COMMUNISM

Communism as a political ideology is based on ideas that date back to Plato's great dialogue The Republic (c. 380–360 b.c.e.). European movements and thinkers from 1789 to 1914 thus had a long and rich tradition to draw on. The term refers to a doctrine that material resources are community property prior to any form of individual ownership, and that such resources are best dispersed through forms of community control.

excerpt from manifesto of the equals, by sylvain marÉchal

What do we need besides equality of rights?

We need not only that equality of rights transcribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains! …

The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We reach for something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of goods! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the extreme minority.

Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their like, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our nephews will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Let there no longer be any difference between people other than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one food. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?

Manifesto of the Equals, by Sylvain Maréchal, translated by Mitch Abidor, available from http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/conspiracyequals/manifesto.htm.

Plato's discussion in The Republic raises three analytically crucial points in understanding communism. First, what is the nature of individual ownership of material resources, as opposed to prior forms of community control? Second, what level of subsistence and surplus production is appropriate to the good life in a community, and how should this be determined? Third, is a system that mixes collective control with individual ownership perhaps the most satisfactory way to organize society, or alternatively would it be inherently corrupting and dangerous? Plato argued that happiness, peace, and justice cannot rest on individual ownership of material resources; moreover, any mixed system will necessarily lead to class war and civil strife. In an attack on The Republic, Plato's pupil Aristotle argued in The Politics (c. 335–322 b.c.e.) for a general principle of individual ownership, mixed with shared use where there are mutual benefits. Since that time, communists have been correctly identified with a pure form of community control.

Thomas More's Utopia (1516) represents a landmark for the later communist tradition in two respects. First, it updated the critique of individualized ownership of material resources to the period of early modern commercialism, in which traditional rights of community use (say, in fields and forests) were being terminated through the assertion of private property rights by landowners. Second, his alternative communist society marks a sharp contrast with commercial societies, because of its ascetism and abolition of money, albeit an imaginary one (he coined the word utopia, meaning "nowhere").

excerpt from karl marx and friedrich engels, manifesto of the communist party (1848)

The theoretical propositions of the communists are in no way founded on ideas or principles invented or discovered by this or that reformist crank.

They merely express in general terms the factual relations of an existing class struggle, a historical movement that is proceeding under our own eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not distinctively communist.

All property relations have been subject to continuous historical change, to continuous historical variation.

The French revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.

What is distinctively communist is not the abolition of property in general but the abolition of bourgeois property.

But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the production and appropriation of products which rests on class conflict, on the exploitation of individuals by others.

In that sense communists can sum up their theory in a single phrase: the transformation of private property.

Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, translated and edited by Terrell Carver, Cambridge, U.K., p. 13.

modern movements

The French Revolution represents a watershed for communist theory and practice in two important ways. It created a conception of popularly driven change, not just of rulers or even of political structures, but of social values and goals toward the ultimate realization of ideals. In 1796 the Manifesto of the Equals, written by Sylvain Marèchal (1750–1803) and published as part of the notorious "Conspiracy," demanded forms of equality beyond those envisaged by other revolutionaries, in that the use of material resources was to be strictly controlled in order to prevent class distinctions. The goal was that there should be neither rich nor poor. François-Noël "Gracchus" Babeuf (1760–1797) was guillotined for his part in the planned uprising, and "Baboeuvism" became iconic for armed intervention to achieve mass equalization of material circumstances. After that it was easy for conservatives and reactionaries to tar anyone favoring democratization of political authority, or economic intervention by the state, with the brush of communism. But as a matter of doctrine there is a sharp line between communists, with their uncompromising hostility to mixed systems of individual and collective economic management, and socialists or "left-liberals," with their advocacy of precisely that.

In the post-Napoleonic period of reaction and authoritarianism throughout Europe (1815–1830), during which representative democracy and constitutional government were attacked and reversed in many places, it is not surprising that communist thought and action—chiefly in the form of (necessarily) secret societies—took hold, evoking figures such as Babeouf and his successors, Philippe Michel Buonarotti (1761–1837) and Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881). The 1830s also produced a flowering of communist literature, sometimes termed socialist, but identifiable as communist through its use of the utopian genre derived from More and its resolutely anticommercial approach to socialreo rganization. Ètienne Cabet's (1788–1856) Travels in Icaria (1839) was widely read and became the basis for actual experiments in communal living. Working in the 1840s, Cabet effectively created a communist tradition by linking his ideas to the recent French revolutionary events of 1830 and back to the period from 1789 to 1795 in a popular history, and continuing the genre of the inspirational manifesto by publishing pamphlets on Why I Am a Communist and My Communist Credo.

Influenced by German followers of Cabet and enthused with the democratic ideals of the French revolutionary tradition, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) involved themselves separately in radical journalism, pushing liberals toward an engagement with the condition of the urban and rural poor, and advocating collective economic management outside a framework of private charity. By late 1844 they were working together, and for the next forty years they pursued a remarkably consistent campaign on three fronts. One was against utopians for their small-scale and sometimes fanciful or religious visions of communism, which they dismissed as childish nonsense. Another was against socialists and reformers of all kinds, who favored "mixed" economic regimes, dismissed by Marx and Engels as dangerous and as no solution. And a third was against anarchists, with their extreme suspicion of authority and collective decision-making, which Marx and Engels dismissed as irresponsible. Working in the 1840s for the Communist League, itself a Europe-wide, umbrella organization for national secret societies, and itself a descendant of rather more shadowy groups of the 1830s, such as the League of the Just, the two produced the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).

This work drew on pan-European and ultimately global perspectives of radical action. In uncompromising tones the Manifesto criticizes the economic and social institutions of commercial (termed "bourgeois") society, yet gives it a crucial role in human history. This was the development of industrial productivity to a remarkable and dizzying degree. Beyond the horrors of class-divided society lay the future institutions of communism, in which productive effort would be in harmony with individual abilities, and the distribution of material goods would correspond to individual needs. Marx and Engels's work contributed substantially to the development of communism in three distinct ways. First, it focused on the industrial working class (or "proletariat") as the crucial agent for democratizing social relations in modern societies. Second, it undermined the claims of individualistic philosophies and economic theories by identifying them as mere episodes in the development of civilization. Third, it advocated a politics of change midway between anarchistic associationism (in which the individual is sovereign) and conspiratorial collectivism (in which a small group acts in the name of individuals en masse).

Marx was among the founders of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864 (later known as the "First International"), a reincarnation of the publicity committees of the 1840s and a venue for communists wanting to push socialists toward uncompromising opposition to capitalist society. The 1860s and 1870s were an era in Europe when socialist parties were legally founded and trade union activity was increasingly permitted. While much of this activity necessitated violence and was sometimes reversed (notably in Germany during the period of the "antisocialist law" from 1878 to 1890), communists found themselves increasingly isolated from socialist advocacy of "mixed" economies and positive engagement with semidemocratic systems. After 1872 the First International fizzled out owing to internecine disputes involving anarchists, but the format was revived in 1889 with the founding of the Socialist (or Second) International, a body representing socialist engagement within, and on behalf of, democratic mixed economies. These goals were supported even by Marxists, albeit as a stage on the way to an increasingly distant communist future, where control over resources would be collective and the money economy would be abolished. This organization collapsed during World War I, after many members supported their nationalist governments in contradiction to their principles of international cooperation on behalf of the working classes of all countries.

Communists as such were thus an underground, most notably in authoritarian countries such as tsarist Russia. Ironically the most successful self-identified Russian communists were those engaged with industrial workers in urban areas, a tiny fraction of the population. In a then obscure but later celebrated work, What Is to Be Done? (1905), Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; 1870–1924) argued for a tightly organized party to lead the workers, make them revolutionary, and utilize political power directly. The revolutionary events of 1917 were pursued by liberals and socialists, but only the Leninist faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took advantage of popular urban support for withdrawing from World War I and for radical democratization of the government.

review and postscript

While communism has a rich and diverse tradition, it has been closely identified with Marx and Engels and Marxism since the late nineteenth century. The utopian and ascetic strands of thought have given way to an embrace of urbanity and mechanization, projected forward to a system of collective control to manage production and distribution according to the principle: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875). Whether communists should seize power (even in nonindustrialized agrarian countries) and create authoritarian structures to effect social change (rather than proceed through democratic gradualism) have been issues that have served to divide self-styled communists (particularly Soviet ideologues and leaders) from socialists. Communism has been truer to its ideals in its theoretical and utopian forms than in its practical manifestations, particularly those that developed after the Russian Revolution (1917–1921) and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe (1945–1989).

See alsoAnarchism; Engels, Friedrich; First International; Fourier, Charles; Labor Movements; Marx, Karl; Second International; Socialism.

bibliography

Freeden, Michael. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford, U.K., 1998.

Heywood, Andrew. Political Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Basingstoke, U.K., 2004.

Johnson, Christopher H. Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851. Ithaca, N.Y., 1974.

Lichtheim, George. The Origins of Socialism. New York, 1968.

Terrell Carver