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 Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
The book contains Marx and Engels' Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism.
As a politician, Lenin was a persuasive and charismaticorator. As an intellectual his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism–Leninism, a pragmatic Russian application of Marxism that emphasized the critical role played by a committed and disciplined political vanguard in the revolutionary process, while defending the possibility of a socialist revolution in less advanced capitalist countries through an alliance of the proletarians with the rural peasantry.
Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Critics labeled him a dictator, but supporters saw him heroically as a champion of the working classes. He has had a significant influence on the Marxist-Leninist movement, which since his death had developed into a variety of schools of thought.
...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.
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A small but highly unpleasant group of APN-KGB people are the retired KGB, who think of Novosti as a charitable institution. Into this category fall some security guards, drivers, administration officials, members of the personnel department and the "military desk," some cleaners, doormen, technicians, and, last but not least, our movie projectionist, Uncle Vasya. He was a short, chubby man, with an expressionless face bearing countless pock marks, like the face of the Great Father of All Progressive Journalists, losif Vissarionovich Stalin, whose bodyguard, they say, Uncle Vasya was. When I last saw him, Vasya's main occupation was screwing up the sequence of foreign film reels shown to the Novosti staff, and getting drunk in between.
Like most of his colleagues, the other KGB old-timers, Uncle Vasya never said a word about his past career. No wonder. These days Novosti employs quite a number of children of posthumously "rehabilitated enemies of the people," liquidated under Stalin. Reminiscences about the old days might result in severe fractures to Uncle Vasya's skull. It should be remembered that every second family of an intellectual, writer, journalist, etc., lost at least one relative to the GULAG death camps or Lubyanka's shooting ranges. This is one reason the old guards keep wisely silent, opening doors for the children of their victims, the Novosti's "new class." Some of the KGB's victims' children are now KGB themselves.
