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Defining Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Socialism

Caveat: There are some inherent pitfalls trying to offer simple, bite sized definitions of capitalism, socialism, communism and fascism the first being that these are complex concepts concerning both economics and government, so short definitions will be incomplete; the second being that these concepts are not always mutually exclusive (most modern states combine elements of more than one); the third being that historical states defined the terms differently; and finally, some of the terms refer strictly to economic systems (capitalism) while others (fascism) also refer to government and economic systems (communism and fascism).

For a point of reference, the United States is a Constitutional Democratic Republic that has long embraced both capitalism (free markets) and socialism (public schools and universities, and public works parks, roads and highways, sewer and water, dams, harbors, as well as social welfare, such as workers comp, unemployment insurance, social security etc.).

Capitalism In common usage, the wordcapitalismmeans aneconomic systemin which all or most of themeans of productionareprivately ownedandoperated, and theinvestmentofcapitaland theproduction,distributionandprices ofcommodities(goodsandservices) are determined mainly in afree market, rather than by thestate. In capitalism, the means of production are generally operated forprofit.

Socialism Most generally, socialism refers to state ownership of common property, or state ownership of the means of production. A purely socialist state would be one in which the state owns and operates the means of production. However, nearly all modern capitalist countries combine socialism and capitalism.

The University of Idaho, and any other public school or university, is a socialist institutions, and those who attend it or work for it are partaking in socialism, because it is owned and operated by the state of Idaho. The same is true of federal and state highways, federal and state parks, harbors etc.

Communism Most generally, communism refers to community ownership of property, with the end goal being complete social equality via economic equality. Communism is generally seen by communist countries as an idealized utopian economic and social state that the country as a whole is working toward; that is to say that pure communism is the ideal that the Peoples Republic of China is (was?) working toward. Such an ideal often justifies means (such as authoritarianism or totalitariansim) that are not themselves communist ideals.

Fundamentally, communism argues that all labor belongs to the individual laborer; no man can own another man's body, and therefore each man owns his own labor. In this model all "profit" actually belongs in part to the laborer, not, or not just, those who control the means of production, such as the business or factory owner. Profit that is not shared with the laborer, therefore, is considered inherently exploitive.

FascismThe word descends from the Latin fasces, the bundle of sticks used by the Romans to symbolize their empire. This should clue you in that Fascism attempts to recapture both the glory and social organization of Rome.

Most generally, a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Unlike communism, fascism is opposed to state ownership of capital and economic equality is not a principle or goal. During the 1930s and WWII, communism and fascism represented the extreme left and right, respectively, in European politics. Hitler justified both Nazi anti-Semitism and dictatorship largely on the basis of his working to fight-off communism.

The church also played a major role in all of the European fascist countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal) as the authority on religious and moral issues, which was opposed to the threat of "godless communists".

Mussolini, the Italian father of Fascism, writes that: ..Fascism [is] the complete opposite ofMarxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production.... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....

* A-moral simply means neither moral or immoral. A rock is a-moral. Driving a car is usually a-moral. Killing someone with a rock is usually immoral. Driving drunk is immoral.

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Defining Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Socialism

By R.J. Rummel Note that I completed this study in November 1993 while still engaged in collecting democide data. Not all the democide totals I mention here may be complete, therefore. For final figures on communist megamurderers, see my summary Table 1.2 in my Death by Government. For all final estimates, see the summary table in Statistics of Democide

With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs.

Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be.

For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in this century. As a result of that effort** I am able to give some conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to compare this to overall world totals.

First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets.

With this understanding of democide, Table 1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government's domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments, as of the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949) and the world total for all governments and guerillas (including such quasi-governments as of the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 1 graphs the communist megamurderers and compares this to the communist and world totals.

Of course, eventhough systematically determined and calculated, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the figures in Table 1 are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres).

With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.

In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist country-- well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it.

Figure 2 shows the major sources of death for those murdered under communism and compares this to world totals for each source for this century. A few of these sources require some clarification. Deaths through government terrorism means the killing of specific individuals by assassination, extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, and such. Massacre, on the other hand, means the indiscriminate mass killing of people, as in soldiers machine gunning demonstrators, or entering a village and killing all of its inhabitants. As used here, genocide is the killing of people because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or language. And democide through deportation is the killing of people during their forced mass transportation to distant regions and their death as a direct result, such as through starvation or exposure. Democidal famine is that which is purposely caused or aggravated by government or which is knowingly ignored and aid to its victims is withheld.

As can be seen in the figure, communist forced labor was particularly deadly. It not only accounts for most deaths under communism, but is close to the world total, which also includes colonial forced labor deaths (as in German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies). Communists also committed genocide, to be sure, but only near half of the world total. Communists are much less disposed to massacre then were many other noncommunist governments (such as the Japanese military during World War II, or the Nationalist Chinese government from 1928 to 1949). As can be seen from the comparative total for terrorism, communists were much more discriminating in their killing overall, even to the extent in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Vietnam, at least, of using a quota system. Top officials would order local officials to kill a certain number of "enemies of the people," "rightists", or "tyrants".

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 1.

But communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslaves, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during world War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin's reign or the height of Mao's power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply.

Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy.

** Note as of 1998: the case studies resulting from that effort were published in Death By Government; the statistics and statistical analyses are in Statistics of Democide.

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MURDER BY COMMUNISM - University of Hawaii

OPINION

January 2, 2013

Re "Spiritual but not religious," Opinion, Dec. 28 Corinna Nicolaou looks backward in her quest for a "special kind of wisdom"; it is the religious who should look forward to her and other like-minded "Nones. " She contemplates the pervasive myth that Nones are "missing out. " I ask: Can religion propagate kindness without intolerance? Does it incline people "to see the big picture," or is a church a group of people encouraging each other that they no longer have to wonder?

ENTERTAINMENT

December 14, 2012 | By Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

Pow! A novel Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt Seagull Books: 386 pp., $27.50 This year's Nobel laureate in literature is an author who somehow manages to write books with brazenly political themes while living in a dictatorship. Mo Yan's latest novel, "Pow!," is a thinly veiled assault on the frayed moral fabric of that hyper-capitalist country known as Communist China. The characters in "Pow!" do awful and disgusting things, most of them involving meat.

OPINION

August 12, 2011 | By Jacob Heilbrunn

On Saturday, Germany will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest and grimmest construction projects in history the building of the Berlin Wall. Photographs of the wall, which overnight brutally severed streets, rail lines and families, have been on display in front of Berlin government buildings for several months. On Saturday, the memorial events will last all day and include a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the victims of the former communist East German government. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, in 2009, attracted a lot more attention in the U.S. It was a victory we like to claim, especially triumphalist conservatives.

ENTERTAINMENT

December 26, 2010 | By Thane Rosenbaum, Special to the Los Angeles Times

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 598 pp., $30 If you think the Cold War is dead as the backdrop for any decent espionage story, you haven't read "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry," journalist Gal Beckerman's reheating of the politics of the Cold War and of how the millions of Russian Jews and the Americans...

ENTERTAINMENT

October 10, 2010 | By Karen Wada, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Sometimes, a litchi box is more than a litchi box. In a designer's hands, it can become a work of art, a cultural artifact or a piece of propaganda. "Graphic design can be put to a number of services and uses," says Bridget Bray, assistant curator at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, where a new exhibition explores "the ways such artistry and relativity were in full effect in 20th century China. " "China Modern: Designing Popular Culture 1910-1970" features more than 160 posters, porcelain figures and everyday objects produced, says Bray, as the country moved from imperial dynastic rule to Western-influenced capitalism to Communism under Mao Tse-tung.

WORLD

April 11, 2010 | By Jeffrey Fleishman

Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who died Satuday in a plane crash in Russia, was a fervent Catholic who battled communism during the Cold War and matured into a staunchly conservative politician. Kaczynski and his identical twin, Jaroslaw, rose to the top of Polish politics in 2005 when their Law and Justice Party swept to power. With Lech as president and his brother as prime minister, the snowy-haired siblings with boyish faces led their country to the right. Despite Poland's membership in the European Union, Lech Kaczynski was adamant that Warsaw not become entangled in continental politics and bureaucracy.

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Articles about Communism - latimes

Communism is a far-left materialist ideology which posits that history moves through stages driven by class conflict. Communist analysis maintains that feudalism, led by aristocrats, was transformed through class conflict with the bourgeoisie (business people/upper middle class) into capitalism, and that capitalism through class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (working class) would lead to the creation of socialism and communism led by the proletariat. Communists believe that the means of production should be owned and controlled by the proletariat.

Modern communist thought took shape in 19th century Europe, when appalling working conditions and low wages were the norm and brought Europe on the verge of revolution. These conditions made communism a serious challenge to the status quo and won over many supporters. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that capitalism would simply become more and more oppressive in response to communism and result in revolution, but this linear process did not happen; Marx and Engels failed to predict that the pressure and threat of communism would result in political and economic reforms that lessened the threat of revolution.

During the 20th century, the arrival of more progressive and left-leaning governments and the development of a social safety net helped to diminish economic inequality, which undermined much of communist dogma. Former followers of Marx and Engels such as Eduard Bernstein[wp] abandoned communism and turned to social democratic politics.

It also didn't help that the communist regimes coming to "fruition" were very much intertwined with events that left mass graves frequent.

Western Communist parties after the fall of the Soviet Union are basically historical reenactment societies that don't realise they are.

Communism, as a political philosophy advocating the communal ownership of property, has been around almost since the dawn of politics, even the dawn of time. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that early hunter-gatherer societies represent primitive communism. Such societies had no social classes or forms of capital.[1] Many religious groups and other utopian communities throughout history have practiced it on a small scale as well.

The most (in)famous form of communism is derived from the ideas of Karl Marx. Marx, who had studied the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, attempted to turn Hegel's idealism on its head in his own philosophy; he did something similar to the earlier communist ideas by attempting to take out the idealism and give them a materialistic footing (what later came to be called "dialectical materialism").

Marx himself is quoted as saying that "if anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist" in relation to how his teachings were being misunderstood or misapplied. However, a set of core beliefs called "Marxist" can certainly be ascribed to Marx, most notably the overthrow of capitalism, the importance of socio-economic factors and class conflict in history, and the rejection of religious or semi-religious justifications for the existing order. Marxism can also be differentiated from other branches of socialism by its insistence on "scientific socialism". Marx believed his contemporary socialists making arguments based on morality and justice (the sort attacked by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) were missing the point entirely, to the extent that he reportedly would burst out laughing when anyone tried to talk to him about morality. For Marx, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system made the emergence of socialism (and thus eventually communism) an inevitability.He saw himself as a scientist analysing the development of the political economy of his time, not a moralist agitating for its abolition.

The Marxist view of society focuses on economic and class relationships and the role of the workers, or proletariat. Marx theorized that human society develops from primitive communism to a slave society, then to feudalism, and then, after feudalism ceases to be productive, to capitalism. He claimed that capitalism, in a similar manner, leads to socialism, since once it is developed enough, the proletariat will be an organized force capable of revolution: "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers."

A workers' revolution having brought about the dictatorship of the proletariat,[2] the State, which Marx defined as the embodiment of the bourgeoisie's end of the class struggle, would "wither away," bringing in communism, this being defined as a classless, and thus stateless, form of social organization. The Communist Manifesto[3] was his statement of purpose, though he later called parts of it (especially the ten planks) antiquated. It was mainly a propagandistic document, and thus did not go into detail in terms of economic theory, as does his later work, Das Kapital.[4] However, one thing that Marx made an explicit warning about was that attempts to do this in a society that had not yet undergone an Industrial Revolution would most likely backfire, which brings us to...

Vladimir Lenin, leading the Russian Revolution, paid large amounts of lip service to Marx, while instead taking more ideas from Blanquism (even though Marx hadn't thought too highly of the chances of revolution from a feudalistic society, and had coined the term dictatorship of the proletariat' in order for differentiate from the Blanquist minority dictatorship) and declared open class warfare on the bourgeoisie (and that he would bring "Peace, Bread and Land!"), in an attempt to take power. Lenin jumped the gun by leading a communist revolution with a small group of intellectuals without waiting for a significant working class to develop, trying to jumpstart a socialist state by "skipping" an entire step in the process Marx had described. In Imperialism: Capitalism's Highest Stage, Lenin argued that foreign capital intervention in backwards countries (colonies and semi-colonies) created the conditions for socialist revolution, which was contrary to what the Mensheviks thought (that the Revolution in Russia would first impose capitalism as a way for socialism to develop). Lenin basically asked: "why would you need to make a revolution to put a capitalist system when capitalism is already here"? Russia, although a mainly peasant and backwards country, had developed over the years a significant working class in the cities. Lenin saw this as the basis for the revolution in which workers and peasants would unite against the monarchy and the Bourgeoisie.

This would become known as Leninism, a sort of forced Marxism on steroids, in which a small yet significant group of leaders, known as a vanguard, ensured "two revolutions for the price of one" by "telescoping" the capitalist and communist revolutions and took over the state and industry. In Leninism, the revolutionary party would lead the revolution. This party would be "the voluntary selection of the most advanced, more aware, more selfless and more active workers", which would handle the socialist state and transform society into "communism" (as the beginning of the idea of socialism and communism being different stages from revolution originated mainly from Lenin). Crucially, this idea of a vanguard party was a big criticism of left-wing socialists to the "mass" party structure of most socialist organizations, which had become a huge bureaucratic apparatus, with thousands of leased politicians and union officials who exercised absolute control of the press and labor organizations that adhered to socialism. A soviet state was established and opposition on both right and left fermented and soon exploded into the brutal Russian Civil War, which in practice, and mainly due to the harsh conditions faced by Lenin and his supporters (German invasion and civil war), resulted in elevating the Bolsheviks to become a new elite within Russia, while the workers and peasants the same people the Bolsheviks claimed to represent were subjected to the same dictatorial control as the Tsar's regime.

There was a total of one democratic election after the October Revolution, and when the Bolsheviks lost out to the moderate and liberal parties (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks), they sent in the Red Guard and closed the Constituent Assembly.

It is true that Lenin's ideas (especially applying planned economy principles to agriculture) didn't really work, but though some reforms were suggested, Lenin and Trotsky killed most of those suggesting them. Then Lenin died.

The revolutionary wave that the Russian Revolution started was diverted by the social-democrats in many countries: in Hungary they persecuted the communist leaders, in Italy they didn't seize power and instead made (indirectly) possible the way for Mussolini, while in Germany they outright murdered the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (aided by the Freikops, which would later be the basis of the Nazi party). This diversion meant that the Russian Revolution was becoming more isolated. Combined with the inexperience of the communist leaders in other countries, the prestige that the Russian Communist Party had gained, the seven long years of war suffered and the concessions made in the New Economic Policy, this created the conditions for a bureaucracy to form inside the soviet state. Stalin took over the Soviet Union and converted a brutal and repressive autocracy (as Lenin had abolished democracy and implemented Party dictatorship) into an extremely brutal and repressive autocracy, ruling by fear. Stalin first expelled the Left Opposition (led by Leon Trotsky) from the party and then exiled and persecuted them. Then Hitler rose to power in Germany thanks to Stalin's orders to keep the communists busy fighting the social-democrats. In Spain, the workers brought down the monarchy and instituted the Second Republic; in 1936 (thanks to Stalin's orders of creating coalitions with the capitalists known as "Popular Fronts"), the Popular Front won the elections, which caused the right-wing sectors of the army to commit a coup. The ensuing Spanish Civil war brought people from all over the world to fight against the fascists for the Republic. Stalin's zigzags with France and England and his policy of persecuting "trotskyists" and anarchists meant that the republicans were more busy fighting each other than fighting the fascists, and indirectly helped Franco win the war. With each defeat suffered, a socialist revolution in Europe was more improbable and the chances of another World War starting seemed more likely, thus Stalin's government grew more and more tyrannical with each day. So not only was the great Soviet experiment failing, Stalin stepped in and ensured it never would recover.

To summarize, communism is a classless, "democratic" (Marx called for 'self-government of the commune' in response to Bakunin's accusations that he wished for a minority dictatorship) and international society. There are different theories to how it should be organized, for example, the anarcho-syndicalists and De Leonists wish for a Socialist Industrial Union, while mutualists (inspired by the ideas of Proudhon) wish for a non-capitalist free market (often claiming that the capitalist market can never have anything to do with 'freedom'), other socialists wish for a system of workers' councils (though these can often be compared to the syndicalist unions), as in the "soviets" which represented the working class in Russia until Lenin's coup d'etat. The workers had also taken over factories, instituting elected and recallable factory committees which ran them under their ultimate control, before Lenin took over. Such "worker self-management" has also been a key part of socialism, in both libertarian Marxist and anarchist tendencies or schools of thought.

Mao Zedong's particularly gruesome take on Marxism easily ranks as the most devastating attempt to establish a Communist society, as far as the total number of human casualties is concerned. Having taken over mainland China in 1949, he developed a branch of Communist theory that was supposed to address China's specific circumstances, commonly referred to as "Mao Zedong thought." Since China was a mostly agrarian country without a solid industrial base, it lacked the distinct class of urban factory workers that was supposed to form the backbone of a Communist revolution, according to Marxism. Hence, Mao's own ideology emphasized the vast numbers of impoverished Chinese peasants as the driving force of the revolution in China, and concentrated on winning their support for the Communist Party of China. However, during the late 1950s, Mao ordered a vast industrialization program that was supposed to transform China's agrarian economy into a much more advanced one, taking a cue from Stalinism. This project, called the "Great Leap Forward," plummeted at the cost of up to 45 million lives.[5]

After being sidelined as a result of this failure, Mao eventually launched yet another attempt at rapid societal transformation in a bid to reestablish himself as the undisputed leader of China. Starting in 1966, his so-called "Great Cultural Revolution" again toppled China into chaos, as a fanatic youth movement set out to destroy Chinese traditional culture and the supposed last vestiges of the old elites. In practice, it was a reign of terror that consisted of completely random attacks against anyone and anything that drew the suspicion of the frenzied "Red Guards," among them no small number of their own operatives. Since the campaign had brought the country to the brink of civil war, Maoist ideology was mostly discredited as an actual guideline for governing the nation. Mao's eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, effectively abandoned it by promoting pragmatic developmental policies, so that today's China is a booming capitalist economy ruled by a totalitarian oligarchy. However, because of Mao's status as a larger-than-life figure in Chinese politics and especially the CCP, Maoism was never officially denounced by Chinese authorities. Yet.

Apart from China itself, several other Communist movements in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Latin America claimed an explicit adherence to Maoism. Despite significant political differences, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge was considered almost a recreation of Mao's Chinese Communist party (down to the extreme, culturally-motivated purges). However, many such parties are no longer exclusively agrarian in focus, placing a dual emphasis on both rural and urban workers.

As it stands, there are only a few remaining nation-states which proclaim themselves Communist, and it is obvious without comment how well the judgement of history will handle them. These systems are:

This has become rather a touchy subject to bring up, as totalitarian socialist states have a good deal to answer for. Let these facts be submitted for the reader's consideration:

The question then becomes what role was played by which ideologue. Some, in particular Leon Trotsky and his followers, claim that the people performing these acts were not actually communists, for the reason that such figures as Joseph Stalin deliberately betrayed and deformed the "true" communist ideals, and that these betrayals were later compounded by many communist states putting them into practice. Others claim that the theories of Marx are impossible to put into practice and thus lead inevitably to economic ruin and despotism.

It is certainly true that Marxism has one of the key philosophical elements required of any totalitarian worldview: the notion that non-adherents are in denial or in some way mentally deficient. In Christianity this notion takes the form of the idea that non-Christians only want to continue living in sin. In Marxism it takes the form of false consciousness the idea that any person who does not put the interests of his class uppermost has been duped by somebody-or-other and is in denial about what his true interests are.

Also, if one tries to assign most or all of the blame to Stalin, as Trotsky did, one must take into account that many of the above atrocities were committed by states that espoused Marxism-Leninism but explicitly rejected Stalinism.

On the other hand, variants of Marxism that do not claim to be a continuation of Marxism-Leninism, such as Catholic Liberation Theology and Eurocommunism, are much more benign, and many of these variants have accepted liberal democracy in lieu of violent revolution as a way to achieve communist goals.[8]

It depends on what you mean by "Communism" and what you mean by "workable."

Certainly 20th century Communism has left a trail of nothing but blood and pollution in its wake; China's communism is barely recognizable under its outward trappings of state capitalism, and the Soviet experiment is (most charitably) seen as incomplete, cut off by Lenin's death and subverted by Stalin's brutality. Previous experiments in communism, whether fundamentally capitalist (Jamestown, VA) or utopian (the Oneida community) lasted only for a couple of generations at most before being torn apart by internal dissent.[9] In addition, the confusion of Communism and the politics of the Warsaw Pact community has essentially stained the name of communism, to the point that even if it was tweaked into a workable form, we'd have to find some other name for it.

Critics of Communism tend to fault it for its hyper-idealistic egalitarianism, based on the assumption that a state set up to fade away is a sitting target for authoritarians and slackers, and also assuming that there would be no incentive to excel in any given field. In addition, the planned economy aspects of Soviet Communism in particular have consistently failed, due to an ideology that proved unable to react to the slightest outside changes.

Again, advocates of Communism look at the failure of every attempt to implement Communism and argue that those societies were not really communist - either for immediate, local reasons or for the blanket reason that none of them have taken place in advanced industrial societies, which (for Marx, at least) would doom them to failure. In most cases, Communist governments didn't necessarily follow Marx's theories as set out, and corruption and cronyism were rampant; Marx certainly wouldn't have approved of that, or the use of tactics by the governing authorities that he considered reserved for the use of the proletariat at large, such as expropriation.[10] However, Marx's antipathy towards the bourgeoisie was used as an excuse to kill millions (especially in China and Cambodia, but more famously Ukrainian country folk in the USSR) because they were branded "petty-bourgeois counter-revolutionaries" for the crime of looking cross-eyed at the nomenklatura.

The question, then, becomes this: what does this "great apostasy" say about the viability of Marxism? Opinions run the gamut.

Also, although state-imposed collectivism did not work out so well, private corporations run as collectives[13] do just as well as companies based on a more traditional hierarchy, and even if Marx was somewhat naive about economics (and, in hindsight, every economist from the 19th century and prior looks rather naive about economics: for example the labor theory of value, the discrediting of which forms the basis for much of the modern economic critique of Marxism, was not unique to Marxism by a long shot, having been conceived by the father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith) his contributions as a historian and pioneering work in then nascent field of sociology shouldn't be overlooked or understated. It's reasonable to look at the train wreck of Communism-in-practice as an utter failure, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from it.

If any conclusions can be drawn from what these examples all have in common, working communism needs a minimum of top-down authority (all examples are varied ways of "bottom up") and avoid to be crushed by any self-declared communists surrounding it who have a more "top-down" approach to things.

Besides communism, there are a great many different ideologies and schools of thought based on Marx's views.

There still is a great deal academics find useful in Marxism as a research tool. For example, Marxist historians focus on economic relationships and progress in history, and believe economic motivations and class consciousness to be the most important underlying causes of change (or, in layman's terms, money in fact does make the world go round, but you'll always get screwed by the rich man). Marxist history is a school of social history, focusing primarily on the conditions of the (working class) majority rather than on the deeds of kings and leaders.[15] There are similar Marxist forms of sociology and cultural theory. Marx's outline of how capitalism works is still taught in economics, though it's not considered the whole story.

There are many variants on the idea of some underclass being exploited or oppressed by some upper class and the need for that underclass to unite and make a revolution. The second wave of feminism most active in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as radical feminism, views women as the underclass. Nationalism[16], particularly among colonized peoples, may view the colonized nation as the underclass; an example of this is the strong nationalistic elements in the ideology of left-wing governments in former territories occupied by empires. This often leads to the strange result of leftists supporting nationalist movements in far off places that do things they would be up in arms against, were they to happen in their own country, up to and including the suppression of a communist opposition. Identity politics abstracts the idea entirely and allows the selection of an arbitrary underclass, thus giving rise to such phenomena as "ethnic studies," "queer studies," "disabled studies," etc. The feminist, militant black, and gay rights movements of the later 1960's and 1970's were informed by a Marxist outlook, including the Black Panthers, as David Horowitz loves to remind us of constantly. So scary.

Libertarian communism is an elimination of the state similar to Marxist communism, but it claims to be a part of the libertarian family.

Karl Marx famously said that religion was "the opiate of the people." Or, in full:

Of course, these are simply Marx's beliefs, and thus religious socialism still exists, as the system of communism is not opposed to religion in any way. Marx does not advocate the banning of religion, and instead says that it is simply a way to cope, and a way to see something bright at the end of the tunnel when one is faced with the injustices of feudal and capitalist society, and says that the criticism of religion is thus the criticism of the conditions that breed it. In an interview later on, Marx dismissed violent measures against religion as "nonsense," and stated the opinion (he specified that it was an opinion) that, "as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part."[17]

As for the phrase itself, opium in Marx's time was an important painkiller, a source of extraordinary visions for 'opium eaters,' the cause of important conflicts such as the Opium Wars, and also used by parents to keep their children quiet. It is likely that Marx was alluding to all of these.

Despite Marx's view that religion could co-exist with communism, many communist states have cracked down on religious groups or banned them altogether. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church had for hundreds of years been a powerful institution in Russia and had many ties to the former czarist regime. Hence, in the mind of the Soviet leaders the church formed an institutional threat to its existence and had to be controlled. Albania under Enver Hoxha banned religion altogether, claiming that it had kept Albania back for a great many years. China tightly regulates religion within its borders, barring the Roman Catholic Church and other churches not under the direct control of the State, leading to a burgeoning Evangelical Protestant "house church" movement.

Marxism, despite generally rejecting the supernatural, carries distinct millennial overtones about it. Although all sectors of Christianity at least nominally oppose orthodox Marxism due to its materialism, the amillennial denominations have been most vocal in their opposition to communism; specifically the Catholic Church, which has explicitly condemned "secular messianism," which it cited as a form of millennialism, and of which it cited communism as an example.[18][19]

Communists are frequently alleged to be the true force behind the UN or some other scheme for a New World Order or one world government. These conspiracy theories are sometimes tied into anti-Semitism and the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy due to the fact that many Jews were aligned with leftist politics.

Wingnuts also ascribe to the word "communism" quite a different meaning: "Any policy or belief that is insufficiently right-wing for my taste," or "any policy which promotes racial equality and integration." You can thank Joseph McCarthy for that.

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

A communist is someone who reads Marx and Engels. An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx and Engels.

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Communism - RationalWiki

Communism is based upon the theory of an economic Utopia, where all wealth is shared and distributed equally, with no personal ownership. The theory, devised by Karl Marx, espouses that human greed can be eliminated by changing human nature, which can be accomplished by changing the environment of economic inequality. The fatal flaw in the theory is the belief that external conditions can actually change basic human nature. In the communist system, the corporate elite is replaced by a ruling (government) elite, which, in theory, is supposed to be a benevolent authority with the best interest of the people in mind. Human nature being what it is, this is quite impossible, as the communist ruling elite succumbs to the same greed it claims to be able to extinguish. Human nature cannot be altered.

Communism also squashes the competition which leads to excellence, because it removes all incentive for human beings to excel. Think of it this way....two basketball teams play each other. One team works harder, plays better, and wins the game by 40 points. In the communist model, there is no winner and no loser, so the losing team has no incentive to improve, and the winning team has no incentive to keep winning. Since competition leads to invention, this is not a good thing for the human race.

Link:
What is communism? | Yahoo Answers