Communism

History of Communism This article is about communism as a form of society built around a gift economy, as an ideology that advocates that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... What is Communism As a theoretical social and economic system, communism would be a type of egalitarian society with no state, no privately owned means of production and no social class. ... Schools of communism Marxism · Leninism Trotskyism · Maoism Left Communism Eurocommunism Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism (a form of Communism); it is a branch of Marxism (and it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s. ... Trotskyism can refer to either the body of ideas associated with Leon Trotsky or the movement based on those ideas. ... Maoism or Mao Tse-tung Thought (Chinese: 毛泽东思想, pinyin: Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng), is a variant of Marxism-Leninism derived from the teachings of Mao Zedong (1893–1976). ... Left Communism is a term describing a whole range of communist viewpoints which oppose the political ideas of the Bolsheviks from a position which is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views held by the Communist International after its first two Congresses. ... Eurocommunism was an attempt in the 1970s by various European communist parties to widen their appeal by embracing public sector middle-class workers, and new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation and rejecting unquestioning support of the Soviet Union, and express more clearly their fidelity to democratic institutions. ... Communist party Communist International World Communist Movement In modern usage, a Communist party is a political party which promotes Communism, a sociopolitical philosophy based on the particular interpretation of Marxism put forth by Vladimir Lenin. ... The first edition of Communist International, journal of the Comintern published in Moscow and Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in May 1919. ... The World Communist Movement is an informal community of certain parties around the world. ... Communist states People's Republic of China Cuba · Vietnam Laos · North Korea A Communist state is a state governed by a single political party which declares its allegiance to the principles of Marxism-Leninism. ... Related Subjects Socialism Planned economy Anti-communism Anarcho-communism The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ... A planned economy is an economic system in which economic decisions are made by centralized planners who determine what sorts of goods and services to produce and how they are to be priced and allocated, and may include state ownership of the means of production. ... Anti-communism is opposition to communist ideology, organization, or government, on either a theoretical or practical level. ... Anarcho-Communism, or Libertarian Communism, is a political ideology related to Libertarian socialism. ...

Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on Georg Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith, Ricardian economics, and 19th century French socialism to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital). Practice connotes a few important things in regard to life ways and ideas, commonly referring to how we learn and do. ... The term social is derived from the Latin word socius, which as a noun means an associate, ally, business partner or comrade and in the adjectival form socialis refers to a bond between people (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence. ... Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, whose two books, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the foundations of Marxism... Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820–August 5, 1895) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. ... G.W.F. Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ... Adam Smith Adam Smith, LL.D. , FRS (Baptised June 5, 1723 – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish political economist and moral philosopher. ... Ricardian economics is an economic model of international trade introduced by David Ricardo to explain the pattern and the gains from trade in terms of comparative advantage. ... The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ... Das Kapital (Capital) is a very large treatise of political economy written by Karl Marx. ...

Marxism is based on the works of the nineteenth century philosopher, Karl Marx.

Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the intellectual basis for their politics and policies, which can be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major splits occurred between the advocates of democratic socialism, who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parlimentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution. Social democracy emerged within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and caused it to abandon its Marxist roots by increments, while communism resulted in the formation of various communist parties. Karl Marx This image is in the public domain in the United States and possibly other jurisdictions. ... Karl Marx This image is in the public domain in the United States and possibly other jurisdictions. ... Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, whose two books, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the foundations of Marxism... 1883 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... A red rose held in a closed fist is the international symbol of democratic socialism. ... This article is about communism as a form of society built around a gift economy, as an ideology that advocates that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD – Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is the oldest political party of Germany still in existence and also one of the oldest and largest in the world, celebrating its 140th anniversary in 2003. ...

Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary social movements and political parties around the world, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, relatively few countries have governments which describe themselves as Marxist. Although social democratic parties are in power in a number of Western nations, they long ago distanced themselves from their historical connections to Marx and his ideas. As of 2005, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China had governments in power which describe themselves as socialist in the Marxist sense. However, the private sector comprised more than 50% of the Chinese economy by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially liberalized its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong control over the means of production. While Marx theorized that such a socialist phase would eventually give way to a classless society in which the state essentially ceases to exist and workers collectively own the means of production (communism,) such a development has failed to occur in any historical Communist state, which have generally followed a socialist, command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage. American Civil Rights Movement is one of the most famous social movements of the 20th century. ... A political party is a political organization subscribing to a certain ideology or formed around very special issues. ... The rise of Gorbachev Although reform stalled between 1964–1982, the generational shift gave new momentum for reform. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ... The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ... The private sector of a nations economy consists of those entities which are not controlled by the state - i. ... Classlessness refers to a type of society in which social classes do not exist. ... A planned economy is an economic system in which economic decisions are made by centralized planners who determine what sorts of goods and services to produce and how they are to be priced and allocated, and may include state ownership of the means of production. ...

North Korea is another contemporary Communist state, though the official ideology of the Korean Workers' Party (originally led by Kim Il-sung and currently chaired by his son, Kim Jong-il,) juche, does not follow doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the leadership of the Soviet Union. Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the Cold War. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes the state's official ideology as Islamic socialism, and has labelled it a third way between capitalism and communism. The Workers Party of Korea (WPK) is the ruling party of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly known as North Korea. ... Kim Il-sung (April 15, 1912–July 8, 1994) was a Korean Communist politician and the ruler of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (North Korea) from 1948 until his death. ... Chairman Kim Jong-il (born February 16, 1942) has been the ruler of North Korea since 1994. ... Juche Sasang (pronounced Joo-cheh), also Kimilsungism, is the official government-sponsored ideology of North Korea. ... Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism; it is a branch of Marxism (and it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s). ... Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi 1 (Arabic: معمر القذافي Mu`ammar al-Qadhdhāfī) (born 1942), has been the leader of Libya since 1969. ... Islamic socialism is a term coined by various muslim leaders to counter the demand at home for a more spiritual form of socialism. ... The Third Way is a centrist political ideology that, at least from a traditional social democratic perspective, usually stands for deregulation, decentralisation and lower taxes. ...

Some members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools of thought believe the principles of modern bourgeois states or big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms have been implemented — not by Marxists but in the forms of Keynesianism, the welfare state, new liberalism, social democracy and other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist states. Laissez-faire is short for laissez faire, laissez passer, a French phrase meaning to let things alone, let them pass. First used by the eighteenth century Physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it is now used as a synonym for strict free market economics. ... Individualism is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes individual liberty, belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence. ... Big government is a pejorative term used mostly by political conservatives or advocates of laissez_faire to describe the central government of their country. ... Malayalam editon of the Manifesto The Communist Manifesto, also known as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, first published on February 21, 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is one of the worlds most historically influential political tracts. ... Keynesian economics, or Keynesianism, is an economic theory based on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, as put forward in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. ... There are three main interpretations of the idea of a welfare state: the provision of welfare services by the state. ... New liberalism (also called modern liberalism, social liberalism or welfare liberalism) is a stance in political economy that argues for extensive government regulation and partial intervention in the economy, though much less than what is advocated by social democrats. ... Social democracy is a political ideology emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from supporters of Marxism who believed that the transition to a socialist society could be achieved through democratic evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. ...

To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view, many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism (without abolishing it) by dealing with market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state." In economics, a market failure is a situation in which markets do not efficiently organize production or allocate goods and services to consumers. ...

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which the development of ideas into their contraries is the guiding theme of human history. This process, dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, symptoms and tools of the underlying impersonal dialectical process rather than shapers of the same. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... In general parlance, idealism or idealist is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealisable or at odds with practical life. ... Broadly speaking, a dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a disagreement. ... In astrophysics, accretion is the gravitational process by which bodies such as planets and stars form from gas and dust. ... Bonaparte as general Napoleon Bonaparte ( 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a general of the French Revolution and was the ruler of France as First Consul (Premier Consul) of the French Republic from November 11, 1799 to May 18, 1804, then as Emperor of the French (Empereur des Français...

Marx, and the circle of Young Hegelians of whom he was one, retained much of Hegel's way of thinking. But Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of another Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach. What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach, however, was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Friedrich Engels said in an 1846 essay they entitled "The German Ideology": The Young Hegelians, later known as the Left Hegelians, were a group of students and young professors at the University of Berlin following Georg Hegels death in 1831. ... Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (July 28, 1804 - September 13, 1872), German philosopher, fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, was born in Landshut, Bavaria and died in Rechenberg (since 1899 a district of Nuremberg). ... Humanism is an active ethical and phylosphical approach to life focusing on human solutions to human issues through rational arguments without recourse to a god, gods, sacred texts or religious creeds. ... This article is about the philosophical meaning of ontology. ... Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820–August 5, 1895) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. ...

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Also, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation and that was only published in the twentieth century), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ...

Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (although Engels was the one who coined this term and Marx himself never used it), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: // General Historical materialism (or what Marx himself preferred to call the materialist conception of history - materialistischen Geschichtsaufassung) is a social theory and an approach to the study of history and sociology, normally considered as the intellectual basis of Marxism. ...

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Marx emphasized that the development of material life will come into conflict with the superstructure. These contradictions, he thought, were the driving force of history. Primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism. // General Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhaltnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. ... Productive forces or forces of production [in German, Produktivkrafte] is a central concept in Marxism and historical materialism. ... // General In Karl Marxs theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning the way of producing) is a specific combination of: productive forces: these include human labor-power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land social relations of production: these include the property... Defining feudalism is difficult because there is no generally accepted agreement on what it means. ... Capitalism has been defined in various ways (see q:Capitalism). ...

The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, but some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse"). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ...

Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the "Ethnological Notebooks" that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist"). Vera Ivanovna Zasulich Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (July 27, 1849-May 8, 1919) (born August 8, New Style) was a Russian Marxist writer and revolutionary. ... Paul Lafargue (1842-1911) was a French socialist writer and political activist. ...

The political-economy roots of Marxism

Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists. Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx claimed the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages—a claim he found implied in the works of Adam Smith and especially in David Ricardo but never explicitly formulated. This value produced by labor but not appropriated by the laborer Marx called "surplus value," perhaps his most important theoretical insight. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day; however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value. This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school [1] [2].) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take. Adam Smith Adam Smith, LL.D. , FRS (Baptised June 5, 1723 – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish political economist and moral philosopher. ... David Ricardo (April 18, 1772 — September 11, 1823), a British political economist, is often credited with systematizing economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists. ...

Capital is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. The method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society. This investigation is commonly taken to commit Marx to a species of labor theory of value as described above. This and other intrinsic theories of economic value are incompatible with modern, predictive economics in which the theory of value is that of supply and demand; to liberal economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory. The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented or commodity-producing society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ... The supply and demand model describes how prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). ...

Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory, are other important elements of Marxist economics. Crisis theory is a debate within the Marxian theory of political economy. ...

Marx also argues that capitalism is, in the words of Ernest Mandell, an editor of Marx's "Capital," a "gigantic enterprise of dehumanization." In "The Communist Manifesto," co-written with Engels and published in 1848, Marx and Engels describe the effects capitalism has on the individual and society: Capitalism "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of phillistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

The liberal challenge

The Austrian School were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School; Marxist authors have decried that the Austrian school as a "bourgeois" reaction to Marx. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists—including Rudolf Hilferding—attended his seminar in 1905-06. The Austrian School is a school of economic thought which rejects opposing economists reliance on methods used in natural science for the study of human action, and instead bases its formalism of economics on relationships through logic or introspection called praxeology. ... A free market is an idealized market, where all economic decisions and actions by individuals regarding transfer of money, goods, and services are voluntary, and are therefore devoid of coercion and theft (some definitions of coercion are inclusive of theft). Colloquially and loosely, a free market economy is an economy... Methodenstreit was a controversy over the method and epistemological character of economics carried on in the late 1880s and early 1890s between the supporters of the Austrian School of Economics, led by Carl Menger, and the proponents of the (German) Historical School, led by Gustav von Schmoller. ... The Historical school of economics was a mainly German school of economic thought which held that a study of history was the key source of knowledge about human actions and economic matters, since economics would be culture-specific and not generalizable over space and time. ... Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (February 12, 1851 - August 27, 1914) made important contributions to the development of Austrian economics. ... Rudolf Hilferding (1877 - 1941) was a Marxist economist and a popularizer of the economic reading of Karl Marx. ...

Class analysis

Marxists believe that capitalist society is divided into two powerful social classes: Social class describes the relationships between people in hierarchical societies or cultures. ...

• the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he believed were responsible for creating the wealth of a society (buildings, bridges and furniture, for example, are physically built by members of this class). Ernest Mandel, in an introduction to Capital, updates this definition to mean people who work for a living (whether "white collar" or "blue collar") and who have no significant savings, where sufficiently large savings are typically invested in the abstract means of production on a shareholder basis.
• the bourgeoisie : those who "own the means of production" and exploit the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat. An example of this would be many small businesses giving way to fewer larger ones, without increasing the number of petty bourgeois bureaucrats required to administer each company.

At first the bourgeoisie, and now the proletariat, are considered to be the universal class, the section of society best equipped to take human progress forwards a further step. The term working class is used to denote a social class. ... The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is called a proletarian. ... Bourgeois at the end of the thirteenth century Bourgeoisie (boorzhwäz-ee´) in modern use refers to the wealthy or propertied classes in a capitalist society. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Petit-bourgeois or Anglicised petty bourgeois is a French term that reffered to the members of the lower middle social-classes. ... Universal class is a category derived from the philosophy of Hegel, redefined and popularized by Karl Marx. ...

Marx developed these ideas to support his advocacy of socialism and communism: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the "fruits of their labour".

Some of these ideas were shared by anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin argued that the state per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity. Anarchism is a generic term describing various political philosophies and social movements that advocate the elimination of hierarchy and imposed authority. ... Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Trolo) (Russian — Михаил Александрович Бакунин, Michel Bakunin — on the grave in Bern), (May 30, 1814–June 13, 1876) was a well-known Russian anarchist contemporary of Karl Marx. ... Peter Kropotkin Prince Peter Alexeevich Kropotkin (In Russian Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин) (December 9, 1842 - February 8, 1921) was one of Russias foremost anarchists and one of the first advocates of what he called anarchist communism: the model of society he advocated for most of his life was that of...

Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc (or Soviet Bloc) comprised the following Central and Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania (until the early 1960s, see below), the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. ...

It is common to speak of Marxian rather than Marxist theory when referring to political study that draws from the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies. Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ...

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

Other than control by the working class, Marx laid out no plans for the structuring of a communist society or of the society that the working class would build on the way to communism. He assumed the working class could do that for themselves and that it would be a productive society able to meet the needs of the people and much more. The political parties who adopted his theories followed Marx in his optimistic approach and detailed plans for the structuring of socialist society were not put forth or developed. With the success of the October Revolution in Russia a Marxist party took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society. The October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was the second phase of the Russian Revolution, the first having been instigated by the events around the February Revolution. ...

The October Revolution

The 1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed and the Soviet Union was on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals for power. He instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths. The October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was the second phase of the Russian Revolution, the first having been instigated by the events around the February Revolution. ... Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин   listen?), original surname Ulyanov (Улья́нов) (April 22 (April 10 (O.S.)), 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union, and the founder of the ideology of Leninism, later expanded into Marxism-Leninism by Joseph... War communism or wartime communism was the harsh economic policy adopted by Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War with an aim to keep towns and the Red Army supplied with weapons and food in the conditions when all normal economical mechanisms and relations were being destroyed by the war. ... The New Economic Policy, or NEP (Russian: ) was a system of economic reforms, partly market-oriented, that Vladimir Lenin instituted in the Russian SFSR and then Soviet Union. ... Iosif (usually anglicized as Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), original name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი; see Other names section) (December 21, 1879[1] – March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union. ... Industrialisation (or industrialization) or an industrial revolution (in general, with lowercase letters) is a process of social and economic change whereby a human society is transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial state. ...

Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution. 1915 passport photo of Trotsky Leon Davidovich Trotsky (Russian: Лев Давидович Троцкий; also transliterated Leo, Lev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij and Trotzky ) (October 26 (O.S.) = November 7 (N.S.), 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лев Давидович Бронштейн), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist intellectual. ...

Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (over 11 miles) into the air, August 9, 1945. ... East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the former Soviet occupation zone of Germany. ... National motto: ??? Official language Arabic Capital Aden Area 287,680 km² Population  - Total (1973)  - Density 1,590,275 5. ... Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in all south Slavic languages) is a term used for three separate but successive political entities that existed during most of the 20th century on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe. ...

Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed. Peoples Republic (sometimes Popular Republic) is a title that is often used by Marxist-Leninist governments to describe their state. ... World revolution is a Marxist concept of a violent overthrow of capitalism that would take place in all countries, although not necessarily simultaneously. ...

The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980, seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued Leninist governments (which China remains) since the death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to apply universally. The New Economic Policy, or NEP (Russian: ) was a system of economic reforms, partly market-oriented, that Vladimir Lenin instituted in the Russian SFSR and then Soviet Union. ... For other uses of the initials WTO, see WTO (disambiguation). ...

The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final, Leninist, say over both commercial and political affairs. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role.

See also: Communist government and Communist state. This article is about one-party states ruled by Communist Parties. ... A Communist state is a state governed by a single political party which declares its allegiance to the principles of Marxism-Leninism. ...

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism—or by capitalism. 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

See also

Other articles about Marxism

• antagonistic contradiction
• dialectical materialism
• dictatorship of the proletariat
• false consciousness
• historical materialism
• Marx's theory of alienation
• Marxian economics
• Marxist philosophy
• Marxist film theory
• Marxist historiography
• Marxist literary criticism
• communism
• council communism
• contributors to marxist theory
• Communist Philosophy of Nature
• Economic Determinism

Antagonistic contradiction is the impossibility of compromise between different social classes. ... Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism as defined by later Communists and their Parties (sometimes called orthodox Marxism). ... The dictatorship of the proletariat is defined by Marxist theory as the use of state power by the working class against the overthrown ruling class and others of its enemies during the passage from capitalism to communism. ... False consciousness is the Engelsist hypothesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat — and perhaps the other classes — over the nature of capitalism. ... // General Historical materialism (or what Marx himself preferred to call the materialist conception of history - materialistischen Geschichtsaufassung) is a social theory and an approach to the study of history and sociology, normally considered as the intellectual basis of Marxism. ... Alienation is a process whereby people come to be divorced or isolated from the society around them. ... Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ... Work in philosophy which is strongly influenced by Marxist theory, or which is written by Marxists, can be called Marxist philosophy. ... Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory. ... Marxist or historical materialist historiography is an influential school of historiography. ... Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism informed by the philosophy or the politics of Marxism. ... This article is about communism as a form of society built around a gift economy, as an ideology that advocates that form of society, and as a popular movement. ... Council communism was a radical Left movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. ... This is a list of those who contributed to marxist theory, principally as authors; it is not intended to list politicians who happen(ed) to be a member of a nominally communist political party or other organisation. ... Through Communism, Marx and Engels not only explain the class struggles of the proletariat and their views on history and society, but also attempt to explain nature, the universe and existence. ... During Karl Marxs and Friedrich Engels creation of the ideology of Communism, they inductively surmised what they saw as a law of history, an inexorable law, that ran throughout the course of history. ...

Related topics

• labor theory of value
• social-conflict theory
• crisis theory
• materialism
• historicism
• political economy
• political theory
• socialism
• anarchism
• Anarchism and Marxism
• History of the Soviet Union
• History of the People's Republic of China
• Communist Party of Vietnam
• Khmer Rouge
• Lao People's Revolutionary Party
• Polylogism

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented or commodity-producing society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ... In social-conflict theory, it is argued that individuals and groups within society have differing amounts of material and non-material resources and that the more powerful groups use their power in order to exploit groups with less power. ... Crisis theory is a debate within the Marxian theory of political economy. ... Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... Historicism has developed different and divergent, though loosely related, meanings. ... Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ... Niccolò Machiavelli, ca 1500, became the key figure in realistic political theory, crucial to political science Political Science is the systematic study of the allocation and transfer of power in decision making. ... The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ... Anarchism is a term which encompasses a variety of political philosophies, social movements, and political ideologies that advocate the abolition of all forms of coercion. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Russian Revolution Main article: Russian Revolution During World War I, Tsarist Russia experienced famine and economic collapse. ... The Peoples Republic of China was proclaimed in the aftermath of the Communist Partys triumph in the Chinese Civil War by Mao Zedong on October 1, 1949 with Beijing as capital. ... Stamp featuring Ho Chi Minh commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party The Communist Party of Vietnam (Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam) is the ruling party in Vietnam. ... Some of the Khmer Rouge leadership during their period in power. ... The Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party (Laotian: Phak Pasason Pativat Lao) is the Communist Party of Laos. ... Polylogism is a tenet of Marxism, Nazism, and some other political and social philosophies, according to which persons of different races or of different social classes use different kinds of logic. ...

External links

• History of Economic Thought: Marxian School
• Modern Variants of Marxian political economy
• Marxist.com In Defence of Marxism
• Marxists Internet Archive
• Pathfinder Books, Marxist bookstore online
• Marxism Page
• Marxist.net Marxist Resources from the Committee for a Workers International
• Marxism FAQ
• Max Stirner, a durable dissident, How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them.