolution in 1968 by deploying the army, but gradually under the leadership of Zhou Enlai moderate forces regained influence. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping succeeded in winning the power struggle, and Mao's widow, Jiang Qing and her associates, the Gang of Four, who had assumed control of the country, were arrested and put on trial.
Since then, the government has gradually and greatly loosened governmental control over people's personal lives, and began transitioning China's planned economy into a mixed economy. These economic reforms led to the rapid development of the consumer and export sectors of the economy, the creation of a middle class (especially in coastal cities where most industrial development is concentrated) that now constitute 15% of the population, higher living standards (which is shown via dramatic increases in GDP per capita, consumer spending, life expectancy, literacy rate, and total grain output), and a much wider range of personal rights and freedoms for average Chinese.
However, some poorer workers and peasants in China, especially in the interior, have been left behind by the refroms. The reforms have been associated with new disparities in wealth, environmental pollution, widespread unemployment associated with layoffs, and sine often unwelcome cultural influences.
The Communist Party of China remains in control and has maintained repressive policies against groups which it feels are threats, such as Falun Gong and the separatist movement in Tibet.
North Korea
Kim's government moved rapidly to establish a Soviet-style system, with political power monopolised by the KWP. The establishment of a socialist economic system followed. Most of the country's productive assets had been owned by the Japanese or by Koreans held to have been collaborators. The nationalization of these assets in 1946 placed 70% of industry under state control. By 1949 this percentage had risen to 90%. Since then virtually all manufacturing, finance and internal and external trade has been conducted by the state.
In agriculture, on which the viability of an economy which was still basically agricultural depended, the government moved more slowly, but equally firmly, towards socialism. The land reform of 1946 redistributed the bulk of agricultural land to the poor and landless peasant population, an undoubtedly popular and beneficial move. In 1954, however, a partial collectivization was carried out, with peasants being urged, and often forced, into agricultural co-operatives. By 1958 virtually all farming was being carried out collectively, and the co-operatives were increasingly merged into larger productive units.
Like all the postwar Communist states, the DPRK undertook massive state investment in heavy industry, state infrastructure and military strength, neglecting the production of consumer goods. By paying the collectivized peasants low state-controlled prices for their product, and using the surplus thus extracted to pay for industrial development, the state carried out a series of three-year plans, which brought industry's share of the economy from 47% in 1946 to 70% in 1959, despite the intervening devastation of the Korean War. There were huge increases in electricity production, steel production and machine building. The large output of tractors and other agricultural machinery achieved a great increase in agricultural productivity.
As a result of these revolutionary changes, there is no doubt that the population was better fed and, at least in urban areas, better housed than they had been before the war, and also better than were most people in the South in this period. Observers generally agree that standards of living rose rapidly in the DPRK in the later 1950s and into the 1960s, certainly more rapidly than in the South, where there had been no land reform and little prior industrial development. There was, however, a chronic shortage of consumer goods, and the urban population lived under a system of extreme labor discipline and constant demands for greater productivity. As a result, the South was able to outpace the North during the 1970s.
Cuba
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The original Communist Party of Cuba was formed in the 1920s and was a member of the Comintern. It was later renamed the People's Socialist Party for electoral reasons. Its policy was dictated from Moscow, and supported Batista in whose government it had Ministers Without Portfolio. The People's Socialist Party was initially critical of Castro.
In July 1961, two years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) was formed by the merger of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, the People's Socialist Party led by Blas Roca and the Revolutionary Directory March 13th led by Faure Chomón. On March 26, 1962 the ORI became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC) which, in turn, became the Communist Party of Cuba on October 3, 1965. The Communist party remains the only legal political party in Cuba.
For the first ten years of its formal existence, the Communist Party was relatively inactive outside of the Politburo. The 100 person Central Committee rarely met and it was ten years after its founding that the first regular Party Congress was held. In 1969, membership of the party was only 55,000 or 0.6% of the population making the CPC the smallest ruling Communist party in the world. In the 1970s the party's apparatus began to develop. By the time of the first Party Congress in 1975 the party had grown to just over 200,000 members, the Central Committee was meeting regularly and the organisational apparatus giving the party the leading role in society that ruling Communist parties generally hold. By 1980 the party had grown to over 430,000 members and grew further to 520,000 by 1985. Apparatuses of the party had grown to ensure that its leading cadres were appointed to key government positions throughout the bureaucracy.
The crisis created by the collapse of the Soviet bloc led to the Fourth Party Congress in 1991 being one of unprecedented openness and debate as the leadership tried to create a wide public consensus to respond to the "Special Period". Three million people engaged in pre-Congress debate and discussions on issues such as political structure and economic policy. The 1991 Congress redefined the party as "the party of the Cuban nation" rather than the "party of the working class". The prohibition on religious believers joining the party was lifted. As well, José Martí was elevated to the level of Karl Marx and Lenin in the party's ideological pantheon.
Much of the debate resulted from an internal struggle between advocates of a Cuban perestroika, i.e. the use of market mechanisms and the liberalisation of strictures on free speech and dissent and others who argued that speedy reforms would undercut the unity of the nation and the party's political dominance and possibly lead to the government's collapse as had happened to Communist states in Eastern Europe. The outcome was political reforms which fell far short of reform demands to permit candidates to campaign for office on competing programs. Economically, however, some modest market reforms were introduced, particularly in agriculture, in an effort to reverse the country's economic decline after the cessation of aid and trade subsidies from the USSR. Increased tensions between the US and Cuba also gave the conservatives the upper hand in the mid-1990s and the government responded more and more harshly to dissident groups.
By the time of the Fifth Party Congress in 1997, political liberalisation was no longer on the agenda. The economic resolution debated at the conference called for the expansion of tourism in order to bring in more hard currency but did not call for economic reforms while the political resolution opposed any political liberalization and constituted a defence of the one party system.
Vietnam
The Vietnamese Communist party was founded by Ho Chi Minh and other exiles living in China as the Vietnam Communist Party but soon changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party after its founding conference held in Hong Kong in February 1930. The First National Party Congress was held in secret in Macau in 1935. At the same time, a Comintern congress in Moscow adopted a policy towards a popular front against fascism and directed Communist movements around the world to collaborate with anti-fascist forces regardless of their orientation towards socialism. This required the ICP to regard all nationalist parties in Indochina as potential allies.
The party was formally dissolved in 1945 in order to hide its Communist affiliation and its activites were folded into the Viet Minh, which had been founded four years earlier as a common front for national liberation. The party was refounded as the Vietnam Workers Party at the Second National Party Congress in Tuyen Quang in 1951. The congress was held in territory in northern Vietnam controlled by the Viet Minh during the French Indochinese War. After the war ended, the communists established their rule of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), located above the 17th parallel. In the 1950s a radical land reform program was conducted in which ten of thousands of land owners and suspected dissidents were killed. The Third National Congress, held in Hanoi in 1960 formalized the tasks of constructing socialism in what was by then North Vietnam and committed the party to carrying out the revolution in the anti-communist South. At the Fourth National Party Congress held in 1976 after the North's victory in the Vietnam War, the party's name was changed to the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Laos
Political unrest in neighbouring Vietnam dragged Laos into the greater Second Indochina War (see also Secret War) which was a destabilising factor that contributed to civil war and several coups d'état. In 1975 the communist Pathet Lao movement overthrew the royalist government of King Savang Vatthana and took control of the country, which they promptly renamed the Lao People's Democratic Republic.
Ethiopia
In 1974 a pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist military junta, the Derg, deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, who had ruled since 1930, and established a one-party socialist state. The ensuing regime suffered several bloody coups, uprisings, wide-scale drought, and massive refugee problem. It was eventually defeated in 1991 by a coalition of rebel forces under the name Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).
South Yemen
In June 1969, a radical Marxist wing of the Yemeni National Liberation Front gained power in South Yemen and changed the country's name on 1 December 1970, to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. In the PDRY, all political parties were amalgamated into the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), which became the only legal party. The PDRY established close ties with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and radical Palestinians.
Efforts toward unification with North Yemen proceeded from 1988 and, on 22 May 1990, the unified Republic of Yemen was declared.
Angola
The People's Republic of Angola was established by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1975, following the end of Portuguese colonial rule. Poet and freedom fighter Agostinho Neto became the first president upon independence, and he was succeeded by José Eduardo dos Santos in 1979.
In 1976, the MPLA adopted Marxism-Leninism as the party ideology. It maintained close ties with the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, establishing similar socialist economic policies and a one-party state. Several thousand Cuban troops were deployed in the country to combat an ongoing insurgency (see Angolan Civil War) and bolster the regime's security. In 1991, the MPLA and its rival factions agreed to turn Angola into a multi-party state.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
When Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Soviet Politburo, was elected General-Secretary in March 1985, it signalled a generational change in the Eastern bloc. In an attempt to revitalize the stagnating Communist Party and the state economy, Gorbachev introduced reforms such as glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring"). Gorbachev believed that democratization would remove corrupt and incompetent apparatchiks from the Soviet system, but instead, a significant number of Communist Party opponents rose to prominence. At the same time, Gorbachev's liberalization of the state-controlled media allowed decades of frustration and disillusionment with the system to surface after years of repression.
On February 7, 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to give up its monopoly of power. The USSR's constituent republics began to assert their national sovereignty over Moscow, and started a "war of laws" with the central Moscow government, in which the governments of the constituent republics repudiated all-union legislation where it conflicted with local laws, asserting control over their local economies and refusing to pay tax revenue to the central Moscow government. This strife caused economic dislocation, as supply lines in the economy were broken, and caused the Soviet economy to decline further.
Gorbachev made desperate and ill-fated attempts to assert control, notably in the Baltic Republics, but the power and authority of the central government had been dramatically and irreversibly undermined. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania declared the restitution of independence and announced that it was pulling out of the Soviet Union. However, the Red Army had a strong presence there. The Soviet Union initiated an economic blockade of Lithuania and kept troops there "to secure the rights of ethnic Russians." In January of 1991, clashes between Soviet troops and Lithuanian civilians occurred, leaving 20 dead. This further weakened 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 a process to reestablish Estonia as an independent state.
On March 17, 1991, in an all-Union referendum 78% of all voters voted for the retention of the Soviet Union in a reformed form. The Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova boycotted the referendum. In each of the other 9 republics, a majority of the voters supported the retention of the Soviet Union.
In June 1991, direct elections were held for the post of president of the Russian SFSR. The populist candidate Boris Yeltsin, who was an outspoken critic of Mikhail Gorbachev, won 57% percent of the vote, defeating Gorbachev's preferred candidate, former Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, who won 16% of the vote.
Faced with growing republic separatism, Gorbachev attempted 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. The new treaty was strongly 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 increasingly convinced that a rapid transition to a market economy was required and were more than 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 new treaty, the conservatives, still strong within the CPSU and military establishment, were completely opposed to anything which might contribute to the weakening of 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 quickly issued an emergency decree suspending political activity and banning most newspapers.
While coup organizers expected popular support for their actions, the 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 ultimately 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 now fatally compromised. 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, declaring their sovereignty one by one. On September 6, 1991, the Soviet government recognized the independence of the three Baltic states. In December 1, 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR 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 issue a declaration 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 of the USSR and turned the powers of his office over to Boris Yeltsin. The next day, the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself and repealed the declaration written in 1922 that had officially established the USSR. By the end of the year, all official Soviet institutions had ceased operations, thereby ending the world's largest and most influential Communist regime.
The four principal elements of the old Soviet system were the hierarchy of soviets, ethnic federalism, state socialism, and Communist Party dominance. Gorbachev's program of perestroika produced radical unanticipated effects that brought that system down. Gorbachev successfully 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 clearly threatened to put the Soviet Union into a state of long-term stagnation.
But by using structural reforms to widen opportunities for leaders and 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 altogether with a liberal democratic one, others demanded independence for the national republics. Still others insisted on the restoration of the old Soviet ways. Ultimately, Gorbachev could not forge a compromise among these forces.
Communism Today
After the fall of the Communist states in the Eastern Bloc, the communist movement arguably became more fragmented than ever, and certainly weaker than it has ever been since 1917. Communist groups and parties all across the world went their separate paths. However, Communism has survived the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
Out of the five remaining communist states, China, Vietnam, and Laos have moved toward market economies but without major privatization of the state sector; and Cuba has recently emerged from the crisis sparked by the fall of the Soviet Union given the growth in its volume of trade with its new allies Venezuela and China. North Korea, however, has had less success in coping with the collapse of the Soviet bloc than its Communist counterparts.
Meanwhile, the communist movement in the capitalist world is slowly emerging from the deep crisis of the 1990s and is drawing increasing support. In the Moldova, the local Communist party won the 2001 and 2005 parliamentary elections. In India, the Communist Party is a key coalition partner of the ruling Congress Party and retains its control over the state of West Bengal. 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.
there is also quite an strong communist opposition to Islamic republic of iran led by worker-communist party of iran and it offshoot,worker-communist party of iran-hekmatist, both claim that they are continue the path of mansoor hekmat,famous iranian communist and founder of the worker-commuist parties of iran and iraq. these parties are trying to overthrow the islamic republic.
See also
References
- Robert Harvey, A Short History of Communism, Thomas Dunne Books, 2004, ISBN 0312329091
- Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, ISBN 0812968646