communist essay

What Is Communism? Definition and Examples

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History of Communism

Key principles, communism in practice.

Communism is a political, social, and economic ideology that advocates the replacement of private ownership and profit-based economies with a classless economic system under which the means of production—buildings, machinery, tools, and labor—are communally owned, with private ownership of property either prohibited or severely limited by the state. Because of its opposition to both democracy and capitalism , communism is considered by its advocates to be an advanced form of socialism .

Key Takeaways: Communism

• Communism is a social and political ideology that strives to create a classless society in which all property and wealth are communally owned, instead of owned by individuals.
• The ideology of communism was developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848.
• A true communist society is the opposite of a capitalist society, which relies on democracy, innovation, and the production of goods for profit.
• The Soviet Union and China were prominent examples of communist systems.
• While the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, China drastically reformed its economic system to include many free-market elements of capitalism.

While the term communism was not widely used until the 1840s, societies that could be considered communist were described as early as the 4th century BC by the Greek philosopher Plato. In his Socratic dialogue, Republic, Plato describes an ideal state in which a ruling class of guardians—mainly philosophers and soldiers—serves the needs of the whole community. Because private ownership of property would make them self-seeking, indulgent, greedy, and corrupt, the ruling guardians, Plato argued, had to function as a large communal family that ownership of all material goods, as well as spouses and children.

Religion inspired early visions of voluntary communistic principles. In the Bible’s Book of Acts , for example, the first Christians practiced a simple kind of freely chosen communal living as a way of maintaining solidarity and avoiding the evils associated with the private ownership of worldly possessions. This voluntary communal living did not last long and was not widely practiced outside of Jerusalem, and it cannot be considered equivalent to political communism. In many early monastic orders, monks took vows of poverty requiring them to share their few worldly goods with each other and the poor. Again, this voluntary communal living is not the same as political communism.

In his visionary 1516 work Utopia, English statesman Sir Thomas More describes an imaginary perfect society in which money is abolished and the people share food, houses, and other goods. Contemporary communism was inspired in Western Europe by the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The revolution, which allowed some to attain great wealth at the expense of an increasingly impoverished working class, encouraged Prussian political activist, Karl Marx , to conclude that class struggles resulting from income inequality would inevitably give rise to a society in common ownership of the means of production would allow prosperity to be shared by all.   

In 1848, Marx, along with German economist Friedrich Engels, wrote The Communist Manifesto , in which they concluded that the problems of poverty, disease, and shortened lives that afflicted the proletariat—the working class—could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism. Under communism, as envisioned by Marx and Engels, the major means of industrial production—factories, mills, mines, and railroads—would be publicly owned and operated for the benefit of all.

Marx predicted that a fully realized form of communism following the overthrow of capitalism would result in a communal society free of class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Of his many followers, especially Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin adopted Marx’s visions of a communist society.

During World War II , the Soviet Union joined with other European communist and socialist regimes in fighting the fascist threat posed by Nazi Germany . However, the end of the war also ended the always shaky alliance between the Soviet Union and its more politically moderate Warsaw Pact satellite countries, allowing the USSR to establish communist regimes across Eastern Europe. 

The Russian Revolution of 1917 led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Vladimir Lenin in 1922. By the 1930s, Lenin’s brand of moderate communism had been replaced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which under Joseph Stalin , exerted absolute government control over all aspects of the Russian society. Despite the incalculable human cost of his iron-fisted, authoritarian application of communism, Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower.

After the Second World War, the political tensions of the Cold War and the economic drain of maintaining its status as a global military superpower slowly weakened the Soviet Union’s grip over its Eastern Bloc communist satellite nations, such as East Germany and Poland. By the 1990s, the prevalence of communism as a global political force quickly diminished. Today, only the nations of China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam continue to function as communist states.

While the most widely recognized communist countries, such as the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia, developed their own models which varied from each other over time, six defining characteristics of pure communist ideology are often identified.  

Collective ownership of the means of production: All means of production such as factories, farms, land, mines, transportation, and communication systems are owned and controlled by the state.

Abolition of Private Property: As collective ownership implies, private ownership of means of production is prohibited. In a purely communist state, individual citizens are allowed to own nothing except the necessities of life. The operation of privately owned businesses is similarly prohibited.

Democratic centralism: The official organizing and decision‐making principle of Communist Parties, democratic centralism is a practice in which political decisions, while reached by a nominally democratic voting process, are binding on all members of the party—effectively all citizens. As conceived by Lenin, democratic centralism allows party members to participate in political discussion and state opinions but compels them to follow the Communist Party “line” once a decision has been made.

Centrally planned economy:   Also known as a command economy , a centrally planned economy is an economic system in which a single central authority, typically the government in communist states, makes all decisions regarding the manufacturing and distribution of products. Centrally planned economies are different from free-market economies , such as those in capitalist countries, in which such decisions are made by businesses and consumers according to the factors of supply and demand .

Elimination of income inequality: In theory, by compensating each individual according to their need, gaps in income are eliminated. By abolishing revenue, interest income, profit, income inequality , and socioeconomic class friction is eliminated, and the distribution of wealth is accomplished on a just and fair basis.

Repression: In keeping with the principle of democratic centralism, political opposition and economic freedom are prohibited or repressed. Other basic individual rights and freedoms may also be repressed. Historically, communist states, such as the Soviet Union, were characterized by government control of most aspects of life. “Correct thinking” in adherence with the party line was encouraged by coercive, often threatening propaganda produced by state owned and controlled media.  

Communism vs. Socialism

The exact difference between communism and socialism has long been debated. Even Karl Marx used the terms interchangeably. Marx viewed socialism as the first step in the transition from capitalism to communism. Today, communism is often identified with socialism. However, while they share several characteristics, the two doctrines differ significantly in their goal and how it is achieved.

The goal of communism is the establishment of absolute social equality and the elimination of socioeconomic classes. Achieving this goal requires that private ownership of the means of production be eliminated. All aspects of economic production are controlled by the central government.

In contrast, socialism assumes that social classes will inevitably exist and strives to minimize the differences between them. The government’s power over the means of production under socialism is regulated by democratic citizen participation. Contrary to a common misconception, socialism allows the private ownership of property.

Unlike communism, socialism rewards individual effort and innovation. The most common form of modern socialism, social democracy, works to achieve equal distribution of wealth and other social reforms through democratic processes and typically co-exists alongside a free-market capitalist economy.

Notable examples of communist regimes throughout history include the former Soviet Union, and the modern-day nations of Communist China, Cuba, and North Korea.

Soviet Union

Today, the former Soviet Union is still widely considered the prototypical example of communism in action. Under Joseph Stalin from 1927 to1953, and his successor Nikita Khrushchev from 1953 to 1964, the Soviet Communist Party prohibited all forms of dissent and took control of the “commanding heights” of the Soviet economy, including agriculture, banking, and all means of industrial production. The communist system of central planning enabled rapid industrialization. In 1953, the Soviet Union shocked the world by exploding its first hydrogen bomb . From 1950 to 1965, the Soviet Union’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a faster rate than that of the United States. Overall, however, the Soviet economy grew at a rate much slower than those of its capitalist, democratic counterparts.

During the Cold War, Soviet central economic “Five Year Plans” overemphasized industrial and military production, leading to chronic underproduction of consumer goods. As long lines at understocked grocery stores became a fixture of Soviet life, weak consumer spending became a drag on economic growth. The shortages led to black markets, which while illegal, were allowed and even supported by corrupt leaders within the Communist Party. Growingly dissatisfied with six decades of shortages, corruption, and oppression, the Soviet people demanded reforms to the economic, social, and political system. Undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev starting in 1985, these reform efforts known as perestroika and glasnost , not only failed to halt the economic decline, but they likely hastened the end of the Communist Party by loosening its grip on sources of public dissent. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and by 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 separate republics.

Communist China

In 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist Party gained control of China, joining the Soviet Union as the world's second major Marxist-Leninist state. In its violence, deprivation, and steel-fisted insistence on unquestioned adherence to the Communist Party line, Mao’s rule in China resembled that of Joseph Stalin. Hoping to spark an industrial revolution in China, Mao’s “ Great Leap Forward ” plan of 1958 ordered the rural population to produce impossible quantities of steel by 1962. Instead of useable steel, the plan produced the Great Chinese Famine killed between 15 and 45 million people. In 1966, Mao and his infamous “ Gang of Four ” launched the Chinese Cultural Revolution . Intended to purge China of the “Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—the “purge” resulted in the deaths of at least another 400,000 people by the time of Mao’s death in 1976.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping introduced a series of successful market reforms. Tempted by these reforms, the United States began normalizing diplomatic relations with China when President Richard Nixon visited in 1972. Today, though state-owned enterprises continue to form a large part of the economy, the Chinese Communist Party presides over a largely capitalist system. Freedom of expression is greatly restricted. Elections are banned, except in the former British colony of Hong Kong , where only candidates approved by the Communist Party are allowed to appear on the ballot. 

Formally organized by Fidel Castro in 1965, the Communist Party of Cuba remains the only political party permitted to function in Cuba. In the latest revised Cuban constitution of 1992, the party was defined as the “organized vanguard of the Cuban nation.” By most accounts, communism has left Cuba as one of the world’s least free countries. According to the independent Heritage Foundation, Cuba now ranks 175th in the world for economic freedom—one spot above Venezuela. Before Castro’s takeover, however, Cuba was one of the wealthiest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

In July 2021, the failures of Cuban communism boiled over as thousands of angry Cubans marched in protest to shortages of food, medicine, and energy, and the Cuban government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to what were the largest demonstrations the nation had witnessed in decades, the government killed at least one protester, arrested journalists, and cut off access to social-media internet sites that protesters had been using to communicate. Many analysts agreed that while the protests will result in few immediate changes to Cuba’s one-party communist rule, they put an unprecedented level of pressure on the government to speed up economic and social reforms.

North Korea

Oxford University scholar Robert Service has called North Korea the modern country that most closely follows the communist principles established by Karl Marx. The country adheres to an indigenous ideology of communism known as Juche , first formulated by Kim Il-sung , the founder of modern North Korea. Juche promotes self-reliance and complete independence from the rest of the world. As a result, North Korea is regarded as one of the most isolative and secretive countries in the world. Also in keeping with Juche, the government, ostensibly on the behalf of the people, has complete control over the country’s economy.

In the 1990s, a series of natural disasters, combined with poor agricultural policies, and general economic mismanagement led to a famine that left between 240,000 and 3,500,000 North Koreans dead from starvation. Rather than addressing the obvious needs of its people, the ruling regime continued to invest heavily in its military, now believed to have developed or otherwise obtained nuclear weapons. Today, North Korea functions as a totalitarian dictatorship under its flamboyant current leader Kim Jong-un . Like his ancestral predecessors, the people are trained to revere Kim as a quasi-deity. The news media is under strict government control. With internet access is not generally available to the people, ordinary North Koreans have almost no way of connecting to the outside world. Any hint of political dissent is quickly and punitively crushed, with human rights violations commonplace. While Kim has instituted some minor reforms, North Korea’s economy remains under the tight control of the ruling communist regime.

For all the worries and wars it has caused, true communism as envisioned by Marx and Lenin no longer exists as a serious political force—and may never have.

By 1985, at the height of the Cold War, nearly one-third of the world’s population lived under communism, mostly in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite republics. However, modern scholars doubt that any of these countries were ever truly communist at all since they significantly strayed from many of the basic components of a Marxist system. Indeed, scholars argue that the failure of these Cold War governments to adhere to the true ideals of communism combined with their trend toward left-wing authoritarianism contributed directly to the decline of communism in the late 20th century.

Today, only five countries—China, North Korea, Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam—list communism as their official form of government. They can be classified as communist only because in all of them, the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system. However, none of them have eliminated elements of capitalism such as personal property, money, or socioeconomic class systems as required by true communist ideology.  

In their 2002 book Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR, professors Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, both specialists in Marxian economics, argue that the gut-wrenching tensions of the Cold War were, in fact, an ideological struggle between the private capitalism of the West and the “state-controlled capitalism” of the Soviet Union. Resnick and Wolff conclude that the war between pure communism and pure capitalism never happened. “The Soviets didn’t establish communism,” they wrote. “They thought about it, but never did it.”

Why Communism Failed

Even as pure Marxist communism created opportunities for human rights atrocities by authoritarian leaders, researchers have identified two common factors that contributed to its ultimate failure.

First, under pure communism, the citizens have no incentive to work for a profit. In capitalistic societies, the incentive to produce for profit spurs competition and innovation. In communist societies, however, “ideal” citizens are expected to selflessly devote themselves exclusively to societal causes without regard to their welfare. As Liu Shaoqi, the first Vice-Chairman of the Communist Party of China wrote in 1984, “At all times and all questions a party member should give first consideration to the interests of the Party as a whole and put them in the foremost and place personal matters and interests second.”

In the Soviet Union, for example, in the absence of free legal markets, workers had little incentive to either be productive or to focus on making goods that might be useful to consumers. As result, many workers tried to do as little work as possible on their official government-assigned jobs, devoting their real effort to more profitable black market activity. As many Soviet workers used to say of their relationship with the government, “We pretend to work for them, and they pretend to pay us.”

The second reason for the failure of communism was its inherent inefficiencies. For example, the overly complex centralized planning system required the collection and analysis of enormous amounts of detailed economic data. In many cases, this data was error-prone and manipulated by party-chosen economic planners to create an illusion of progress. Placing so much power in the hands of so few, encouraged inefficiency and corruption. Corruption, laziness, and intense government surveillance left little incentive for industrious and hard-working people. As a result, the centrally planned economy suffered, leaving the people, poor, disillusioned, and dissatisfied with the communist system.

• Service, Robert. “Comrades! A History of World Communism.” Harvard University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780674046993.
• “Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation , 2021, https://www.heritage.org/index/about.
• Bremmer, Ian. “What the Protests in Cuba Mean for the Future of Communism and U.S. Relations.” Time , July 2021, https://time.com/6080934/cuba-protests-future-communism-u-s-relations/.
• Pop-Eleches, Grigore. “Communist Legacies and Left-Authoritarianism.” Princeton University , 2019, https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/gpop/files/communist_leagacies.pdf.
• Stone, William F.  “Authoritarianism: Right and Left.” Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954. Online ISBN 978-1-4613-9180-7.
• Lansford, Thomas. “Communism.” Cavendish Square Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0761426288.
• MacFarlane, S. Neil. “The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World.” Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-081221620.
• Resnick, Stephen A. and Wolff, Richard D. “Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR.” Routledge (July 12, 2002), ISBN-10: ‎0415933188.
• Costello, T. H., Bowes, S. “Clarifying the Structure and Nature of Left-Wing Authoritarianism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 2001, https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq/.
• Shaoqi, Liu. “Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi.” Foreign Languages Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8351-1180-6.
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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Communism is a form of government most closely associated with the ideas of Karl Marx, which he outlined in The Communist Manifesto . Communism is based on the goal of eliminating socioeconomic class struggles by creating a classless society in which everyone shares the benefits of labor and the state controls all property and wealth.

Social Studies, Civics, Economics

Soldiers Marching in Beijing

China is one of just five proclaimed communist nations left. There were many more communist countries in 1973 when this photograph of Chinese soldiers was taken.

Photograph by J. Cuinieres/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Communism is a form of government most frequently associated with the ideas of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who outlined his ideas for a utopian society in The Communist Manifesto , written in 1848. Marx believed that capitalism , with its emphasis on profit and private ownership, led to inequality among citizens. Thus, his goal was to encourage a system that promoted a classless society in which everyone shared the benefits of labor and the state government controlled all property and wealth. No one would strive to rise above others, and people would no longer be motivated by greed. Then, communism would close the gap between rich and poor, end the exploitation of workers, and free the poor from oppression. The basic ideas of communism did not originate with Marx, however. Plato and Aristotle discussed them in ancient times, but Marx developed them into a popular doctrine , which was later propelled into practice. Marx’s ideal society ensured economic equality and fairness. Marx believed that private ownership of property promoted greed, and he blamed capitalism for society’s problems. The problems, he claimed, stemmed from the Industrial  Revolution . The rise of factories, the reliance on machines, and the capability of mass production created conditions that promoted oppression and encouraged the development of a proletariat, or a working class. Simply put, in a capitalist system, the factories fueled the economy, and a wealthy few owned the factories. This created the need for a large number of people to work for the factory owners. In this environment, the wealthy few exploited the laborers, who had to labor in order to live. So, Marx outlined his plan to liberate the proletariat, or to free them of the burden of labor. His idea of utopia was a land where people labored as they were able, and everyone shared the wealth. If the government controlled the economy and the people relinquished their property to the state, no single group of people could rise above another. Marx described this ideal in his Manifesto , but the practice of communism fell far short of the ideal. For a large part of the 20th century, about one-third of the world lived in communist countries—countries ruled by dictatorial leaders who controlled the lives of everyone else. The communist leaders set the wages, they set the prices, and they distributed the wealth. Western capitalist nations fought hard against communism , and eventually, most communist countries collapsed. Marx’s utopia was never achieved, as it required revolution on a global scale, which never came to pass. However, as of 2020, five proclaimed communist countries continue to exist: North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Laos.

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• The Inventory

Why I’m a communist—and why you should be, too

In the short preamble to The Communist Manifesto, one of history’s most widely read texts , you can tell that the authors have had it , right up to their beards. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were clearly sick of explaining that communism was not a synonym for evil or naivety, but a historical stage vital to the flourishing of all. In 1848, they demanded an immediate end to fearful European talk about the “specter” of communism. But, more than a century and a half later, the jittery gossip about communism continues.

Marx may have been one of the world’s most influential thinkers. His work, however, is now barely taught in the West. We might have scant knowledge of Marx these days, but we do retain enormous confidence that his ideas crumbled into dust along with the Berlin Wall .

Well. They didn’t. That wall never contained communism. And, heck, communism contains some ideas that are still very appealing, especially in times such as now when an economic downturn has been felt by so many.

Communism is a system of social organization that has never been truly tried and, these days, never truly explained. Yet it inspires fear in some, derision in others, and an almost universal unconcern for what it is actually intended to convey.

You could read Marx for yourself, of course, and find that his communism is not made from dreary monsters but instead complex reasoning toward a future social evolution. Many of its features may even be acceptable to your conservative aunt, if only she read him, too. But, given that a) Marx is tough, and b) you’re pretty busy making profit for capitalists all day, let’s have a précis.

There have been many significant socialist and communist thinkers, but the fact they largely call themselves Marxist is a tip-off that this guy’s writing—particularly the three volumes of Capital —is foundational. But, you’re busy, and Capital is very long and bound to put you to sleep sometime in Volume 2.

As people who need Marx but have little time to read Marx, we’ll make this quick. Let’s try some subheadings before we transform the world.

What’s the difference between communism, socialism, and liberalism?

First up, you need to suffer one of those tedious passages where we define some terms. Here we go: Socialism and communism and liberalism are not interchangeable words. Just because members of the alt-right hurl these terms from a patchwork Make-America-Great-Again tote bag of insults (which also may include “feminazi,” “social-justice warrior,” and “snowflake”), they have distinct meanings. Although they may see being a “liberal” as identical to being a communist, these are very different categories of thought.

The liberal, whether of a progressive or conservative sort, believes that social problems largely derive from poor individual morals. US presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for example, said our moral intolerance of minorities is the great problem with America; US president Donald Trump said our moral privileging of minorities is the great problem with America.

The communist cannot agree with either proposition. The communist does agree that oppression of minorities is a true problem—vehemently, in fact—but they do not see people’s bad morals as the origin of this. Instead, this oppression is the result of what is called our “mode of production,” which is the way we organize our means for survival. Currently, that system is capitalism. Communism is the critique and the antidote to capitalism, with all its problems, including those of social and cultural division.

A liberal believes that capitalism can be humanized. They use a phrase like “crony capitalism” to suggest that capitalism is only bad when bad people are capitalists. A socialist is skeptical about this. A communist doesn’t believe it at all. In other words, liberals think a few bad apples spoil the supply. A communist thinks that the crate itself is rotten.

A communist is a socialist, but a socialist is not necessarily a communist. A communist believes that socialism is a historical phase that precedes communism and follows capitalism. Socialism is that system where the state is the full or partial owner of all property. Communism is the collective ownership of all property. A socialist might be happy with just moving things around a bit and, say, making sure that investment banks who have behaved reprehensibly aren’t always the first beneficiaries of government welfare .

A communist wants more. A communist seeks the abolition of property, whether held by the state or private firms and citizens; they want all of us to own everything equally and become our own dictators. A communist seeks conditions to end the state entirely and have all human society collectively managed.

The road to communism

To make his argument that the mode of production is the starting point for many of our ideas and life experiences, Marx goes back in time. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx famously wrote. That is to say, the labor of many has ensured the comfort of a few ever since the Neolithic Revolution. This is our struggle.

In a slave economy, most of us are slaves. In a feudal economy, most of us are serfs. In a capitalist economy, we become the servants of a small class of capitalists .

In a slave mode of production, the slave gives all their labor—or what Marx calls “surplus”—to the slave owner. Under feudalism, the serf gave roughly 50% of their surplus to the lord. Under capitalism today, we give a lot of our surplus to our bosses. You may earn your pay in two or three hours, and the rest of your labor is turned to profit by the firm for which you work. If a business fails to make a profit—which it derives from the surplus provided by the worker—it will not be a business for very long.

The progressive liberal believes that if we encourage business owners to be better people, this exploitation will not occur. But the communist believes that the exploitation is inevitable.

You might think the individual will is more powerful than the mode of production that contains it. To this, a communist, particularly one in a bad mood, might counter you with a picture of a Congolese child mining for the rare elements used inside our smartphones. No amount of assertiveness training is going to help that kid succeed. Our mode of production plays a very significant role in the development of that child: Capitalism needs that cheap labor to function. For a communist, the true face of capitalism is this young miner. If we want virtue, it does not, per the liberal belief, “all start with me.” It starts with the mode of production.

A big secret is that Marx was actually quite impressed by capitalism, our current mode of production in this stage of history. As much as he urged the workers of the world to seize their machinery and claim the products and tools of their labor as collective property—he praised capitalism. He saw the abundance it could create and he predicted a time when machines would do much of the boring work and innovation would solve many human problems.

The communist believes that capitalism produces regular crises, and that over time, there is tendency of the rate of profit to fall . in the Marxist view, capitalism is going to run its course as the current mode of production, so we’d better have some communism ready to step in. Because, goodness knows, we certainly get some poor solutions to times of capitalist crisis.

What communism may look like

Consider this your trigger warning for disappointment: There is no blueprint for communism. If we hold with Marx’s view of history as a matter of interplay between what he calls the base (the mode of production) and the superstructure (the law, the culture, the apparatuses of the state, our morals, and, basically, everything else in human society), then we can’t predict with real accuracy where we are being led by the next stage. But we can talk a little about how we might get there.

No transition in the mode of production has ever been smooth, nor has it been particularly quick. The transition in Europe from feudalism to capitalism took even longer than the director’s cut of Titanic . It had its own vanguard: Intellectuals like John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo provided instructions for the leaders of the modern state and its partner economy. It’s useful to note that all these stars of classical economics had died before Marx even learned to read. Yet, theirs are the thoughts on which the poorly functioning neoliberal policy of the present still rests. Theirs are the thoughts on which many lives are ended early or lived in blank servitude.

This is not to say that the seizing of power by socialists eager for the communist stage of history is going to be a picnic. Things started well at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg , but they didn’t continue in this strategic, bloodless mode. A future transfer could be peaceful—even the result of democratic elections—allowing for the possibility in the West of a truly democratic election free from intervention by the capitalist class.

Capitalism had many false starts, and now, in the view of a commie such as myself, it is enduring a very real end. Voters are rejecting its prescriptions in different ways, expressing their frustration by electing authoritarians who promise a fictional version of the past or, as in Spain , Greece , and Scotland , socialists and communists who hint at an unseen future. Just this past week, Jean-Luc Melenchon, a man informed by Marx, won close to 20% of votes in the first round of the French presidential election.

We don’t know what that communist future will look like. We know that our age of automation has created the possibility of free time. We know that we have collectively created the means to sustain all on this planet. But, we also know that we have built this abundance at the cost of environmental devastation. Both climate change and the irrevocable fact of nuclear weapons reduce the original communist hope for collective management of everything; these totalizing threats demands a certain level of totalitarian management. It is my view that an honest communist can now no longer say that the state can be done away with entirely—these true threats require a handful of true bureaucrats to manage them.

But, there is no need for the nation-state to sustain our life, any more than there is a need for profit. A good, productive life for all demands a new and collective mode of production. Or, at the very least, it demands a little of our curiosity. If you no longer believe economists who tell us the “ GDP is up !” even as our incomes decline, perhaps you can give some of your leisure time to confront the specter of communism.

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Essay: LENIN: COMMUNISM’S CHARTER MYTH

THE scene was symbolic and significant: Soviet leaders gathering solemnly, even reverently last week in Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk), where, 100 years ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 22. They had excellent reason to be reverent and grateful, for their formidable aggregate of power still derives from Lenin’s genius and from his achievements as the true architect of Communism. Thus they will invoke his name to legitimize their rule, and adroitly select from his speeches and writings to justify the existing social order. They will cite Lenin to sanctify Russia’s quarrel with China, its invasion of Czechoslovakia and its imperious nuclear stance. Outside Russia, wherever there are Communists, men will also congregate in obeisance to the memory of a man who changed the world beyond recognition. Far more than Marx, Lenin is almost the only symbol shared by the world Communist movement, fragmented as it is today by national, ideological and tactical differences.

“Lenin Lives!” is an incantation that has been ritualistically repeated in Russia since his death in 1924; during this centennial year, the official worship of the Lenin cult has approached religious delirium. The Russian penchant for excesses aside, the existence of such a mystique should hardly surprise the West. Every nation requires what sociologists term a charter myth, meaning a founding father and a founding ideology. In the Soviet Union, the need for a charter myth has been particularly insistent. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 attempted to destroy every traditional institution—political, religious and economic—that had held Russia together since the 15th century. From its inception, moreover, the Soviet system has demanded terrible sacrifices of its people that had to be justified in the name of Lenin’s ideals. While Stalin ruled by mass police terror, the extraordinary achievement of the Soviet people in industrializing and defending their nation could only be fully explained as an act of faith.

The Remote Invocation

Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia’s present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin’s closest Bolshevik comrades—Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev—were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin’s death in 1924 through Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father.

Besides, it seems to be a law of Communist history that the more remote from Leninism the Soviet system becomes, the greater is the effort made to invoke him. Thus the less that Russian leaders are interested in fomenting world revolution and the less that they are concerned with creating a Communist society as Lenin saw it, the greater the volume of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin’s real remoteness is underscored by the problems with which a great power must struggle in an age of computer technology. Just as Lenin discovered that there was little in Marx to tell him how to rule Russia once he had seized power, so there is little in Lenin to tell Brezhnev how to build an ABM system.

The Lenin myth portrays him as the master theoretician of Communist revolutions. In fact, not one successful 20th century revolution—not even the Russian—followed the pattern that Lenin advocated. As he saw it, small bands of professional revolutionaries would inspire the masses and lead them in forcibly overthrowing established regimes. This was his hope as he waited in self-imposed exile in Western Europe around the turn of the century. There, amid endless quarrels with rival Socialist exiles, he created his own cadre of disciples who expected revolutions to break out in Europe and then spread throughout the world. Lenin’s journal Iskra (The Spark), was printed abroad and smuggled into Russia. “Out of this spark,” grandly proclaimed the first issue, “will come a conflagration.”

As the years passed and the spark failed to light any major fires, he grew discouraged. Six weeks before the February 1917 revolution, which would depose Czar Nicholas II, Lenin, then 46, told a group of young Socialists in Zurich: “We old people will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.” Less than a year later, he was established as the heir of the Romanovs.

The February revolution, Russia’s only spontaneous popular uprising, created a constitutional government that Lenin despised. He viewed it as “giving power to the bourgeoisie, because of the proletariat’s insufficient awareness and organization.” In his immediate shock over the revolution, he even described it as a plot by France and England to prevent Russia from signing a peace treaty with Germany. Lenin may have been unprepared for this momentous turning point, but he had the political genius to capitalize on it. He persuaded the Bolsheviks—a band of perhaps 20,000 disciplined revolutionaries in a population of 150 million—to destroy the ineffectual provisional government of Socialist Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, which was giving Russia its only democratic moment in history.

As Lenin put it, the Bolshevik seizure of power during the ten world-shaking days of October 1917 was “as easy as lifting a feather.” Lenin and his ideas did not arouse the masses to overthrow an exploiting regime, as his early scenario had called for. Instead, he simply but effectively thrust himself into the vacuum of power that had been created by the disintegration of the Russian state and society. In the name of building socialism, he overthrew the “bourgeois” liberties that Russia had barely begun to enjoy, convinced that he knew what was best for the people. “The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator,” he explained in 1918. “Soviet socialist democracy is not in the least incompatible with individual rule and dictatorship.”

Lenin did not start the revolution, but he knew how to harness its spontaneous, anarchic forces and to establish his authority by sheer organization. “Our fighting method is organization,” Lenin proclaimed. “We must organize everything.” When he had attained power, he evolved a network of interlocking organizations—trade unions, youth groups, administrative hierarchies, control commissions, agitation and propaganda centers—with the party as its nucleus. Before anyone else in history, he recognized the limitless potential of political and social engineering to reach into every aspect of a people’s life and transform it. The durability and power of the Soviet regime testify to Lenin’s essential genius as the theoretician of political organization.

Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington observes, “Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin.” Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised—some would say subverted—the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant country—thereby turning Communism into a practical program that could be applied to the underdeveloped world rather than to Europe alone. The economics of Marxism are hopelessly antiquated today, and its appeal as a secular religion is surpassed by that of nationalism. That Marxism continues to survive as a movement is a tribute to Lenin, who transformed a social theory into a plan of political action.

Instrument of Tyranny

Lenin always considered the coercive system he built as a temporary necessity. It is, of course, true that Lenin’s ultimate goal was the liberation of humanity, and the creation of an egalitarian Utopia when the state, as envisioned by Marx, had withered away. Yet it was under Lenin that the CHEKA was created—the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands of detachments of Bolsheviks forcibly requisitioned grain and other products. It was Lenin who, after the 1920 Bolshevik victory in the civil war, turned his full attention to building the gigantic machinery of rule that served as the instrument of Russia’s new autocracy and, ultimately, of Stalin’s tyranny.

In 1923, after a stroke effectively removed him from power, he seems to have grown horrified by much of what he had wrought. From his sick room he railed against the strangulating Soviet bureaucracy and denounced the “Russian chauvinism” that he saw crushing the rights of national minorities. In his testament, which has never been published in Russia, he wrote that Stalin “concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not certain he can always use this power with sufficient caution.” In a final postscript to his will, he vainly pleaded that Stalin be removed as general secretary of the party.

Inexorably, the question arises of Lenin’s responsibility for the horrors of the Stalin era. Probably the essential difference between the two leaders was that Lenin considered coercion as a temporary weapon in Socialism’s struggle against its enemies, while Stalin applied it as a method of everyday rule. Yet the fact remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor’s crimes possible: “Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle.” Here is the 20th century extension of Ivan Karamazov’s doctrine that “if there is no God, everything is permitted.” Indeed, Stalin was to Lenin what Smerdyakov was to Ivan, the murderer who made his half brother’s deadly aphorism come true.

As all the factions of the world Communist movement join the Russians in celebrating Lenin’s birthday, the Lenin who emerges in centennial rhetoric varies sharply in Peking, Rome, Belgrade and Moscow. In China, they cite the Lenin who denounced Czarist Russian expansionism in the Far East, who stressed the threat to revolutionary purity in the unbridled development of bureaucracy, and who believed in the inevitability of world revolution. In Rome, it is the Lenin who stood for every nation’s right to self-determination, who observed that when you scratch a Russian Communist, you will find a Russian chauvinist, and who said that Western Communists would do a better job of building Communism than the Russians. In his own country, he is the Lenin who said, “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification,” who thought Russia’s main duty to international Communism was to transform itself into a mighty industrial society, and who was profoundly intolerant of any dissent from party policy.

All these Lenins and more are genuine. No other modern leader has combined in one person so many different and often contradictory views and impulses. Yet it is impossible to believe that all who call upon his varying ideas would meet with Lenin’s approval. Although something of a campus radical at the University of Kazan, he would no doubt excoriate the passionate bomb throwers of America’s S.D.S. and other extremist groups as dangerous amateurs, afflicted with the “infantile disease of leftism.” Almost certainly, he would be highly suspicious of Tito’s reliance on a market economy and private farming, bewildered by Castro’s wild-eyed barbudos, and appalled by Che’s adventuristic forays in Latin America. Although he took a certain satisfaction in being revered as the Marx of the 20th century, Lenin was a man of personal modesty; he might well consider the cult of Chairman Mao a trifle excessive. He would be contemptuous of the intellectual poverty of his successors in the Kremlin, and despise their grossly simplistic reiterations of his ideas. Their chauvinism and anti-Semitism would enrage him. The expansion of Communist systems to more than one-third of the globe would please him; the quarrels between Communist countries, verging on armed conflict, would shatter his dream that the victory of revolution would bring peace among nations.

A Many-Faced Lenin

History, as Adam Ulam of Harvard observes, may have vindicated Lenin’s tactics, but it has also repudiated his hopes. History has also affected his contemporary relevance. If his criticisms of bourgeois society retain a certain validity for many, his remedies have proved worse than the ills they are intended to cure. Beyond that, the viability of Lenin’s thought has been affected by social changes he did not, indeed could not, account for. Like many another Marxist, he grossly underrated the productive vitality and capacity for change in what he considered a moribund capitalist world. Lenin also did not have to confront today’s youth. There is a fine irony in the fact that in many nations the revolutionary party he helped create is regarded as reactionary by the anti-Establishment young—witness the ferocious diatribes against French Communism by students involved in the May 1968 revolt. The newest revolutionary impulse is not economic or political but romantic and sensual (at its mildest) or anarchic (at its harshest). The young rebels oppose material progress and the very principle of organization—including Communist organization.

Lenin’s heirs in Russia do not face this kind of opposition as yet. Nonetheless they are also caught by the contradictory force of middle-class consumer appetites for a better, wider life and by the insistent demands of the creative and scientific intelligentsia for greater freedoms. It is more than likely that both the Western and Communist nations have entered a new historical period. If Soviet leaders choose to react to it by being flexible and granting greater freedoms, they will be able to find chapter and verse in Lenin to justify their course. If they react to it—as seems far more likely—by further repression, that too will be ratified by the appropriate citations from the charter myth. Lenin’s ultimate impact on his country will be decided by lesser men, whose only superiority over him is that they are alive in 1970.

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“The Manifesto of the Communist Party” Essay (Critical Writing)

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The abstract under analysis was taken from the manuscript written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and called “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”. This work in known as one of the most significant political writings as it explores the issue of class differences and struggle in the society that was especially meaningful during the 1840s-50s when the revolutions and uprisings started to take over the European countries. The authors of this manuscript provided their own explanation of the nature of the society, the gap between classes as its ever-present historical characteristic, and the predicted development and failure of the capitalist way of life.

“The Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by two German philosophers driven by their materialist approach to the concepts of society and politics. The work was created during quite an unstable time of the Western European history. This period is characterized by a series of revolutionary movements that occurred in several European countries within just several years. The causes of the public dissatisfaction were multiple.

First of all, the rapid development of industrialization all over Europe created a larger community of laborers whose income was quite low and unmatched to the contribution they made to the prosperity of their nations. At the same time, a wave of hunger, low harvest, and food scarcity struck a number of countries and brought starvation, poverty, and desperation among the peasants and laborers. Feudal order that dominated Europe became seriously endangered when the hungry peasants attacked the ruling class. 1

The prices for food and growing taxes served as the main triggers for the uprisings in Berlin, Krakow, Milan, Sicily, Vienna, and Paris. The composition of the rebelling crowds all around Europe was the same – students, peasants, landless citizens, factory workers. All of them fought for the establishment of democracy and civil rights, the abolition of serfdom. 2 In other words, capitalist built of the society was attacked by the hungry laborers tired of the growing gap between the rich and the poor social classes.

The manifesto begins with the preamble and then is divided into four chapters: “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, “Proletarians and Communists”, “Socialist and Communist Literature”, and “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties”. The passage discussed in this essay is located at the end of the first chapter. Chapter one begins with the claim that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” 3 .

This statement outlines the main subject the authors are concerned with throughout the writing. Marx and Engels begin their manifesto familiarizing the reader with various examples of class inequalities and struggle from the earlier human history to support their initial claim. Further, they compare the society of their time with all the previous illustrations and conclude that it is still filled with class antagonisms. The authors evaluate the rule of the bourgeoisie as the major push towards the advancement of economies, international relations, markets, and technologies, but, at the same time, they point out that it resulted in total exploitation of the people. 4

Next, Marx and Engels emphasize that the bourgeoisie has facilitated its own decay creating the proletarian class turning the proletarians against the rulers. 5 The selected passage draws a conclusion to the discussion leading up to it and says that the bourgeoisie is unfit for the modern world. The passage right below it is the last to the first chapter, and it states that the downfall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletarians are inevitable.

The passage is important to the work because it summarizes the points the authors used to persuade the reader and support their initial claim. After all the arguments concerning the development and decay of the bourgeoisie and the uprising of the proletarians are laid out, the authors sum them up in this passage making a conclusion regarding the present and the nearest future of both classes. That way, the previous passages comprise the thesis statement, background, and the explanation, whereas the passage under analysis serves as the dénouement and the conclusion.

The value of the manifesto by Marx and Engels is immense. Within the period when it was written, the work provided a clear and detailed explanation of the crises the Europe was dealing with, its causes, and even the future outcomes. The authors delivered a professional analysis of the historical, social, economic, and political events of the time. Besides, the work is written in a very comprehensible matter and is logically built. It begins with a claim, moves on to the background and arguments that support it, and ends with a clear conclusion that includes recommendations and implications of the events.

Marx and Engels leave no room for arguments regarding their point of view and analysis. Their arguments include multiple characteristics of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Besides, even though the authors speak against the bourgeoisie, they avoid bias and describe this class mentioning its advantages and achievements as well as its failures. Overall, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” is a scholarly view on the events in Europe of the 1840s rather than a subjective promotion of communism.

Bibliography

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, “ The Manifesto of the Communist Party .” Marxists. 2015. Web.

Smitha, Frank E. “ Revolutions in 1848. ” Macrohistory . Web.

• Frank E. Smitha, “Revolutions in 1848,” Macrohistory . Web.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marxists. 2015. Web.
• Civil Disobedience: Advantages and Disadvantages
• Liberalism: History, Ideologies, Justification
• Boyer's The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto
• Communist Manifesto, Time and Social Issues
• Marxist Theories of History: Pros and Cons
• Obedience and Disobedience to Authority
• What Is the Point of Equality Theory?
• Socialism: H. White's and J. Keynes' Ideas
• The Nation-State Today: Arguments by Mann and Meadwell
• Habeas Corpus: History, Evolution and Significance
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Richard Nixon

The meaning of communism to americans: study paper by richard m. nixon, vice president, united states of america.

The major problem confronting the people of the United States and free peoples everywhere in the last half of the 20th century is the threat to peace and freedom presented by the militant aggressiveness of international communism. A major weakness in this struggle is lack of adequate understanding of the character of the challenge which communism presents.

I am convinced that we are on the right side in this struggle and that we are well ahead now in its major aspects. But if we are to maintain our advantage and assure victory in the struggle, we must develop, not only among the leaders, but among the people of the free world a better understanding of the threat which confronts us.

The question is not one of being for or against communism. The time is long past when any significant number of Americans contend that communism is no particular concern of theirs. Few can still believe that communism is simply a curious and twisted philosophy which happens to appeal to a certain number of zealots but which constitutes no serious threat to the interests or ideals of free society.

The days of indifference are gone. The danger today in our attitude toward communism is of a very different kind. It lies in the fact that we have come to abhor communism so much that we no longer recognize the necessity of understanding it.

We see the obvious dangers. We recognize that we must retain our present military and economic advantage over the Communist bloc, an advantage which deters a hot war and which counters the Communist threat in the cold war. In the fields of rocket technology and space exploration, we have risen to the challenge and we will keep the lead that we have gained. There is no question that the American people generally will support whatever programs our leaders initiate in these fields.

What we must realize is that this struggle probably will not be decided in the military, economic, or scientific areas, important as these are. The battle in which we are engaged is primarily one of ideas. The test is one not so much of arms but of faith.

If we are to win a contest of ideas we must know their ideas as well as our own. Our knowledge must not be superficial. We cannot be content with simply an intuition that communism is wrong. It is not enough to rest our case alone on the assertions, true as they are, that communism denies God, enslaves men, and destroys justice.

We must recognize that the appeal of the Communist idea is not to the masses, as the Communists would have us believe, but more often to an intelligent minority in newly developing countries who are trying to decide which system offers the best and surest road to progress.

We must cut through the exterior to the very heart of the Communist idea. We must come to understand the weaknesses of communism as a system - why after more than 40 years on trial it continues to disappoint so many aspirations, why it has failed in its promise of equality in abundance, why it has produced a whole library of disillusionment and a steady stream of men, women, and children seeking to escape its blight.

But we must also come to understand its strength - why it has so securely entrenched itself in the U.S.S.R., why it has been able to accomplish what it has in the field of education and science, why in some of the problem areas of the world it continues to appeal to leaders aspiring to a better life for their people.

It is to find the answers to these questions that in this statement I want to discuss communism as an idea - its economic philosophy, its philosophy of law and politics, its philosophy of history.

This statement will admittedly not be simple because the subject is complex.

It will not be brief because nothing less than a knowledge in depth of the Communist idea is necessary if we are to deal with it effectively.

In discussing the idea I will not offer programs to meet it. I intend in a later statement to discuss the tactics and vulnerabilities of the Communist conspiracy and how we can best fashion a strategy for victory.

I anticipate that some might understandably ask the question - why such a lengthy discussion of communism when everybody is against it already?

If the free world is to win this struggle, we must have men and women who not only are against communism but who know why they are against it and who know what they are going to do about it. Communism is a false idea, and the answer to a false idea is truth, not ignorance.

One of the fundamentals of the Communist philosophy is a belief that societies pass inevitably through certain stages. Each of these stages is supposed to generate the necessity for its successor. Feudalism contained within its loins the seed of capitalism; capitalism was, in other words, to supplant feudalism. Capitalism, in turn, moves inevitably toward a climax in which it will be supplanted by its appointed successor, communism. All of these things are matters of necessity and there is nothing men can do to change the inflexible sequence which history imposes.

It is a part of this philosophy that, as society moves along its predestined way, each stage of development is dominated by a particular class. Feudalism was dominated by the aristocracy; capitalism by something called the bourgeoisie; communism by the proletariat. During any particular stage of society's development the whole of human life within that society is run and rigged for the benefit of the dominant class; no one else counts for anything and the most he can expect is the leftover scraps. In the end, of course, with the final triumph of communism, classes will disappear - what was formerly the proletariat will expand so that it is the only class, and, since there are no longer any outsiders that it can dominate, there will in effect be no classes at all.

Now this theory of successive stages of development makes it clear that, if we are to understand communism, we must understand the Communist view of capitalism, for, according to Communist theory, capitalism contains within itself the germs of communism. The Communist notion of capitalism is that it is a market economy, an economy of "free trade, free selling and buying," to quote the manifesto again. It follows from this that, since communism inevitably supplants and destroys capitalism, it cannot itself be anything like market economy.

The fundamental belief of the Communist economic philosophy therefore is a negative one; namely, a belief that, whatever the economic system of mature communism may turn out to be, it cannot be a market economy; it cannot - in the words of the Communist Manifesto - be an economy based on "free trade, free selling and buying."

It may be well at this point to digress for the purpose of recalling the curious fact that the literature of communism contains so many praises for the achievements of capitalism. The manifesto contains these words about the market economy of capitalism and its alleged overlords, the bourgeoisie:

It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades. * * * The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years (the manifesto speaks from the year 1848), has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

Marx and Engels could afford this praise for capitalism because they supposed it would everywhere be succeeded by communism, a stage of society whose glories would in turn dwarf all the achievements of capitalism. Communism would build on capitalism and bring a new economy that would make the capitalist world look like a poorhouse. Those who constituted the dominant class of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, would have performed their historic mission and would be dismissed from the scene - dismissed without thanks, of course, for after all they only accomplished what was foreordained by the forces of history, forces that were now to throw them into the discard like the husk of a sprouting seed.

One of the most startling gaps in the Communist theory is the lack of any clear notion of how a Communist economy would be organized. In the writings of the great founders of communism there is virtually nothing on this subject. This gap was not an oversight, but was in fact a necessary consequence of the general theory of communism. That theory taught, in effect, that as a society moves inevitably from one level of development to another, there is no way of knowing what the next stage will demand until in fact it has arrived. Communism will supplant and destroy the market economy of capitalism. What will its own economy be like? That we cannot know until we are there and have a chance to see what the world looks like without any institution resembling an economic market. The manifesto, in fact, expresses a deep contempt for "utopian socialists" who propose "an organization of society specially contrived" by them, instead of waiting out the verdict of history and depending on the "spontaneous class organization of the proletariat." The Communist economy would organize itself according to principles that would become apparent only when the arena had been cleared of the market principle.

Operating then, in this vacuum of guidance left behind by their prophets, how did the founders of the Soviet Union proceed to organize their new economy? The answer is that they applied as faithfully as they could the teachings of their masters. Since those teachings were essentially negative, their actions had to have the same quality. They started by attempting to root out from the Russian scene every vestige of the market principle, even discouraging the use of money, which they hoped soon to abolish altogether. The production and distribution of goods were put under central direction, the theory being that the flow of goods would be directed by social need without reference to principles of profit and loss. This experiment began in 1919 and came to an abrupt end in March of 1921. It was a catastrophic failure. It brought with it administrative chaos and an almost inconceivable disorder in economic affairs, culminating in appalling shortages of the most elementary necessities.

Competent scholars estimate its cost in Russian lives at 5 million. The official Russian version of this experiment does not deny that it was an enormous failure. It attributes that failure to inexperience and to a mythical continuation of military operations, which had in fact almost wholly ceased. Meanwhile the Russian economy has been moving steadily toward the market principle.

The flow of labor is controlled by wages, so that the price of labor is itself largely set by market forces. The spread from top to bottom of industrial wages is in many cases wider than it is in this country. Managerial efficiency is promoted by substantial economic incentives in the form of bonuses and even more substantial perquisites of various kinds. Enterprises are run on a profit and loss basis. Indeed, there are all the paraphernalia of an advanced commercial society, with lawyers, accountants, balance sheets, taxes of many kinds, direct and indirect, and finally even the pressures of a creeping inflation.

The allocation of resources in Russia probably now comes about as close to being controlled by the market principle as is possible where the government owns all the instruments of production. Russian economists speak learnedly of following the "Method of Balances."

This impressive phrase stands for a very simple idea. It means that in directing production and establishing prices an effort is made to come out even, so that goods for which there is an insufficient demand will not pile up, while shortages will not develop in other fields where demand exceeds supply. The "Method of Balances" turns out to be something a lot of us learned about in school as the law of supply and demand.

All of this is not to say that the Russian economy has fully realized the market principle. There are two obstacles that block such a development. The first lies in the fact that there is a painful tension between what has to be done to run the economy efficiently and what ought to be happening according to orthodox theory. The result is that the Russian economist has to be able to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. He has to be prepared at all times for sudden shifts of the party line. If today he is condemned as an "unprincipled revisionist" who apes capitalist methods, tomorrow he may be jerked from the scene for having fallen into a "sterile orthodoxy", not realizing that Marxism is a developing and creative science.

The other obstacle to the realization of a free market lies in the simple fact that the government owns the whole of industry. This means, for one thing, that the industrial units are huge, so that all of steel, or all of cosmetics, for example, is under a single direction. This naturally creates the economic condition known as oligopoly and the imperfectly functioning market which attends that condition.

Furthermore, a realization of the market principle would require the managers of the various units of industry to act as if they were doing something they are not, that is, as if they were directing independent enterprises. Understandably there is a considerable reluctance to assume this fictitious role, since the manager's reward for an inconvenient independence may well be a trip to Siberia where he is likely nowadays, they say, to be made chief bookkeeper in a tiny power plant 300 miles from the nearest town. Meanwhile, a constant theme of complaint by Moscow against the managers is that they are too "cousinly" with one another and that they are too addicted to "back scratching." They ought to be acting like capitalist entrepreneurs, but they find this a little difficult when they are all working for the same boss.

One of the most familiar refrains of Communist propaganda is that "capitalism is dying of its internal contradictions." In fact, it would be hard to imagine a system more tortured by internal contradictions than present-day Russia. It constantly has to preach one way and act another. When Russian economists and managers discover that they have to do something that seems to contradict the prophets, they usually don't know which of three justifications - all hazardous - they ought to attempt: (1) to explain their action as a temporary departure from Marxist propriety to be corrected in a more propitious future; (2) to show that what they are doing can be justified by the inherited text if it is read carefully and between the lines; or (3) to invoke the cliché that Marxism is a progressive science that learns by experience - we can't after all, expect Marx, Engels, and Lenin to have foreseen everything.

These inner tensions and perplexities help to explain the startling "shifts in the party line" that characterize all of the Communist countries. It is true that these shifts sometimes reflect the outcome of a subterranean personal power struggle within the party. But we must remember that they also at times result from the struggles of conscientious men trying to fit an inconvenient text to the facts of reality.

The yawning gap in Communist theory, by which it says nothing about how the economy shall be run except that it shall not be by the market principle, will continue to create tensions, probably of mounting intensity, within and among the Communist nations. The most painful compromise that it has so far necessitated occurred when it was decided that trade among the satellite countries should be governed by the prices set on the world market.

This embarrassing concession to necessity recognized, on the one hand, that a price cannot be meaningful unless it is set by something like a market, and, on the other, the inability of the Communist system to develop a reliable pricing system within its own government-managed economy.

The Communist theory has now had a chance to prove itself by an experience extending over two generations in a great nation of huge human and material resources. What can we learn from this experience? We can learn, first of all, that it is impossible to run an advanced economy successfully without resort to some variant of the market principle. In time of war, when costs are largely immaterial and all human efforts converge on a single goal, the market principle can be subordinated. In a primitive society, where men live on the verge of extinction and all must be content with the same meager ration, the market principle largely loses its relevance. But when society's aim is to satisfy divers human wants and to deploy its productive facilities in such a way as to satisfy those wants in accordance with their intensity - their intensity as felt by those who have the wants - there is and can be no substitute for the market principle. This the Russian experience proves abundantly. That experience also raises serious doubt whether the market principle can be realized within an economy wholly owned by the government.

The second great lesson of the Russian experience is of deeper import. It is that communism is utterly wrong about its most basic premise, the premise that underlies everything it has to say about economics, law, philosophy, morality, and religion. Communism starts with the proposition that there are no universal truths or general truths of human nature. According to its teachings there is nothing one human age can say to another about the proper ordering of society or about such subjects as justice, freedom, and equality. Everything depends on the stage of society and the economic class that is in power at a particular time.

In the light of this fundamental belief - or rather, this unbending and all-pervasive disbelief - it is clear why communism had to insist that what was true for capitalism could not be true for communism. Among the truths scheduled to die with capitalism was the notion that economic life could be usefully ordered by a market. If this truth seems still to be alive, orthodox Communist doctrine has to label it as an illusion, a ghost left behind by an age now being surpassed. At the present time this particular capitalist ghost seems to have moved in on the Russian economy and threatens to become a permanent guest at the Communist banquet. Let us hope it will soon be joined by some other ghosts, such as freedom, political equality, religion, and constitutionalism.

This brings me to the Communist view of law and politics. Of the Communist legal and political philosophy, we can almost say that there is none. This lack is, again, not an accident, but is an integral part of the systematic negations which make up the Communist philosophy.

According to Marx and Engels, the whole life of any society is fundamentally determined by the organization of its economy. What men will believe; what gods, if any, they will worship; how they will choose their leaders or let their leaders choose themselves; how they will interpret the world about them - all of these are basically determined by economic interests and relations. In the jargon of communism: religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law constitute a superstructure which reflects the underlying economic organization of a particular society. It follows that subjects which fall within the superstructure permit of no general truths; for example, what is true for law and political science under capitalism cannot be true under communism.

I have said we can almost assert that there is no Communist philosophy of law and political science. The little there is can be briefly stated. It consists in the assumption that after the revolution there will be a dictatorship (called the dictatorship of the proletariat) and that this dictatorship will for a while find it necessary to utilize some of the familiar political and legal institutions, such as courts. (There is an incredibly tortured literature about just how these institutions are to be utilized and with what modifications.) When, however, mature communism is achieved, law and the state, in the consecrated phrase, "will wither away." There will be no voting, no parliaments, no judges, no policemen, no prisons - no problems. There will simply be factories and fields and a happy populace peacefully reveling in the abundance of their output.

As with economic theory, there was a time in the history of the Soviet regime when an attempt was made to take seriously the absurdities of this Communist theory of law and state. For about a decade during the thirties an influential doctrine was called the commodity exchange theory of law. According to this theory, the fundamental fact about capitalism is that it is built on the economic institution of exchange. In accordance with the doctrine of the superstructure, all political and legal institutions under capitalism must therefore be permeated and shaped by the concept of exchange. Indeed, the theory went further. Even the rules of morality are based on exchange, for is there not a kind of tacit deal implied even in the Golden Rule, "Do unto others, as you would be done by"? Now the realization of communism, which is the negation of capitalism, requires the utter rooting out of any notion of exchange in the Communist economy. But when exchange has disappeared, the political, legal, and moral superstructure that was built on it will also disappear. Therefore, under mature communism there will not only be no capitalistic legal and political institutions, there will be no law whatever, no state, no morality - for all of these in some measure reflect the underlying notion of an exchange or deal among men.

The high priest of this doctrine was Eugene Pashukanis. His reign came to an abrupt end in 1937 as the inconvenience of his teachings began to become apparent. With an irony befitting the career of one who predicted that communism would bring an end to law and legal processes, Pashukanis was quietly taken off and shot without even the semblance of a trial.

As in the case of economics, since Pashukanis' liquidation there has developed in Russian intellectual life a substantial gray market for capitalistic legal and political theories. But where Russian economists seem ashamed of their concessions to the market principle, Russian lawyers openly boast of their legal and political system, claiming for it that it does everything that equivalent bourgeois institutions do, only better. This boast has to be muted somewhat, because it still remains a matter of dogma that under mature communism, law and the state will disappear. This embarrassing aspect of their inherited doctrine the Soviet theorists try to keep as much as possible under the table. They cannot, however, openly renounce it without heresy, and heresy in the Soviet Union, be it remembered, still requires a very active taste for extinction.

One of the leading books on Soviet legal and political theory is edited by a lawyer who is well known in this country, the late Andrei Vyshinsky. In the table-pounding manner he made famous in the U.N., Vyshinsky praises Soviet legal and political institutions to the skies and contrasts their wholesome purity with the putrid vapors emanating from the capitalist countries. He points out, for example, that in Russia the voting age is 18, while in many capitalist countries it is 21.

The capitalists thus disenfranchise millions of young men and women because, says Vyshinsky, it is feared they may not yet have acquired a properly safe bourgeois mentality. As one reads arguments like this spelled out with the greatest solemnity, and learns all about the "safeguards" of the Soviet Constitution, it comes as a curious shock to find it openly declared that in the Soviet Union only one political party can legally exist and that the Soviet Constitution is "the only constitution in the world which frankly declares the directing role of the party in the state."

One wonders what all the fuss about voting qualifications is about if the voters are in the end permitted only to vote for the candidates chosen by the only political party permitted to exist. The plain fact is, of course, that everything in the Soviet Constitution relating to public participation in political decisions is a facade concealing the real instrument of power that lies in the Communist Party. It has been said that hypocrisy is vice's tribute to virtue. The holding of elections in which the electorate is given no choice may similarly be described as an attempt by communism to salve its uneasy conscience. Knowing that it cannot achieve representative democracy, it seems to feel better if it adopts its empty forms.

When one reflects on it, it is an astounding thing that a great and powerful nation in the second half of the 20th century should still leave its destinies to be determined by intraparty intrigue, that it should have developed no political institutions capable of giving to its people a really effective voice in their Government, that it should lack any openly declared and lawful procedure by which the succession of one ruler to another could be determined. Some are inclined to seek an explanation for this condition in Russian history with its bloody and irregular successions of czars. But this is to forget that even in England, the mother of parliaments, there were once in times long gone by some pretty raw doings behind palace walls and some unseemly and even bloody struggles for the throne.

But where other nations have worked gradually toward stable political institutions guaranteeing the integrity of their governments, Russia has remained in a state of arrested development. That state will continue until the Russian leaders have the courage to declare openly that the legal and political philosophy of Marx, Engles, and Lenin is fundamentally mistaken and must be abandoned.

How heavy the burden of the inherited Communist philosophy is becomes clear when the concept of law itself is under discussion. Throughout the ages, among men of all nations and creeds, law has generally been thought of as a curb on arbitrary power. It has been conceived as a way of substituting reason for force in the decision of disputes, thus liberating human energies for the pursuit of aims more worthy of man's destiny than brute survival or the domination of one's fellows. No one has supposed that these ideals have ever been fully realized in any society. Like every human institution, law is capable of being exploited for selfish purposes and of losing its course through a confusion of purposes. But during most of the world's history, men have thought that the questions worthy of discussion were how the institutions of law could be shaped so that they might not be perverted into instruments of power or lose the sense of their high mission through sloth or ignorance.

What is the Communist attitude toward this intellectual enterprise in which so many great thinkers of so many past ages have joined? Communism consigns all of it to the ashcan of history as a fraud and delusion, beneath the contempt of Communist science. How, then, is law defined today in Russia? We have an authoritative answer. It is declared to be "the totality of the rules of conduct expressing the will of the dominant class, designed to promote those relationships that are advantageous and agreeable to the dominant class."

Law in the Soviet Union is not conceived as a check on power, it is openly and proudly an expression of power. In this conception surely, if anywhere, the bankruptcy of communism as a moral philosophy openly declares itself.

It is vitally important to emphasize again that all of the truly imposing absurdities achieved by Communist thought - in whatever field: in economics, in politics, in law, in morality - that all of these trace back to a single common source. That origin lies in a belief that nothing of universal validity can be said of human nature, that there are no principles, values, or moral truths that stand above a particular age or a particular phase in the evolution of society. This profound negation lies at the very heart of the Communist philosophy and gives to it both its motive force and its awesome capacity for destruction.

It is this central negation that makes communism radically inconsistent with the ideal of human freedom. As with other bourgeois virtues, once dismissed contemptuously, Soviet writers have now taken up the line that only under communism can men realize "true freedom." This line may even have a certain persuasiveness for Russians in that individuals tend to prize those freedoms they are familiar with and not to miss those they have never enjoyed. A Russian transplanted suddenly to American soil might well feel for a time "unfree" in the sense that he would be confronted with the burden of making choices that he was unaccustomed to making and that he would regard as onerous. But the problem of freedom goes deeper than the psychological conditioning of any particular individual. It touches the very roots of man's fundamental conception of himself.

The Communist philosophy is basically inconsistent with the ideal of freedom because it denies that there can be any standard of moral truth by which the actions of any given social order may be judged. If the individual says to government, "Thus far may you go, but no farther," he necessarily appeals to some principle of rightness that stands above his particular form of government. It is precisely the possibility of any such standard that communism radically and uncomprisingly denies. Marx and Engels had nothing but sneers for the idea that there are "eternal truths, such as freedom, justice, etc., that are common to all states of society."

They contend that there are no eternal truths. All ideas of right and wrong come from the social system under which one lives. If that system requires tyranny and oppression, then tyranny and oppression must within that system be accepted; there can be no higher court of appeal.

Not only do the premises of Communist philosophy make any coherent theory of freedom impossible, but the actual structure of the Soviet regime is such that no true sense of freedom can ever develop under it. To see why this is so, it is useful to accept the Communist ideology provisionally and reason the matter out purely in terms of what may be called human engineering. Let us concede that a struggle for political power goes on in all countries and let us assume in keeping with Marxist views that this struggle has absolutely nothing to do with right and wrong. Even from this perversely brutal point of view, it is clear why a sense of freedom can never develop under the Soviet regime. In a constitutional democracy the struggle for political power is assigned to a definite arena; it is roped off, so to speak, from the rest of life. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there is no clear distinction between politics and economics, or between politics and other human activities. No barriers exist to define what is a political question and what is not. Instead of being ordered and canalized as it is in constitutional democracies, the struggle for political power in Russia pervades, or can at any time pervade, every department of life. For this reason there is no area of human interest - the intellectual, literary, scientific, artistic, or religious - that may not at any time become a battleground of this struggle.

Take, for example, the situation of a Soviet architect. Today without doubt he enjoys a certain security; he is not likely to lie awake fearing the dread knock at the door at midnight. Furthermore, he may now see opening before him in the practice of his profession a degree of artistic freedom that his predecessors did not enjoy. But he can never be sure that he will not wake up tomorrow morning and read in the papers that a new "line" has been laid down for architecture, since his profession, like every other, can at any moment be drawn into the struggle for power. He can never know the security enjoyed by those who live under a system where the struggle for political power is fenced off, as it were, from the other concerns of life. When Soviet "politics" invades a field like architecture, it cannot be said to spread beyond its proper boundaries, for it has none. It is precisely this defect in the Soviet regime that in the long run prevents the realization of the ideal of freedom under communism.

It is only in the constitutional democracies that the human spirit can be permanently free to unfold itself in as many directions as are opened up for it by its creative urge. Only such governments can achieve diversity without disintegration, for only they know the full meaning of "those wise restraints that make men free."

Since the Communist philosophy of history is the central core of its ideology, that philosophy has of necessity permeated every theme I have so far discussed. Briefly stated the Communist philosophy of history is that man does not make history, but is made by it.

Though communism denies to man the capacity to shape his own destiny, it does accord to him a remarkable capacity to foresee in great detail just what the future will impose on him. The literature of communism is full of prophecies, tacit and explicit. Probably no human faith ever claimed so confidently that it knew so much about the future. Certainly none ever ran up a greater number of bad guesses. On a rough estimate the Communist record for mistaken prophecies stands at about 100 percent.

Among the conclusions about the future that were implicit in the Communist philosophy, or were drawn from it by its prophets, we can name the following:

That communism will first establish itself in countries of the most advanced capitalism; That in such countries society will gradually split itself into two classes, with the rich becoming fewer and richer, the laboring masses sinking steadily to a bare level of existence; That under capitalism colonialism will increase as each capitalistic nation seeks more and more outlets for its surplus production; That in capitalist countries labor unions will inevitably take the lead in bringing about the Communist revolution; That as soon as communism is firmly established steps will be taken toward the elimination of the capitalist market and capitalist political and legal institutions; etc.

As with other aspects of communism, this record of bad guesses is no accident. It derives from the basic assumption of Marxism that man has no power to mold his institutions to meet problems as they arise, that he is caught up in a current of history which carries him inevitably toward his predestined goal. A philosophy which embraces this view of man's plight is constitutionally incapable of predicting the steps man will take to shape his own destiny, precisely because it has in advance declared any such steps to be impossible. Communism in this respect is like a man standing on the bank of a rising river and observing what appears to be a log lodged against the opposite shore. Assuming that what he observes is an inert object, he naturally predicts that the log will eventually be carried away by the rising floodwaters. When the log turns out to be a living creature and steps safely out of the water the observer is, of course, profoundly surprised. Communism, it must be confessed, has shown a remarkable capacity to absorb such shocks, for it has survived many of them. In the long run, however, it seems inevitable that the Communist brain will inflict serious damage upon itself by the tortured rationalizations with which it has to explain each successive bad guess.

This brings us to the final issue. Why is it that with all its brutalities and absurdities communism still retains an active appeal for the minds and hearts of many intelligent men and women? For we must never forget that this appeal does exist.

It is true that in the United States and many other countries the fringe of serious thought represented by active Communist belief has become abraded to the point of near extinction. It is also the fact that many people everywhere adhere to groups dominated by Communist leadership who have only the slightest inkling of communism as a system of ideas. Then again we must remember that in the Communist countries themselves there are many intelligent, loyal, and hard-working citizens, thoroughly acquainted with the Communist philosophy, who view that philosophy with a quiet disdain, not unmixed with a certain sardonic pleasure of the sort that goes with witnessing, from a choice seat, a comedy of errors that is unfortunately also a tragedy Finally we must not confuse every "gain of communism" with a gain of adherents to Communist beliefs. In particular, we should not mistake the acceptance of technical and economic aid from Moscow as a conversion to the Communist faith, though the contacts thus established may, of course, open the way for a propagation of that faith.

With all this said, and with surface appearance discounted in every proper way, the tragic fact remains that communism as a faith remains a potent force in the world of ideas today. It is an even more tragic fact that that faith can sometimes appeal not only to opportunists and adventurers, but also to men of dedicated idealism. How does this come about?

To answer this question we have to ask another: What are the ingredients that go to make up a successful fighting faith, a faith that will enlist the devotion and fanaticism of its adherents, that will let loose on the world that unaccommodating creature, "the true believer"?

I think that such a faith must be made up of at least three ingredients.

First, it must lift its adherents above the dread sense of being alone and make them feel themselves members of a brotherhood.

Second, it must make its adherents believe that in working for the objectives of their faith they are moving in step with nature, or with the forces of history, or with the divine will.

Third, it must be a faith that gives to its adherents a sense of being lifted above the concerns that consume the lives of the nonbelieving.

All of these ingredients are furnished in abundance by communism. In the Communist philosophy the first two ingredients are fused into one doubly effective amalgam. To become a Communist is no longer to be alone, but to join in the march of a great, oppressed mass of humanity called the proletariat. This silent, faceless army is being carried inevitably to its goal by the unseen forces of history. There is thus a double identification. History belongs to the proletariat, the proletariat belongs to history. By joining in this great march the Communist not only gains human companions but a sense of responding to the great pull of the universe itself.

Now the picture I have just painted is not one that even the most devout Communist can comfortably carry about with him at all times. Indeed, there are probably few Communists who do not, even in their moments of highest faith, sense some of the fictions and contradictions of the dream to which they are committed. The absurdities of the Communist ideology are, however, by no means immediately apparent to the new convert, who is likely to be intrigued rather by the difficulty of understanding them. The old believer sees no reason to point out these absurdities, partly because he does not wish to undermine the faith of the young, and partly because he has become inured to them, has learned to live with them at peace, and does not want to disturb his own adjustment to them.

One of the key fictions of the Communist edifice of thought is the belief that there is in modern industrial society an identifiable class of people called the proletariat. That such a class would develop was not a bad guess in 1848 and Marx had other economists with him in making this guess. As usual, history perversely took the wrong turn. And as usual, this has caused communism no particular embarrassment, for it continues - with diminished ardor, to be sure - to talk about the proletariat as if it were actually there. But professing to see things that are not there is often a sign of faith and furnishes, in any event, a bond of union among believers.

To many of its American critics, communism has appeared as a kind of nightmare. Like awakened sleepers still recoiling from the shock of their dream, these critics forget that the nightmare is after all shot through and through with absurdities. The result is to lend to the Communist ideology a substance that, in fact, it does not possess. If in moments of doubt the Communist is inclined to feel that his philosophy is made of air and tinsel, he is reassured and brought back into the fold when he recalls that its critics have declared this philosophy to be profoundly and powerfully vicious.

Part of the tarnish that an uncompliant history has visited on the Communist prophecies has in recent years been removed by the achievements of Russian technology. It is now possible to identify communism with the land that has the highest school buildings, the hugest outdoor rallies, the most colossal statues and the space satellites that weigh the most tons. It is not difficult to make all this appear as a kind of belated flowering of the promises communism began holding out more than a hundred years ago. It is easy to make men forget that none of the solid accomplishments of modern Russia came about by methods remotely resembling anything anticipated by Marx, Engels, or Lenin.

In suggesting the ingredients that go to make up a successful fighting faith, I stated that such a faith must be one "that gives to its adherents a sense of being lifted above the concerns that consume the lives of the nonbelieving." I have purposely left this aspect of the Communist faith to the last for it is here that the truly nightmarish quality of that faith manifests itself.

Not that it is any objection to a faith that it enables those sharing it to be indifferent to things that seem important to others. The crucial question is, What is it that men are told not to heed? As to the Communist faith there is no ambiguity on this score. It tells men to forget all the teachings of the ages about government, law, and morality. We are told to cast off the intellectual burden left behind by men like Confucius, Mencius, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Kant and Bentham. There are no "eternal truths" about society. There is no science of social architecture. Only the simple minded can believe that there are principles guiding the creation of sound legal and political institutions. For the enlightened there is only one rule: Smash the existing "bourgeois" economic and legal order and leave the rest to the "spontaneous class organization of the proletariat."

In diplomatic dealings the Russians display great respect for American military and economic power, but consider us hopelessly naive in matters political. We are still concerned with trifles as they feel themselves long since to have left behind - trifles like: How do you help a people to realize self-government who have had no experience with its necessary forms and restraints? How, following the overthrow of a tyranny, do you suggest steps that will prevent an interim dictatorship from hardening into a second tyranny?

It is not that the Communists have ideas about sound government that differ from ours. According to strict Communist theory there can be no ideas on such a subject. If a gray market for such ideas has gradually developed in Russia it has not yet reached the point of being ready for the export trade. Russia has engineers able to help the underdeveloped countries build roads and dams and there is no reason to question the competence of these engineers. But whoever heard of Russia sending an expert in political institutions to help a new country design an appropriate form of representative self-government? Not only would such a mission stand in ludicrous incongruity with the present situation of the Communist countries in Europe; it would be a repudiation of the basic premises of the whole Communist philosophy.

Even in the economic field, Russia really has nothing to offer the rest of the world but negations. For a long time after the establishment of the Soviet regime it was actively disputed in Russia whether for communism there is any such thing as an economic law.

Communistic ideology has had gradually to bend before the plain fact that such laws exist. But Russia has as yet developed no economic institutions that are more than distorted shadows of their capitalist equivalents. Russia may help a new country to develop electric power. It has nothing to say about the social institutions that will determine how that power will be utilized for the good of the whole people.

This great vacuum that lies in the heart of communism explains not only why its philosophy is in the long run so destructive of everything human, but why in the short run it can be so successful. Consider, for example, what it can offer to the leader of a successful revolution. A cruel dictatorship has been overthrown. It had to be overthrown by force because it permitted no elections or never counted the vote honestly. Following the successful revolt, there must be an interval during which order is kept by something approaching a dictatorship. Sooner or later, if the revolution is not to belie its democratic professions, some movement must be made toward representative self-government. This is a period of great difficulty. There is no mystery about its problems. They fit into an almost classic pattern known from antiquity. The revolutionary leaders must find some accommodation with what is left of the old regime. Sooner or later the firing squad must be retired. Even when this is done vengeful hatreds continue to endanger the successful operation of parliamentary government. Among the revolutionary party, men who were once united in overthrowing plain injustice become divided on the question what constitutes a just new order. Militant zealots, useful in the barricades, are too rough for civil government and must be curbed. If curbed too severely, they may take up arms against the new government. Etc., etc. What can communism offer the revolutionary leader caught in this ancient and familiar quandary? It can, of course, offer him material aid. But it can offer him something more significant and infinitely more dangerous, a clear conscience in taking the easy course. It can tell him to forget about elections and his promises of democracy and freedom. It can support this advice with an imposing library of pseudoscience clothing despotism with the appearance of intellectual respectability.

The internal stability of the present Russian Government lends an additional persuasiveness to this appeal. If Russia can get along without elections, why can't we? Men forget that it is a common characteristic of dictatorships to enjoy internal truces that may extend over decades, only to have the struggle for power renew itself when the problem of a succession arises. This is a pattern written across centuries of man's struggle for forms of government consistent with human dignity. It is said that the struggle for power cannot under modern conditions with modern armies and modern weapons, take the form of a prolonged civil war. That is no doubt true in a developed economy like that of Russia. The shift in power when it comes may involve only a few quick maneuvers within the apparatus of the party, which have their only outward manifestation in purges or banishments that seal the results. But the fact remains that the fate of millions will be determined by processes which take no account of their interests or wishes, in which they are granted no participation, and which they are not even permitted to observe.

It must not be forgotten that modern Russia was for an indefinite period prior to 1953 governed by a tyranny. This is admitted in Russia today. To be sure, the term "tyranny" is not used, because according to the Communist philosophy a term like that betokens a naive and outdated view of the significance of governmental forms. The Soviet term is "the cult of personality." According to the official explanation Stalin and his followers in some mysterious way became infected with a mistaken view of Stalin's proper role. According to ancient wisdom this was because Stalin ruled without the check of constitutional forms and without effective popular participation in his government. In the words of Aristotle, written some 23 centuries ago, "This is why we do not permit a man to rule, but the principle of law, because a man rules in his own interest, and becomes a tyrant."

It is plain that Stalin at some point became a tyrant. According to Aristotle this was because Russia did not base its government on the principle of law. According to the Communist theory some inexplicable slippage of the gears, some accidental countercurrent of history, led Stalin to embrace incorrect notions about himself.

If mankind is to survive at a level of dignity worthy of its great past, we must help the world recapture some sense of the teachings of the great thinkers of former ages. It must come again to see that sound legal and political institutions not only express man's highest ideal of what he may become, but that they are indispensable instruments for enabling him to realize that ideal. It would be comforting to believe that the forces of history are working inevitably toward this realization and that we too are cooperating with the inevitable. We can only hope that this is so. But we can know that the forces of human life, struggling to realize itself on its highest plane, are working with us and that those forces need our help desperately.

Richard Nixon, The Meaning of Communism to Americans: Study Paper by Richard M. Nixon, Vice President, United States of America Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/274060

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Karl Marx was born in the German Rhineland to middle-class parents of Jewish descent who had abandoned their religion in an attempt to assimilate into an anti-Semitic society. The young Marx studied philosophy at the University of Berlin and received a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but he was unable, because of his Jewish ancestry and his liberal political views, to secure a teaching position. He then turned to journalism , where his investigations disclosed what he perceived as systematic injustice and corruption at all levels of German society. Convinced that German (and, more broadly, European) society could not be reformed from within but instead had to be remade from the ground up, Marx became a political radical . His views soon brought him to the attention of the police, and, fearing arrest and imprisonment, he left for Paris. There he renewed an acquaintance with his countryman Friedrich Engels , who became his friend and coauthor in a collaboration that was to last nearly 40 years.

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The son of the co-owner of a textile firm with factories in Germany and Britain, Engels was himself a capitalist who helped to manage the firm’s factory in Manchester. Like Marx, Engels was deeply disturbed by what he regarded as the injustices of a society divided by class . Appalled by the poverty and squalor in which ordinary workers lived and worked, he described their misery in grisly detail in The Condition of the English Working Class (1844).

Marx and Engels maintained that the poverty, disease, and early death that afflicted the proletariat (the industrial working class) were endemic to capitalism: they were systemic and structural problems that could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism. Under this alternative system, the major means of industrial production—such as mines, mills, factories, and railroads—would be publicly owned and operated for the benefit of all. Marx and Engels presented this critique of capitalism and a brief sketch of a possible future communist society in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which they wrote at the commission of a small group of radicals called the Communist League.

Marx, meanwhile, had begun to lay the theoretical and (he believed) scientific foundations of communism, first in The German Ideology (written 1845–46, published 1932) and later in Das Kapital (1867; Capital ). His theory has three main aspects: first, a materialist conception of history; second, a critique of capitalism and its inner workings; and third, an account of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by communism.

According to Marx’s materialist theory, history is a series of class struggles and revolutionary upheavals, leading ultimately to freedom for all. Marx derived his views in part from the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel , who conceived of history as the dialectical self-development of “spirit.” In contrast to Hegel’s philosophical idealism , however, Marx held that history is driven by the material or economic conditions that prevail in a given age. “Before men can do anything else,” Marx wrote, “they must first produce the means of their subsistence.” Without material production there would be no life and thus no human activity.

According to Marx, material production requires two things: “material forces of production”—roughly, raw materials and the tools required to extract and process them—and “social relations of production”—the division of labour through which raw materials are extracted and processed. Human history is the story of both elements’ changing and becoming ever more complex. In primitive societies the material forces were few and simple—for example, grains and the stone tools used to grind them into flour. With the growth of knowledge and technology came successive upheavals, or “revolutions,” in the forces and relations of production and in the complexity of both. For example, iron miners once worked with pickaxes and shovels, which they owned, but the invention of the steam shovel changed the way they extracted iron ore. Since no miner could afford to buy a steam shovel, he had to work for someone who could. Industrial capitalism , in Marx’s view, is an economic system in which one class —the ruling bourgeoisie —owns the means of production while the working class or proletariat effectively loses its independence, the worker becoming part of the means of production, a mere “appendage of the machine.”

The second aspect of Marx’s theory is his critique of capitalism . Marx held that human history had progressed through a series of stages, from ancient slave society through feudalism to capitalism. In each stage a dominant class uses its control of the means of production to exploit the labour of a larger class of workers. But internal tensions or “contradictions” in each stage eventually lead to the overthrow and replacement of the ruling class by its successor. Thus, the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy and replaced feudalism with capitalism; so too, Marx predicted, will the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace capitalism with communism.

Marx acknowledged that capitalism was a historically necessary stage of development that had brought about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature. The problem, Marx believed, was that this wealth—and the political power and economic opportunities that went with it—was unfairly distributed. The capitalists reap the profits while paying the workers a pittance for long hours of hard labour. Yet it is the workers who create economic value, according to Marx’s labour theory of value , which holds that the worth of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour required to produce it. Under capitalism, Marx claimed, workers are not paid fully or fairly for their labour because the capitalists siphon off surplus value , which they call profit . Thus, the bourgeois owners of the means of production amass enormous wealth, while the proletariat falls further into poverty. This wealth also enables the bourgeoisie to control the government or state, which does the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the powerless.

The exploitation of one class by another remains hidden, however, by a set of ideas that Marx called ideology . “The ruling ideas of every epoch,” he wrote in The German Ideology , “are the ideas of the ruling class.” By this Marx meant that the conventional or mainstream ideas taught in classrooms, preached from pulpits, and communicated through the mass media are ideas that serve the interests of the dominant class. In slave societies, for example, slavery was depicted as normal, natural, and just. In capitalist societies the free market is portrayed as operating efficiently, fairly, and for the benefit of all, while alternative economic arrangements such as socialism are derided or dismissed as false or fanciful. These ideas serve to justify or legitimize the unequal distribution of economic and political power. Even exploited workers may fail to understand their true interests and accept the dominant ideology—a condition that later Marxists called “ false consciousness .” One particularly pernicious source of ideological obfuscation is religion , which Marx called “the opium of the people” because it purportedly dulls the critical faculties and leads workers to accept their wretched condition as part of God’s plan.

Besides inequality, poverty, and false consciousness , capitalism also produces “ alienation .” By this Marx meant that workers are separated or estranged from (1) the product of their labour, which they do not own, (2) the process of production, which under factory conditions makes them “an appendage of the machine,” (3) the sense of satisfaction that they would derive from using their human capacities in unique and creative ways, and (4) other human beings, whom they see as rivals competing for jobs and wages.

Marx believed that capitalism is a volatile economic system that will suffer a series of ever-worsening crises— recessions and depressions —that will produce greater unemployment , lower wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. These crises will convince the proletariat that its interests as a class are implacably opposed to those of the ruling bourgeoisie. Armed with revolutionary class consciousness , the proletariat will seize the major means of production along with the institutions of state power— police , courts , prisons , and so on—and establish a socialist state that Marx called “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat .” The proletariat will thus rule in its own class interest, as the bourgeoisie did before, in order to prevent a counterrevolution by the displaced bourgeoisie. Once this threat disappears, however, the need for the state will also disappear. Thus, the interim state will wither away and be replaced by a classless communist society.

Marx’s vision of communist society is remarkably (and perhaps intentionally) vague. Unlike earlier “ utopian socialists ,” whom Marx and Engels derided as unscientific and impractical—including Henri de Saint-Simon , Charles Fourier , and Robert Owen —Marx did not produce detailed blueprints for a future society. Some features that he did describe, such as public education and a graduated income tax , are now commonplace. Other features, such as public ownership of the major means of production and distribution of goods and services according to the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” remain as radical as they were in Marx’s time. But for the most part, Marx believed that the institutions of a future communist society should be designed and decided democratically by the people living in it; it was not his task, he said, to “write recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Yet , though Marx was reluctant to write such recipes, many of his followers were not. Among them was his friend and coauthor, Friedrich Engels.

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Essays on Communism

Communism essay topics.

Communism is a political and economic ideology that has shaped the course of history and continues to be a topic of debate and discussion in academic circles. Whether you are studying political science, history, economics, or sociology, writing an essay on communism can provide a unique opportunity to explore the complexities of this ideology and its impact on society. In this guide, we will explore some compelling communism essay topics that can help you delve deeper into this fascinating subject.

1. The Rise of Communism: A Historical Analysis

One of the most popular communism essay topics is the exploration of the rise of communism and its impact on the world. You can examine the historical events and factors that led to the emergence of communism in countries such as Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Discuss the role of key figures such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro in shaping the ideology and its implementation.

2. The Ideological Foundations of Communism

Another interesting topic for an essay on communism is to delve into the ideological foundations of the ideology. You can explore the core tenets of communism as outlined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, and analyze how these ideas have been interpreted and put into practice by different communist regimes around the world. Consider the principles of class struggle, the abolition of private property, and the vision of a classless society.

3. The Soviet Union and the Legacy of Communism

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union is a rich subject for an essay on communism. You can examine the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution, the consolidation of power under Stalin, the Soviet economic model, and the eventual collapse of the USSR. Consider the lasting legacy of communism in Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries, and how it continues to shape political and social dynamics in the region.

4. The Cultural Revolution in China

Another compelling topic for an essay on communism is the Cultural Revolution in China. You can explore the origins of the movement, its impact on Chinese society and politics, and its legacy in contemporary China. Consider the role of Mao Zedong in initiating the Cultural Revolution, the mass mobilization of the Red Guards, and the long-term effects on Chinese culture, education, and economy.

5. Communism and the Cold War

The Cold War is a pivotal period in modern history, and writing an essay on communism can provide insight into this global conflict. You can explore the ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the spread of communism in Eastern Europe, and the proxy wars fought in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Consider the lasting impact of the Cold War on international relations and the global balance of power.

6. The Legacy of Communism in Contemporary Society

Finally, you can choose to write an essay on the legacy of communism in contemporary society. You can explore how former communist countries have transitioned to market economies and democratic political systems, and the challenges they continue to face in reconciling their past with the present. Consider the impact of communism on social inequality, political corruption, and cultural identity in post-communist societies.

When choosing a communism essay topic, it's important to consider the specific requirements of your assignment and your own areas of interest. You may also want to consider the availability of primary and secondary sources to support your research. Regardless of the topic you choose, writing an essay on communism provides a valuable opportunity to engage with complex ideas and historical events, and to develop a deeper understanding of this influential ideology.

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