Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including
anarchist communism,
Marxist schools of thought, and
religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include
Marxism,
Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from
capitalism, its
economic system, and
mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a
social revolution. The two classes are the
proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their
labor power to survive, and the
bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a
communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a
communist mode of production.
Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. In the 20th century, several ostensibly
Communist governments espousing
Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the
Soviet Union with the
Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after
World War II. As one of the many
types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with
social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)
The Communist Party of Indonesia (
Indonesian: Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) was a
political party in
Indonesia. With growing popular support and a membership of about 3 million by 1965, the PKI was the strongest communist party outside the
Soviet Union and
China. The party had a firm base in various mass organizations, estimates claim that the total membership of the party and its frontal organizations might have at its peak organized a fifth of the Indonesian population. In March 1962 PKI joined the government. PKI leaders Aidit and Njoto were named advisory ministers.
Following the military coup in 1965, between 300,000 and one million Indonesians were killed in the mass killings that followed as the new regime cracked down on PKI. A
CIA study of the events in Indonesia assessed that "In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...".
Knud Jespersen (12 April 1926,
Sulsted – 1 December 1977) was a
Danish politician. Jespersen served as chairman of the
Communist Party of Denmark between 1958 and 1977 and was a member of parliament between 1973 and 1977.
During his teenage years Jespersen joined the
resistance movement against the
German occupation of Denmark. Both his mother and stepfather were members of the Communist Party. Following the 'police action' against the Communist Party on 22 June 1941, the entire household joined the underground resistance. In 1942, Jespersen himself became a member of the Communist Party. Both Jespersen and his stepfather were arrested and held in
concentration camps. His stepfather, Christian Andersen, was arrested by the
Gestapo in a raid on the family residence in December 1943. He died in the
Neuengamme concentration camp a year later. Jespersen arrested on 27 March 1945 and was detained at the
Frøslev Prison Camp. Jespersen was scheduled to be transferred to Germany, but was released after the Liberation on 5 May 1945.
After the war Jespersen became a
trade union activist. Following his release he began to work as a casual labourer. He was elected local union chairman of warehouse workers in
Aalborg in 1953. During the strike movements of the spring of 1956, he became known as an agitator.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian
bourgeoisie, was converted by
Communists into the Central
Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
Everyone is welcome to participate in WikiProject Socialism, where editors collaborate to improve all aspects related to
socialism on Wikipedia.
Selected quote
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Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what
Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your
father and your
mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically
man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and
nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of
abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that
question. Ask yourself whether your
question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the
creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You
postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an
egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?
You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its
genesis, just as I ask the
anatomist about the formation of
bones, etc.
But since for the
socialist man the entire so-called
history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human
labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his
birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice.
Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of
God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but
socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive
self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of
religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of
private property, through
communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human
emancipation and
rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.
