COMMUNISM

Communism, term in political science denoting either a society where all property is held in common or a political movement whose final aim is the establishment of such a society

Primitive Communism

Primitive communism designates a largely self-sufficient village economy where the basic tools of production, animals, land, etc., are the property of the community as a whole. The idea that individual private property is an impediment to a just society has led many writers to imagine a state of affairs without private ownership. Thus in the Republic by Plato the ruling class of guardian-philosophers live in a state of communism so that they may dedicate themselves to the pursuit of justice. Other classes are not so restricted. Communal ownership also characterizes the utopian societies imagined by Thomas More (1516, Utopia) and Tommaso Campanella (Civitas Solis, 1623; The City of the Sun). Similar depictions became common among socialist thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance Charles Fourier and William Morris.

Socialists and Communism

The socialist parties which adopted Marx's ideas held communism to be the final goal but assumed that capitalism would have to expand to its utmost limits before collapsing into a final crisis from which a post-capitalist society would emerge. In the 19th century the anarchists, the socialists' main rivals among working-class activists (especially in Southern Europe), held the view that communism and the abolition of the state could be achieved spontaneously and immediately through an uprising of the oppressed masses (Mikhail Bakunin) or through the gradual development of mutual aid societies (Pytor Kropotkin). By the end of the 19th century anarchism had ceased to be of much significance in the labour movement except in Spain, where it survived until the end of the Spanish Civil War, and in some parts of Latin America. Thus until 1917 socialists were the main champions of a communist society, though this was a long-term vision, kept in the background, while workers were recruited to the cause mainly because socialist activists concentrated their efforts on practical "bread and butter" issues: on building up trade unions and pursuing clearly defined political goals such as universal suffrage, welfare reforms, and the eight-hour day

The Soviet Model

By 1930 Communism had come to denote an international movement whose fundamental aim was to defend and protect the USSR and whose immediate objective was to replicate, with some inevitable modification due to national differences, the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism in the USSR. In the interwar years the basic assumption of Communists was that political power could only be achieved through an insurrection, and not by electoral and parliamentary means. The circumstances which made such revolution possible could not be determined by the Communists themselves but depended on what Lenin had called the general law of revolution: this would occur only when the ruling class was no longer able to rule and when the oppressed classes were no longer willing to go on in the old ways. The task of the Communist vanguard was to prepare for such eventuality. Only then would the Communists swiftly occupy the centre of power, abolish the bourgeois organs of representative democracy (parliament, etc.) where they existed, and establish a network of assemblies or Soviets somehow co-ordinated by the Communist party itself, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat. In practice this meant that the Communist party would rule the country using the central administration of the state, including the police and the secret services, in order to destroy opposition and prevent the formation of other independent parties or groups. By the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union had become a fully-fledged model