Communism was first a French word, coined in the s, to describe a system of collective ownership in which individuals did not own private property and worked together for the benefit of all community members. This new French word described ideals similar to the English concept of socialism and derived from the word common , meaning something is free or open to everyone. The word communism was adopted by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the s to describe their ideology of opposing industrial capitalism.
Marxist communism sought the overthrow of governments supporting a capitalist economy. The combined economic and political ideology of modern communism was implemented in the Soviet Union , the People's Republic of China , North Korea , North Vietnam , and Cuba Today, the historical words capitalism , socialism , and communism do not fully capture the economic systems of nations. New words are also used to describe economic systems: free market system ; mixed economy ; command economy.
In recent years, communist China and Cuba have loosened economic restrictions and allowed free market activities. In other words, communism, socialism, and capitalism are a continuum, with modern national economics falling somewhere in the middle, or mixed, zone.
In American politics, those aligned to the right of the political spectrum are more likely to support free market policies, and those to the left are more likely to support government intervention in the economy. Recent polls by the Pew Research Center demonstrate how the political alliances of Americans influence perceptions of these words. To address the problem, they prescribed a system in which the workers themselves "take the control of industry and of all branches of production," along with the abolition of private property and "the communal ownership of goods.
Following the Russian revolution of , Vladimir Lenin, leader of the victorious Bolsheviks, expanded on the principles of Marxism, as did Lenin's eventual successor, Joseph Stalin. Their ideas evolved into Marxism-Leninism, which, rather than seeing the state wither away, called for rule by a single political party.
That was the system that governed the Soviet Union until its collapse in In addition, a number of other nations have communist parties that participate, to varying degrees, in the political process. Like Marxism, modern socialism arose in the 19th century in response to the Industrial Revolution and what many perceived to be the excesses of capitalism. Instead of the individualism encouraged by a capitalist system, it emphasized the "collective good," or collectivism. It grew out of ideas about redistribution of wealth that developed during the Enlightenment and revolutionary movements of the 18th century.
Among its leading proponents on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was Robert Owen, himself a prosperous, Welsh-born owner of textile mills. Some early socialists including Owen, often referred to as utopian socialists, created communities based on shared property in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. One well-known American example was the Shakers, a Protestant sect formed in England that established settlements throughout the eastern and Midwestern U. Adherents who still called themselves socialists maintained their gradualist approach, while communists urged more aggressive action.
From the 19th century on, socialist principles have had an influence on public policy in Great Britain, France, and other countries—in particular through laws aimed at protecting workers' rights, including the right to form trade unions and bargain collectively.
Social democracy is a strain of socialism that allows capitalism to exist but attempts to reign in its excesses through regulation while also addressing inequality through government-run social programs.
It gained ground after World War II, in part as a response to the economic failures and brutal governance of the Stalin-era Soviet Union. Countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are examples of social democracies, and many social welfare programs in the United States and elsewhere might also be seen as social democratic initiatives.
Countries that combine both socialism and capitalism in this way are sometimes referred to as having mixed economies. In some countries where socialism has not taken hold as the official form of government, political parties such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Labour Party in the United Kingdom exert large influence. Communism has never gained much of a foothold in the United States, although the Communist Party USA, founded in , has run candidates for public office over the years.
But much of that law has since been repealed, and the party remains in existence. Socialism has fared better but has also had its ups and downs. Numerous socialists have been elected to positions as mayors and several have been elected members of Congress. Eugene V. Debs, who was the socialist candidate for president in five elections , , , , and , earned close to 1 million votes on his final try. For decades, the terms "communist" and "socialist" have been used in the U.
Similarly, countless government programs and legislative proposals have been denounced as "socialist" or "communist" by those who oppose them for one reason or another. Social friction between white and blue-collar workers and between rural and urban cultures will be eliminated, freeing each person to achieve his or her highest human potential.
Under pure communism, the central government provides the people with all basic necessitates, such as food, housing, education, and medical care, thus allowing the people to share equally from the benefits of collective labor. Free access to these necessities depends on constant advances in technology contributing to ever-greater production.
The ideology of modern communism began to form during the French Revolution fought between and Pure socialism is an economic system under which each individual—through a democratically elected government—is given an equal share of the four factors or economic production: labor, entrepreneurship, capital goods, and natural resources. In essence, socialism is based on the assumption that all people naturally want to cooperate, but are restrained from doing so by the competitive nature of capitalism.
Socialism is an economic system where everyone in society equally owns the factors of production. The ownership is acquired through a democratically elected government. It could also be a cooperative or public corporation in which everyone owns shares. As in a command economy , the socialist government employs centralized planning to allocate resources based on both the needs of individuals and society as a whole. Democratic socialism is an economic, social, and political ideology holding that while both the society and economy should be run democratically, they should be dedicated to meeting the needs of the people as a whole, rather than encouraging individual prosperity as in capitalism.
Democratic socialists advocate the transition of society from capitalism to socialism through existing participatory democratic processes, rather than revolution as characterized by orthodox Marxism. Universally-used services such as housing, utilities, mass transit, and health care are distributed by the government, while consumer goods are distributed by a capitalistic free market.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the emergence of a more moderate version of socialist democracy advocating a mixture of socialist and capitalist control of all means of economic production supplemented by extensive social welfare programs to help provide the basic needs of the people.
This is achieved largely through government ownership of the largest, most resource consumptive corporations. Economic production focuses on meeting the basic needs of the people, rather than a wasteful excess of unneeded consumer goods. Green socialism often offers a guaranteed minimum livable income to all citizens regardless of their employment status. It is difficult to classify countries as being either communist or socialist.
Several countries, while ruled by the Communist Party, declare themselves to be socialist states and employ many aspects of socialist economic and social policy.
Three countries typically considered communist states—mainly due to their political structure—are Cuba, China, and North Korea. The Communist Party of China owns and strictly controls all industry, which operates solely to generate profits for the government through its successful and growing export of consumer goods.
Health care and primary through higher education are run by the government and provided free of charge to the people. However, housing and property development operate under a highly competitive capitalist system.
The Communist Party of Cuba owns and operates most industries, and most of the people work for the state. Government-controlled health care and primary through higher education are provided free. Housing is either free or heavily subsidized by the government. Today, the government provides universal health and education for all citizens.
Private ownership of property is forbidden. Instead, the government grants people the right to government-owned and assigned homes. But their dispute clarified it as the central divide among socialists in the early 20th century.
Luxemburg was critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia and wary of the failed communist revolution in Germany in which she participated and perished. But she helped lay the theoretical groundwork for that general approach, of achieving socialism through revolt and mass social upheaval.
Bernstein, in turn, established a socialist tradition in which electoral politics was of the utmost importance. This became the strategic inspiration for the SPD, the Socialist Party in France, and just about every other Western European country's major left party. In this, Bernstein was helped by the existence of non-Marxist "ethical socialists," who, unburdened by Marx's focus on capitalism's tendency toward crisis, also tended to emphasize social reforms and electoral politics ahead of revolution.
The most important group here was the Fabian Society in Britain, which grew to be a key intellectual hub of the nascent Labour Party. This one is complicated. On the one hand, "socialism" and "communism" are technical terms in Marxist theory. On the other, they're disparate political movements that have developed on the international left for a century not to mention that socialism predates Marx by quite a bit.
In Marxist theory, socialism and communism are both as-yet-unrealized stages of humanity's economic development, with the former preceding the latter. Socialism succeeds capitalism, and is heralded by the working class's seizing of the state. Using that power, the working class then assumes control over the means of production, either by establishing cooperative enterprises in which companies are owned by their workers, or by effecting state ownership.
Workers are compensated in relation to their contribution to society. Communism, by contrast, is achieved as the state gradually "withers away," and the extreme technological progress enabled by socialism leads to such abundance that ownership and private property become essentially irrelevant.
Classes evaporate, and all human needs are met. But it's worth distinguishing communism and socialism as political movements aside from the terms' theoretical connotations. With the success of the Bolshevik revolution in , socialist and social democratic parties across the world faced a choice.
They could support Lenin and his allies as fellow socialists who actually succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist state through a worker's revolution, or they could oppose them as authoritarians who were abandoning the essentially democratic spirit of socialism. This led, in Europe and America, to a split in socialist parties into pro-Soviet communist parties and more traditional social democratic parties. The non-communist socialist parties were members of the Socialist International or the "Second International," as it succeeded Marx's original International Workingmen's Association , while the Soviet Union organized the communist parties into the Communist International also known as "Comintern" or the Third International.
How closely the communist parties' platform actually mirrored the policies of the Soviet Union varied considerably. Some parties, like those in the US and Britain, remained clearly under Moscow's thumb. But in the s and '80s, the Spanish and Italian communist parties embraced "Eurocommunism," an approach that emphasized reform through parliamentary democratic processes and that distanced them from the Soviet model.
The reforms they wanted parliaments to pass were more dramatic than those of social democratic parties, but the difference was in degree, rather than in the parties' confidence in representative democracy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many communist parties in Western Europe moderated and became, essentially, social democratic parties; the Democratic Party of Italy, the country's dominant left party, of which Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is a member, is in part a direct descendant of the Italian Communist Party, though Renzi himself is a former member of a centrist party that merged with the ex-communists.
Over time, non-Soviet-aligned revolutionary communism also came to be a major force. After the purging of Leon Trotsky from the Soviet party in the '20s, Trotskyist parties also cropped up, eventually forming a Fourth International, though none ever came to power. So in practical political terms, "communism" has come to connote a belief in revolutionary political change or, at the very least, more dramatic and transformative democratic change than social democratic parties have advocated.
But communist parties would almost universally identify themselves as committed to the goals of socialism — more committed, indeed, than their squishy social democratic rivals.
And for their part, many democratic socialists — like US presidential candidate Norman Thomas and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee — were vehemently anti-communist. I mean, if you don't love weird factionalist history, socialism might not be for you. But thankfully, there are plenty of great socialist tunes. Obviously we have to start with "The Internationale," a song beloved of socialists, communists, and leftists of all stripes at least since the Second International adopted it as its official anthem the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would do so as well.
Here it is sung by Billy Bragg, the outspoken British socialist and folk-rock singer:.
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