Communism, a political and economic doctrine, aims to replace private property and profit – based economies – with public ownership of means of production, public education, and public health and welfare. Marx, like most 19th-century writers, tended to use the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. Communism, according to its proponents, is therefore a form of socialism, but not necessarily a socialist ideology. How exactly communism differs from socialism has long been debated, and the difference is largely due to the nature of Marx’s own ideas about the relationship between the two concepts and his own personal experiences.
After the state revolution of 1917, Lenin claimed that communism was socialism and socialism was communism. This distinction was reinforced when the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Soviet Union) and its leader Vladimir Lenin seized power and adopted the names of all Russian communist parties. Since then, the forms of political and economic organization that developed in the Soviet Union and were adopted in other countries governed by communist parties have been largely, but not exclusively, identified with communism. The terms socialism and communism have been used interchangeably since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War.
Marx and Engels, however, recognized socialism as a system in which the majority of productive property was in common ownership, without class differences remaining.
Communism is an economic and political philosophy founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the second half of the 19th century. Marx, Engels and Lenin stressed the importance of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat at the socialist stage of development, communism, so that there is no possibility of counter-revolution or a return to capitalism. Marx and Engels reserved the term communism for a system in which class differences have disappeared, people live in harmony and no more government is needed. With the proletariat as the individual labor power of the bourgeoisie, they thought that the means of production in a capitalist society belong to a small number of individuals, such as workers, peasants, workers and working families. Then there would be a fundamental process of class conflict, which would resolve itself through revolutionary struggle. After this conflict, a proletariat will rise up against the bourgeoisie and establish a communist society.
Communism is a political ideology that believes that society can achieve full social equality by abolishing private property. The manifesto in its last three points does not mention state ownership, which makes even the purest vision of communism sound like socialism. Marx argued that state-property was a valid stage in the transition to communism. The concept of communism began in the 1840s and spread throughout Europe, adapting the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Mao Zedong. After World War II, the rapid spread of Communists was perceived as a threat to capitalist countries and led to the Cold War. Western nations like the United States have this threat of communism as the basis for the entire Cold War.
What is communism and how did it come to be so feared and reviled, and what is it that it is so strongly opposed in the United States and other countries?
Communism is a political and economic ideology developed in the mid-19th century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Modern communist ideology, which developed from the ideas of Marx, Engels and their fellow Marxists, began after the French Revolution. Marx & Engels were political philosophers who dealt with the social consequences of industrial capitalism. In 1848 they published their first book, “The Communist Manifesto,” a critique of the capitalist system. The Communist Manifesto presented the French Revolution as a significant historical turning point, when the merchant class, in the process of consolidating control over the means of production, overthrew the feudal power structure and ushered in a modern capitalist era. The medieval class struggle, in which the nobility was played off against the serfs, with the working class selling its labor for wages, was replaced by the modern one, which plays off the bourgeois owners of capital against those of the proletariat, who are sold to the proletariat for labor and wages.
This new ideology was proposed in the Communist Manifesto, which the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx co-wrote with Friedrich Engels in 1848. Engels and his followers advocated and predicted a global proletarian revolution that would usher in a first era of socialism and then communism. Marx and Engels themselves later elaborated the basic principles of communism and the theory and practice of the communist movement. Although the manifesto outlines the basic requirements of a communist society, it does not contain instructions for the formation of communist governments, proposes the ultimate goals of a system, or even behaves specifically with regard to the historical events that led to its necessity. The manifesto emphasizes the dangerous instability that capitalism creates and the need for a revolutionary revolution in the face of this instability.