communism

What is Communism?

A ideal or notion that human communities could function in a mutually respectful, honest, and nurturing way as an idealized community in which everyone contributes with what they know best, love to do, feel passionate about, and receive from the community both physical and material, but also spiritual, benefits, consumables, and means of both a physical and mental life. Communists seek to alleviate the condition of the working class by eliminating the relationship between the rich and powerful employer/capitalist class, who work the capitalist economy to maintain control over the masses through the private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of the workers via wage labor, and the employee/worker class, who live their lives beholden to a paycheck and live in fear of being laid off, in exchange for democratically ran workplaces. (i.e master => slave, lords => serfs, owner => employee). The transition to this democratically organized society will eventually give way for the withering away of classes and the “state” that maintains the capital order.

The reason all attempts and experiments of “socialism” and “communism” throughout world history have never succeeded is because they simply replaced private capitalism with state-run capitalism. Though the state control of enterprise increased wages, improved working conditions, provided health care and transport, and developed standards of living faster than western/private capitalism in a lot of examples, the inequality and instability of the organization of the workplace was never addressed, thus maintaining the oppression of poor and working folk.

Socialism vs Communism Split

Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848 to articulate this vision in a critique of capitalism, the current way society and world economy is structured. Communistic communities have existed for thousands of years (“communes” in French villages and relgious commitments of medieval Catholic monks, orders of nuns, etc). The Communist Manifesto inspired “socialism” throughout the second half of the 19th century leading up to World War 1. The war split “socialists” into two groups on the left of the political spectrum. The first group kept the name “socialists” and believed in fighting WW1 on behalf of their country (i.e. German, British, United States), inherently pitting them against socialists in other countries (soldiers on the other side and/or affected citizens). The second half, the “communists”, were anti-war and viewed war between nation states as an extension of capitalism and colonialism. Individuals who refused to be partisan included both the head of the United States Socialist party Eugene Victor Debs, and Vladamir Lenin in Russia. They refused to take sides against working class folk in other countries, ultimately becoming exiled and jailed for taking that position.

No communist party official in the Soviet Union ever aticulated that they established communism in their country after the Russian Revolution. What failed in the Soviet Union (& Cuba, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, etc) was “socialism”, a system of government, articulated by Marx and Engels, that transitions society to a future idealized utopian ideal sometimes call communism.

Communism vs Socialism (1919 - 1989)

From the end of World War 1 until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed, socialism and communism could be categorized as the following:

Socialism = > Like capitalism, except with a human face, that takes care of people in a way that capitalism, as left to itself to the pure private market, never would. Socialists did not challenge private enterprise, private capitalism, or employer/employee structure of enterprises. They left this in private capitalist hands. They believed in mobilizing voters in alliance with trade unions to exert political power, either by becoming government or shaping government policy to make the mass of people better off. They championed public housing, public transport, subsidized medical care, and a whole host of things that have become common parts of many countries in which socialists achieved these kinds of things.

Communism = > Communists believed socialists didn’t go far enough in elevating the worker’s condition. If it did, it was only because the private capitalists tolerated it. When they wouldn’t anymore, whatever was given to the workers would be taken back. Communists would look at the unraveling of the New Deal, which socialists helped get passed in the 1930s in the united states, as an example of this. Because power was not given to the working class from the private sector, it was ultimately able to be taken away from them. Their argument: The government has to go further in taking over and operating industries like agriculture to make sure that what was being done was for the benefit of society as a whole and not for the small group of capitalists who lived off profits.