Introduction
Communism lies to the extreme left of the political spectrum. The term communism was coined around in the 1840s. It is derived from the Latin communis, meaning ‘shared’ or ‘common’—visions of a society. Communism is a political and economic doctrine which seeks to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and control of the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society.
Karl Marx is the chief theorist of communism. His theory covers three main aspects: (1) materialist conception of history; (2) critique of capitalism and its workings; and (3) revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by communism.
Materialist theory characterizes history as a series of class struggles and revolutionary upheavals, leading ultimately to freedom for all. Earlier, Hegel regarded history as the dialectical (logical or rational) self-development of “spirit”. Marx replaced it with a materialistic interpretation. According to Marx, material production depends on (i) “material forces of production”—tools, technology and raw materials---and (ii) and “social relations of production”—organization of production in an economy. Growth of knowledge and technology revolutionize material forces of production. But the social and economic structures in the absence of concomitant change act as drags on dynamic technologies. This contradiction is overcome when society undergoes a revolution as from feudalism to capitalism.
Industrial capitalism is an economic system in which one class— ruling bourgeoisie—owns the means of production. The working class or proletariat effectively loses its independence. The worker becomes part of the means of production, a mere “appendage of the machine.”
Marxist Critique of Capitalism
Marx held that human history went through several stages, from ancient slave society through feudalism to capitalism. In each stage, a dominant class uses its control of the means of production to exploit the labour of a larger class of workers. But internal tensions or “contradictions” in each
stage eventually lead to the overthrow and replacement of the ruling class by its successor. Thus, the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy and replaced feudalism with capitalism. Similarly, Marx predicted, proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace capitalism with communism.
Capitalism was a historically necessary stage of development. It led to remarkable scientific and technological changes and greatly increased wealth. But this wealth—and the political power and economic opportunities that went with it—was unfairly distributed. The capitalists reap the profits while paying the workers a pittance for long hours of hard labour. This wealth also enables the bourgeoisie to control the government or state, which does the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the powerless. But the dominant thinking of society hides these facts. Religion, which Marx called “the opium of the people” causes ideological obfuscation. It dulls the critical faculties and leads workers to accept their wretched condition as part of God’s plan. Besides inequality, poverty, and false consciousness, capitalism also produces a feeling of alienation among workers.
Marx believed that capitalism is a volatile economic system that will suffer a series of ever-worsening crises—recessions and depressions—that will produce greater unemployment, lower wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. These crises will convince the proletariat that its interests as a class are implacably opposed to those of the ruling bourgeoisie. Armed with revolutionary class consciousness, theproletariat willseize the major means of productionalong with theinstitutions of statepower—police, courts, prisons, and so on—and establish a socialist state that Marx called “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” The proletariat will thus rule in its own class interest, as the bourgeoisie did before, in order to prevent a counterrevolution by the displaced bourgeoisie. Once this threat disappears, however, the need for the state will also disappear. Thus, the interim state will wither away and be replaced by a classless communist society.
Marx’s vision of communist society is remarkably (and perhaps intentionally) vague. Unlike earlier “utopian socialists,” whom Marx and Engels derided as unscientific and impractical, Marx did not produce detailed blueprints for a future society. It was not his task, he said, to “write recipes for the kitchens of thefuture.”
We need not follow the twists and turns which communism later took. One group led by Bernstein, the first revisionist, advocated that communism should take parliamentary route of trade unionism. Lenin adapted Marxism to the needs of revolution. Marxism-Leninism propounded that
(i) Society needs a centralized, vanguard party and does not need multiparty competition through peaceful, lawful political participation.
(ii) Imperialism has shaped the development of capitalism and altered the terms of revolutionary struggle from those outlined by Marx; namely, revolutions are more likely in less developed capitalist economies, contrary to Marx’s theory.