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Communist Party

Communist party

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. Communist parties today may or may not formally use the term "communist" in their name. Even if they do, not all follow a strict interpretation of any of the main 'schools' of communism (chiefly Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism or Trotskyism). The original Communist Parties first started to be widely established across the world in the early 20th century, after the creation of the Communist International by the Russian Bolsheviks. Communist parties have held power in 21 nations throughout history, first and most notably in the Soviet Union. As of 2005, parties that profess adherence to communist ideology govern Cuba, the Peoples' Republic of China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In the case of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the adoption of a so-called "socialist market economy" — formally known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" — has led many communists and communist parties worldwide to argue that it has either partially or completely abandoned communism for capitalism and market society, a charge which the CPC vigorously denies. The Communist Party of Vietnam's adoption of doi moi has led to similar allegations from critics, as have recent Communist Party of Cuba policies dating from during and after the Special Period of the 1990s. In North Korea, Marxism has been officially "superseded" by the ideology of Juche. In July 2002, North Korea started running an experiment with capitalism in the Kaesŏng Industrial Region. A small number of other areas have been designated as Special Administrative Regions, or regions where free-market policies are allowed, including Sinŭiju along the China-North Korea border. Meanwhile, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, the Communist Party was elected back into power. However, as of 2004, this nominally communist government has not distinguished itself in any significant way from the capitalist government which preceded it. There are currently hundreds, if not thousands, of communist parties, large and small, in existence today throughout the world. Their success rates vary widely: some are growing; others are in decline. See the List of Communist Parties and the World Communist Movement for details on today's communist parties.

History of Communist Parties

Early Communist groups

The first international Marxist organization was called the Communist League, advocates of the principles put forth in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto and inspired by the example of the Paris Commune. The group dissolved in 1852 after breaking into factional quarrels. The Bolshevik party seized power in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In March, 1918, the party changed its name to "All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", and was generally known as "The Communist Party" from that point on. Many other Communist parties, especially in Europe, were created in the 1910s and 1920s as the result of factional splits within most of the socialist parties that existed at the time. Some factions advocated the creation of socialism through existing legal channels, while others advocated armed revolution and the ejection of the bourgeois from power through the use of force. The revolutionary groups usually called themselves communists, while those who wanted a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism kept the names socialists or social democrats. Shortly after the split, more differences between the two sides began to emerge. During the 1920s, communists supported the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism, while the socialists supported only Marxism and rejected Leninism. This rift grew even wider as both sides started to develop separate branches of their own. Most mainsteam social democrats had abandoned Marxism by the 1950s. Trotskyism and several other branches of self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxism contend that, under the influence of Stalinism, the Soviet-influenced Communist Parties drifted far away from the original Marxist-Leninist position during the same period. In contrast, Anti-Revisionists, who also self-identify as revolutionary Marxists, say that the Soviet Union broke with true socialism with Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956. The latter subsequently supported the 1949 Chinese Revolution, Mao Zedong, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, though most abandoned support of China as it became clear (in their view) that Deng Xiaoping's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" pursued in the late 1970s and early 1980s signalled a return to capitalism.

Stalin-era Communist Parties

Following Stalin's orders, the Communist International was dissolved in 1943. In the period between 1945 and 1949, following the end of World War II, Moscow-controlled Communist parties such as the Polish Polish United Workers' Party and the German Socialist Unity Party were put in power throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe, creating the Eastern bloc. The Communist Party of the United States was considered within the political mainstream during the 1930s and 1940s, but the advent of the Cold War got it declared illegal for a time and led to McCarthyism, a vigorous anti-Communist political repression movement in America during the 1950s which effectively destroyed the American Communist Party's influence.

Non-Soviet controlled Communist governments

In Yugoslavia, communist guerrillas liberated the country from Nazi occupation and established a government without Soviet assistance. As a result, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was not controlled from Moscow. Indeed, it opposed the Soviet Union vigorously on a number of major policy points, leading to Stalin's excommunication of the Yugoslav communist government from the Soviet bloc. In 1949, Chinese communists ended a civil war that had raged for decades, and established the People's Republic of China. Shortly thereafter, another communist party, the Workers Party of Korea, came to power in North Korea and was backed by the new communist Chinese government during the Korean War. Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong entertained major differences of vision, however, precipitating the Sino-Soviet split between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the early 1960s. Albania was liberated by communist partisans in a similar fashion, but it developed in a very different way from Yugoslavia. The Albanian government sided with the Soviet Union early on, then took the side of the Communist Party of China in the Sino-Soviet split.

Western European Communist Parties after the war

Members of communist parties were persecuted in many countries in the early Cold War period, when anticommunist sentiment was fueled by Western governments as part of their Cold War strategy. Nevertheless, in capitalist countries such as Italy and France, large Communist Parties gathered lots of popular support and played a prominent part in politics throughout the post-war decades. They developed a variant of Communist ideology known as Eurocommunism. This called for a socialist planned economy under the administration of a democratic government, and a multi-party system of free elections. This was a clear break with the Soviet line, but many of these parties continued to maintain good, or at least diplomatic, relations with the Soviet Union.

Third world Communist parties

In the third world, communist parties became quite popular in some areas because they promised the overthrow of governmental structures that many people considered oppressive, and a higher standard of living for the poor. Often, communists played the dominant role in struggles for independence against colonial powers. The resulting wars usually became enmeshed into the Cold War, with the Soviet Union supporting communist forces and the United States supporting anti-communist ones. The two superpowers waged wars by proxy, as in, for example, the Vietnam War, where American troops fought local communists; or in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where Soviet troops fought mujahideen forces supported by the United States which sought to overthrow the pro-Soviet Communist government of Afghanistan. Vietnam and Laos are still ruled by Communist Parties.

Cuba

After Fidel Castro's nationalistic revolt in Cuba, he was snubbed by President Eisenhower, who went out to play golf on the day he was scheduled to meet with Castro, and assigned Vice President Richard Nixon to meet with Castro instead. Castro was extremely annoyed at the slight, and entered into negotiations with the Soviet Union. Castro aligned with the Soviets and declared himself a communist shortly afterward. Cuba survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with careful market-oriented reforms and strategic alliances, known as the "Special Period," the Communist Party of Cuba remains in power as of 2005. Some question, however, how Castro's personal health will fare in the near future, and it remains to be seen if his party will remain in power after his death.

Post-Soviet Eastern bloc Communists

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist parties lost their power monopolies in most of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In many places, communist parties re-organized themselves as new socialist or social democratic organizations (though some have remained orthodox late-Soviet era communist). Many of the communist parties in those countries and their various successor organizations remain highly influential in local government elections and political struggles throughout the former Eastern bloc.

Structure of Communist parties

:See: democratic centralism. In theory, a party congress would elect a Central Committee to execute the will of the Congress between meetings. The Central Committee would elect a much smaller Politburo to elect a general secretary and handle day-to-day operations. In practice, the flow of power often became the reverse: the Politburo became self-perpetuating, and controlled the composition of the Central Committee, which in turn controlled the party congresses. Some modern communist parties still hold to the democratic centralist tradition. Others have abadoned democratic centralism, often accompanied by a renouncing of Marxism-Leninism overall, and instead pursue a structure more in common with social democracy, advocating welfare-statism such as is found in Scandinavia and most parts of Western Europe. The doctrine of ruling communist parties was typically that all property would belong to the state as the transition to a communist society (see socialism and state capitalism), and that the state would highly regulate all commerce in the country in the meantime. This policy stopped companies from driving each other out of business and in turn kept unemployment low.

See also


- List of Communist Parties
- Communism
- World Communist Movement
- Trotskyism
- Maoism
- Marxism
- Marxism-Leninism
- Titoism
- Euro Communism
- Communist State
- Anti-Communism Category:Communism
- zh-min-nan:Kiōng-sán-tóng ko:공산당 ja:共産党

Political party

A political party is a political organization that seeks to attain political power within a government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns. Some parties are not permitted to or choose not to seek power through elections and so may turn to other forms of pressure, sometimes terrorism. Parties often espouse a certain ideology, but may also represent a coalition among disparate interests. In parliamentary systems of government, most political parties have an elected leader who, if his or her party is elected, becomes head of government. In presidential systems, especially those with full separation of powers, there may not be a formal leader. In certain electoral situations, more common in elections using proportional representation than First Past the Post, a government may be formed of more than one party, called a coalition government. Partisanship is the tendency of supporters of political parties to subscribe to or at least support their party's views and policies in contrast to those of other parties. Differentiation is essential to most political parties: they must be different at least in some ways to other parties to compete in politics and win elections. Extreme partisanship is sometimes referred to as partisan warfare.

Nonpartisan, Single-party, two-party, and multi-party governments

In a nonpartisan system, no official political parties exist, or the law does not permit political parties. In nonpartisan elections, each candidate for office runs on her or his own merits rather than as a member of a political party. In nonpartisan legislatures, there are no typically formal party alignments within the legislature; even if there are caucuses for specific issues. Despite being nonpartisan, most members have consistent and identifiable voting patterns. Historians have frequently interpreted Federalist No. 10 to imply that the Founding Fathers of the United States intended the government to be nonpartisan. The administration of George Washington and the first few sessions of the US Congress were nonpartisan. The unicameral legislature of Nebraska is the only nonpartisan state government body in the United States. Many city and county governments are nonpartisan. Unless there are legal prohibitions against political parties, factions within nonpartisan governments generally evolve into political parties. In single-party systems, only one political party is legally allowed to hold effective power. Although minor parties may sometimes be allowed, they are legally required to accept the leadership of the dominant party. This party may not always be, however, identical to the government, although sometimes positions within the party may in fact be more important than positions within the government. In Dominant-party systems, opposition parties are allowed, and there may be even a deeply established democratic tradition, but other parties are widely considered to have no real chance of gaining power. Sometimes, political, social and economic circumstances, and public opinion are the reason for others parties' failure. Sometimes, typically in countries with less of an established democratic tradition, it is possible the dominant party will remain in power by using patronage and sometimes by voting fraud. In the latter case, the definition between Dominant and single-party system becomes rather blurred. Examples of dominant party systems include the People's Action Party in Singapore and the African National Congress in South Africa. Also, one party dominant systems existed in Mexico with the Institutional Revolutionary Party until the 1990's, and in the southern United States with the Democratic Party from the 1880s until the 1970s. Two-party systems are states such as the United States and Jamaica in which there are two political parties dominant to such an extent that electoral success under the banner of any other party is extremely difficult. One right wing coalition party and one left wing coalition party is the most common ideological breakdown in such a system but in two-party states political parties are traditionally catch all parties which are ideologically broad and inclusive. The relationship between the voting system used and the two-party system was described by Maurice Duverger and is known as Duverger's Law. Duverger's Law Multi-party systems are systems in which there are multiple parties. In nations such as Canada and the United Kingdom, there may be two strong parties, with a third party that is electorally successful. The party may frequently come in second place in elections and pose a threat to the other two parties, but has still never formally held government. In some rare cases, such as in Finland, the nation may have an active three-party system, in which all three parties routinely hold top office. It is very rare for a country to have more than three parties who are all equally successful, and all have an equal chance of independently forming government. More commonly, in cases where there are numerous parties, no one party often has a chance of gaining power, and parties must work with each other to form coalition governments. This has been an emerging trend in the politics of the Republic of Ireland.

Parties and directions

Political parties are often considered on a political spectrum. One typical spectrum has the Left associated with radical or progressive policies and the Right with conservative or traditional policies. Other analyses include other dimensions such as the political parties' acceptance of parliamentary democracy as opposed to authoritarian or totalitarian attitudes, and economic policies, the Left favoring social-democracy, socialism or communism, while the Right tends to favor laissez-faire economics or Fascism. Centrist parties often adopt a collection of policies that defy easy placing on the political spectrum. Many parties will have (formal or informal) factions within them that have differing views on policy direction.

Colors and emblems for parties

:Main article: see political colour Generally speaking, over the world, political parties associate themselves with colors, primarily for identification, especially for voter recognition during elections. Red usually signifies leftist, communist or socialist parties. Conservative and Christian democratic parties generally use blue or black. Recently in the United States, this trend has been reversed. Pink sometimes signifies socialist. Yellow is often used for liberalism. Green is the color for green parties and Islamist parties. Orange is sometimes a color of nationalism, such as in The Netherlands, or is a color of reform such as in Ukraine. In the past, Purple was considered the color of royalty, but is rarely used in modern-day political parties. Brown is generally associated with fascist or neofascist parties, going back to the Nazi Party's brownshirt security guards. Color associations are useful for mnemonics when voter illiteracy is significant. Another case where they are used is when it is not desirable to make rigorous links to parties, particularly when coalitions and alliances are formed between political parties and other organizations, for example: Red Tory, "Purple" (Red-Blue) alliances, Red-Green Alliances, Blue-Green Alliances, Pan-green coalitions, and Pan-blue coalitions. The emblem of socialist parties is often a red rose held in a fist. Communist parties often use a hammer, a sickle, or both.

International organizations of political parties

During the 19th and 20th century, many national political parties organized themselves into international organizations along similar policy lines. Notable examples are the International Workingmen's Association (also called the First International), the Socialist International (also called the Second International), the Communist International, (also called the Third International), and the Fourth International, as organizations of Working class parties, or the Liberal International (yellow), and the International Democrat Union (blue). Worldwide green parties have recently established the Global Greens. The Socialist International, the Liberal International, and the International Democrat Union are all based in London.

See also


- List of politics-related topics
- List of political parties
- Party class
- Political faction (both pre- and within a modern party)

External links


- [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/platforms.php U.S. Party Platforms from 1840-2004 at The American Presidency Project: UC Santa Barbara]
- [http://www.electionworld.org/parties.htm Political parties around the world]
- [http://www.politicalresources.net/ Political resources on the net]
- [http://www.broadleft.org/ Leftist political parties of the world] Category:Elections Category:Political parties ko:정당 ja:政党 simple:Political party



Marxism

Marxism is the social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 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, more commonly known as Das Kapital. Since its inception and up to the present day, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes exist in most countries around the world, and Marxism continues to enjoy significant intellectual respect in many circles. Das Kapital Das Kapital Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency (later known as Social Democracy) came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the Second International and these parties supported their own governments in World War One. This issue caused the communists to break away and form their own parties which became members of the Third International. The contemporary meanings of these terms was initially very different: Lenin, for example, was considered a social democrat until the mutation of the latter movement. 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 yet to occur in any historical self-claimed Communist state, often due to an initial authoritarian regime's unwillingness to relinquish the power it gained in revolution. These historically communist states have generally followed a socialist, command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage. 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 Marxism. Some libertarian members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist 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. 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 coordinating economic actors and 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."

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

market failure Marx's immensely rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy. Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which the progress of freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses by the development of ideas into their contraries. 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, servants of a World Spirit whose Freedom has reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the material. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians and Marx attached himself to Bauer. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Marx and Engels quit the Young Hegelians and wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family," and "The German Ideology." 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. (Feuerbach had not been one of Hegel's favorite pupils; when Feuerbach sent his thesis to Hegel, Hegel refused to reply. So, the title of Young Hegelian should be considered loosely when considering 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": :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. 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: :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. In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: 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. 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. 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").

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 proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control. This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). 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 [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm] [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm].) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take. 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. According to his prescriptions, 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 marginalism: on one side, technical production coefficients; on the other, subjective preferences. To neoclassical economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory. 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. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible. Marx suggested that capitalist dynamics included the tendential law of a falling rate of profit. The general tendency could be explained by the actions of individual capitalists. Competition forced them to cut costs by boosting labour productivity, yet this technical change through mechanisation caused a corresponding fall in the "productivity of capital" (the output-capital ratio). As such the average rate of profit fell over the economy as a whole. Certain Marxist economists, such as Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick Sr, have used this theoretical edifice to construct a theory of capitalist "breakdown". Others have explained it as an aspect of capitalist crisis, and prone to counter-tendencies during economic booms. Marx argues that capitalism is, in the words of Ernest Mandel, 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 philistine 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 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. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to the alleged inconsistencies of Marxian theory. Later, neo-Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labour theory of value.

Class analysis

Marxists believe that in its pure form capitalist society is divided into two powerful social classes:
- 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. From a Marxist perspective, the actually-existing basic classes in today's advanced economies are the capitalist class, the new middle classes who engage in both labour and managerial responsibilities, self-employed proprietors, the working class and a lower "lumpenised" stratum. 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. 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. 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. 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..

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

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. Further, many, both inside and outside the revolution worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development, as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism, and consequently the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. 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 and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation. 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. 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. 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. 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 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments 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 death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs. Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true Marxist party. 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. 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, more commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism.

See also

Other articles about Marxism


- antagonistic contradiction
- communism
- council communism
- contributors to marxist theory
- Communist Philosophy of Nature
- Criticisms of communism
- Economic Determinism
- 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
- Western Marxism
- Marxist humanism

See also


- anarchism
- Anarchism and Marxism
- crisis theory
- communist state
- communist party
- Freiwirtschaft
- historicism
- History of the Soviet Union
- History of the People's Republic of China
- Khmer Rouge
- Lao People's Revolutionary Party
- Lewis H. Morgan
- labor theory of value
- materialism
- Participatory Economics aka ParEcon
- political economy
- political philosophy
- Polylogism
- Producerism
- social-conflict theory
- social evolutionism
- socialism

External links


- [http://www.MarxismOnline.com Marxism Online]
- [http://www.marxismfaq.co.uk A Marxism FAQ - under construction]
- [http://www.libcom.org libcom.org - class struggle history, theory and discussion including many works by Marx and marxists]
- [http://www.dougdowd.org/NewFiles/articles/lebowitzhi.html Introductory article by Michael A. Lebowitz]
- [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/marxian.htm History of Economic Thought: Marxian School]
- [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/neomarx.htm Modern Variants of Marxian political economy]
- [http://www.marxist.com/ Marxist.com] In Defence of Marxism
- [http://www.marxists.org/ Marxists Internet Archive]
- [http://www.pathfinderpress.com Pathfinder Books, Marxist bookstore online]
- [http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/ Marxism Page]
- [http://www.marxist.net/ Marxist.net] Marxist Resources from the Committee for a Workers International
- [http://libcom.org/library/marxism Libertarian Communist Library Marxism archive]
- [http://www.newyouth.com/archives/theory/marxismfaq.asp Marxism FAQ]
- [http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/766.html The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy (Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath)] critique by Karl Popper
- [http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.asp?control=72 An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Volume II: Classical Economics (Ricardo, Marx and Stuart Mill)] critique by Murray Rothbard
- [http://www.mises.org/store/Resurrecting-Marx-The-Analytical-Marxists-on-Freedom-Exploitation-and-Justice-P22C1.aspx Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice] critique by David Gordon
- [http://www.zmag.org/debateiso.htm Debating Marxism]Michael Albert (ParEcon) vs. Alan Maass (Marxism) Category: Economic ideologies Category:Philosophical movements zh-min-nan:Marx-chú-gī ko:마르크스주의 ja:マルクス主義 simple:Marxism th:ลัทธิมาร์กซ

Leninism

Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism (the forerunner of Communism) and is a branch in its own right (it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s). Leninism was developed mainly by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, and it was also put into practice by him after the Russian Revolution. Lenin's theories have been a source of controversy ever since their inception, having numerous critics across the political spectrum, from the Left and radical Left (for example, social democrats, anarchists, and even other Marxists, like the luxembourgists), to the center and center-left (for example, political moderates and liberals), and on the Right (for example, libertarians and conservatives) as well as the far Right (fascists and Nazis). Lenin argued that the proletariat can only achieve a successful revolution consciousness through the efforts of a Communist party that assumes the role of "revolutionary vanguard." Lenin further believed that such a party could only achieve its aims through a form of disciplined organization known as "democratic centralism," where Communist Party officials discuss proposals but agree to not question decisions after they have been made. Lenin expanded on Marx's initial theories, taking into account the fact that increasing class polarization and Communist revolution had failed to occur in the developed world. Lenin liked Marx's basic definition of communism and believed it would lead to the spread of Marxism. He attempted to explain this by stating that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that developed countries had created a labor aristocracy content with capitalism by exploiting the developing world. He maintained that capitalism could only be overthrown by revolutionary means, but added that due to imperialism such a revolution would have to occur in a lesser-developed country first, such as Russia. Lenin also supported the Marxist concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" following revolution, in which the working class is presumably represented through local Marxist-Leninist councils known as soviets. This is referred to as soviet democracy. Knowing that according to Marx's theories, a socialist system would be unable to develop independently in an underdeveloped country such as Russia, Lenin proposed two possible solutions: #The revolution in the underdeveloped country sparks off a revolution in a developed capitalist country (for example, Lenin hoped the Russian Revolution would spark a revolution in Germany.) The developed country establishes socialism and helps the underdeveloped country do the same. #The revolution happens in a large number of underdeveloped countries at the same time or in quick succession; the underdeveloped countries then join together into a federal state capable of overcoming the opposition of capitalist countries and establishing socialism. This was the original idea behind the foundation of Lenin's Russia later renamed the Soviet Union to demonstrate to the rest of the world the validity of his control. Either way, according to Marxism, socialism cannot survive in one poor underdeveloped country alone. Thus, Leninism calls for world revolution in one form or another. Lenin's contributions to Marxist theory are controversial; some have criticized them as revisionist. Still, Lenin's theories had a dramatic impact on Communist movements worldwide. The influence of Leninist ideology has waned since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there are still Leninists today who have focused their criticism on globalization, claiming it is a modern-day form of imperialism. Near the end of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism was proclaimed as the official ideology of the Communist Party. The concept of Marxism-Leninism is somewhat different to, although by no means contrary to, the concept of Leninism. Both terms have since been used by communist parties, although with different functions. Marxism-Leninism is used to describe the basic ideology of the communist party, whereas Leninism is often used when discussing the organizational model of the party. Dissident groups within the communist tradition, such as Trotskyists and Luxembourgists, often discard the term Marxism-Leninism as "Stalinism".

External links

Works by Vladimir Lenin:
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ What is to be Done?]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1 The State and Revolution]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/index.htm The Lenin Archive at Marxists.org]
- [http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/FCCI19.html First Conference of the Communist International] Other links:
- [http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/intellectuals-state.html An excerpt on Leninism and State Capitalism from the work of Noam Chomsky]
- [http://www.leninism.org/ Cyber Leninism] Category:Communism Category:Marxism Category:Modernism ko:레닌주의 simple:Leninism

Maoism

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). In the People's Republic of China (PRC) it is the official doctrine of the Communist Party of China, but since the 1978 beginning of Deng Xiaoping's market economy-oriented reforms, "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has come to the forefront of Chinese politics, and the official definition and role of Mao's ideology in the PRC has been radically altered and reduced (see History of China). It should be noted that the word Maoism has never been used by the Communist Party of China in its English-language publications, except derisively. The term Mao Tse-tung Thought has always been the preferred term. Likewise, Maoist groups outside China have usually called themselves Marxist-Leninist rather than Maoist. This is a reflection of Mao's view that he did not change, but only developed, Marxism-Leninism. The word Maoist has generally been used either as a pejorative term by other communists, or as a descriptive term by non-communist writers. However, some Maoist groups, believing that Mao's theories were substantial additions to the Marxist canon, call themselves "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" (MLM) or simply "Maoist". For example, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) distinguish themselves from the much more mainstream Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) by appending "Maoist" to their name. Outside the PRC, the term Maoism was used from the 1960s onwards, usually in a hostile sense, to describe parties or individuals who supported Mao Zedong and his form of communism, as opposed to the form practiced in the Soviet Union, which the parties supporting Mao denounced as "revisionist." Since the death of Mao and the reforms of Deng, most of these parties have disappeared, but various small communist groups around the world continue to advance Maoist ideas. These groups generally have the idea that Mao's ideas were betrayed before they could be fully or properly implemented.

Maoist theory

Unlike the earlier forms of Marxism-Leninism in which the urban proletariat was seen as the main source of revolution, and the countryside was largely ignored, Mao focused on the peasantry as a revolutionary force which, he said, could be mobilized by a Communist Party with their knowledge and leadership. The model for this was of course the Chinese Communist rural insurgency of the 1920s and 1930s, which eventually brought the Communist Party of China to power. Furthermore, unlike other forms of Marxism-Leninism in which large-scale industrial development was seen as a positive force, Maoism made all-round rural development the priority. Mao felt that this strategy made sense during the early stages of socialism in a country in which most of the people were peasants. Unlike most other political ideologies, including other socialist and Marxist ones, Maoism contains an integral military doctrine and explicitly connects its political ideology with military strategy. In Maoist thought, "political power comes from the barrel of the gun" (one of Mao's quotes), and the peasantry can be mobilized to undertake a "people's war" of armed struggle involving guerrilla warfare in three stages. The first stage involves mobilizing the peasantry and setting up organization. The second stage involves setting up rural base areas and increasing coordination among the guerrilla organizations. The third stage involves a transition to conventional warfare. Maoist military doctrine likens guerrilla fighters to fish swimming in a sea of peasants, who provide logistical support. Maoism emphasizes revolutionary mass mobilization, village-level industries independent of the outside world (see the example of the Great Leap Forward, which every Chinese person to melt down industrial pots and pans to smelt their own iron from scratch). Deliberate organizing of mass military and economic power is necessary to defend the revolutionary area from outside threat, while centralization keeps corruption under supervision, amid strong control, and sometimes alteration, by the revolutionaries of the area's arts and sciences. A key concept that distinguishes Maoism from other left-wing ideologies is the belief that the class struggle continues throughout the entire socialist period (as a result of the fundamental antagonistic contradiction between capitalism and communism). Even when the proletariat has seized state power through a socialist revolution, the potential remains for a bourgeoisie to restore capitalism. Indeed, Mao famously stated that "the bourgeoisie [in a socialist country] is right inside the Communist Party itself", implying that corrupt Party officials would subvert socialism if not prevented. This was the main reason for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in which Mao exhorted the public to "Bombard the [Party] headquarters!" and wrest control of the government from bureaucrats (such as Liu Shaoqi) perceived to be on the capitalist road. Mao's doctrine is best summarized in the Little Red Book of Mao Zedong, which was distributed to everyone in China as the basis of revolutionary education. This book consists of quotations from the earliest days of the revolution to the mid-1960s, just before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Maoism in China

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978, the role of Mao's ideology within the PRC has radically changed. Although Mao Zedong Thought nominally remains the state ideology, Deng's admonition to seek truth from facts means that state policies are judged on their practical consequences and the role of ideology in determining policy has been considerably reduced. Deng also separated Mao from Maoism, making it clear that Mao was fallible and hence that the truth of Maoism comes from observing social consequences rather than by using Mao's quotations as holy writ, as was done in Mao's lifetime. In addition, the party constitution has been rewritten to give the pragmatic ideas of Deng Xiaoping as much prominence as those of Mao. One consequence of this is that groups outside China which describe themselves as Maoist generally regard China as having repudiated Maoism and restored capitalism, and there is a wide perception both in and out of China that China has abandoned Maoism. However, while it is now permissible to question particular actions of Mao and to talk about excesses taken in the name of Maoism, there is a prohibition in China on either publicly questioning the validity of Maoism or questioning whether the current actions of the Communist Party of China are "Maoist." Although Mao Zedong Thought is still listed as one of the four cardinal principles of the People's Republic of China, its historical role has been re-assessed. The Communist Party now says that Maoism was necessary to break China free from its feudal past, but that the actions of Mao are seen to have led to excesses during the Cultural Revolution. The official view is that China has now reached an economic and political stage, known as the primary stage of socialism, in which China faces new and different problems completely unforeseen by Mao, and as such the solutions that Mao advocated are no longer relevant to China's current conditions. Both Maoist critics outside China and most Western commentators see this re-working of the definition of Maoism as providing an ideological justification for what they see as the restoration of the essentials of capitalism in China by Deng and his successors. Mao himself is officially regarded by the Chinese communist party as a "great revolutionary leader" for his role in fighting the Japanese and creating the People's Republic of China, but Maoism as implemented between 1959 and 1976 is regarded by today's Communist Party of China as an economic and political disaster. In Deng's day, support of radical Maoism was regarded as a form of "left deviationism" and being based on a cult of personality, although these 'errors' are officially attributed to the Gang of Four rather than to Mao himself. Although these ideological categories and disputes are less relevant at the start of the 21st century, these distinctions were very important in the early 1980s, when the Chinese government was faced with the dilemma of how to allow economic reform to proceed without destroying its own legitimacy, and many argue that Deng's success in starting Chinese economic reform was in large part due to his being able to justify those reforms within a Maoist framework. Some historians today regard Maoism as an ideology devised by Mao as a pretext for his own quest for power. The official view of the Chinese government was that Mao did not create Maoism to gain power, but that in his later years, Mao or those around him were able to use Maoism to create a cult of personality. Both the official view of the Communist Party of China and much public opinion within China regards the latter period of Mao's rule as having been a disaster for their country. The various estimates of the number of deaths attributable to Mao's policies that have been offered remain highly controversial. For more discussion of this period, see the article Cultural Revolution. At the same time, even this period is largely seen both in official circles and among the general public as preferable to the chaos and turmoil that existed in China in the first half of the twentieth century. Among some people there is nostalgia for the idealism of revolutionary Maoism in contrast to the corruption and money-centeredness some see in current Chinese society. Many also regret the erosion of guaranteed employment, education, health care, and other gains of the revolution that have been largely lost in the new profit-driven economy. On December 24, 2004, four Chinese protesters were sentenced to prison terms for distributing leaflets entitled "Mao Forever Our Leader" at a gathering in Zhengzhou honoring Mao Zedong on the anniversary of his death. Attacking the current leadership as "imperialist revisionists", the leaflets called on lower-level cadre to "change (The Party's) current line and to revert to the socialist road." The Zhengzhou incident is one of the first manifestations of public nostalgia for the Mao era to make it to the international press, although it is far from clear whether these feelings are isolated or widespread.

Maoism internationally

Cultural Revolution From 1962 and onwards the challenge to the Soviet hegemony in the World Communist Movement made by the Chinese Communist Party resulted in various divisions in communist parties around the world. At an early stage, the Albanian Party of Labour sided with CPC. So did many of the communist parties in South-East Asia, like the Burmese Communist Party, Communist Party of Thailand, Communist Party of Indonesia etc. Some Asian parties, like the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Workers Party of Korea attempted to take a middle-ground position. In the West and South, a plethora of parties and organizations were formed that upheld links to the CPC. Often the took names such as 'Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)' or 'Revolutionary Communist Party' to distinguish themselves from the traditional pro-Soviet communist parties. The pro-CPC movements were, in many cases, based amongst the wave of student radicalism that engulfed the 1960s and 1970s. Only one 'Western' communist party sided with CPC, the Communist Party of New Zealand. Under the leadership of CPC and Mao Zeodong a parallel international communist movement emerged, although it was never as formalized and homogenous as the pro-Soviet tendency. After the death of Mao in 1976 and various power-struggles in China that followed, the international Maoist movement was, in rough terms, divided into three. One portion supported, although not necessarily with great enthusiasm, the new Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping. Another portion denounced the new leadership as traitors to the cause of "Marxism-Leninism Mao Zeodong Thought"; and a third portion sided with the Albanians in denouncing the Three Worlds Theory of CPC. The latter category would effectively start to function as an international tendency of its own, led by Enver Hoxha and the APL. That tendency was able to amalgate most of the groups in Latin America, such as the Communist Party of Brazil. The first category was extremely heterogenous. The new Chinese leadership had little interest of the various foreign factions supporting China, and the movement fell into disarray. Many of the parties associated with it developed into non-communist parties. What is today referred to as the international Maoist movement evolved out of the second category, the parties that opposed Deng and claimed to uphold the legacy of Mao. During the 1980s two parallel regroupment efforts emerged, one centered around the Communist Party of the Philippines (which gave birth to the ICMLPO) and Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (in which the Communist Party of Peru played a leading role). Both tendencies claimed to uphold Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zeodong Thought, although RIM was later to substitute MLMZT for 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism'. Today the Maoist organizations, grouped in RIM, have their strongest hold in South Asia. Armed struggles take place in Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Parallel to RIM a regional structure, CCOMPOSA has been founded.

Military strategy

The military aspects of Maoist theory have garnered much more universal respect than his political or economic ideas. Mao is widely regarded as a brilliant military strategist even among those who oppose his other ideas. His writings on guerrilla warfare and the notion of people's war are now generally considered to be essential reading, both for those who wish to conduct guerrilla operations and for those who wish to oppose them. As with his economic and political ideas, Maoist military ideas seem to have more relevance at the start of the 21st century outside of the People's Republic of China than within it. There is a consensus both within and outside the PRC that the military context that the PRC faces in the early 21st century are very different from the one faced by China in the 1930s. As a result, within the People's Liberation Army there has been extensive debate over whether and how to relate Mao's military doctrines to 21st-century military ideas, especially the idea of a revolution in military affairs.

See also


- Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
- History of the People's Republic of China
- Cult of Personality
- List of people described as Maoists

External links

General


- [http://marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/a.htm#maoism The Encyclopedia of Marxism] Mao Zedong Thought.
- [http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/m/a.htm#mao-tse-tung The Encyclopedia of Marxism] Mao's life.
- [http://www.monthlyreview.org/0105commentary.htm Monthly Review January 2005] Text of the leaflets distributed by the Zhengzhou Four.

Maoist organizations (listed alphabetically)


- [http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)]
- [http://www.pcr-rcpcanada.org/ Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP)]
- [http://revcom.us/ Revolutionary Communist Party USA] Revolution paper online
- [http://www.awtw.org/rim/index.htm Revolutionary Internationalist Movement] Committee of various Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties from around the world

Revolutions


- [http://www.saag.org/papers3/paper277.html A paper on "Maoists of Nepal" from website of "South Asia Analysis Group" www.saag.org]
- [http://www.philippinerevolution.org/index.shtml Philippine Revolution Web Central] Information on the Philippine Communist Party, the New People's Army, and Revolution in the Philippines
- [http://www.defendsison.be/ Committee to Defend the democratic rights of Jose Maria Sison] Jose Maria Sison, Founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines
- [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=+site:news.bbc.co.uk+Maoists Search] BBC for news about Maoists (using Google)
- [http://news.google.com/news?q=Maoists&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wn Search for Maoists] on Google News Category:Maoism ja:毛沢東思想

Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself a Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party. He considered himself an advocate of orthodox Marxism. His politics differed in many respects from those of Stalin or Mao, most importantly in declaring the need for an international "permanent revolution". Numerous groups around the world continue to describe themselves as Trotskyist and see themselves as standing in this tradition, although they have diverse interpretations of the conclusions to be drawn from this. Trotskyism is sometimes also used critically by those from a Stalinist or social democratic background to denote any of various political currents claiming a tradition of Marxist opposition to both Stalinism and capitalism. "Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International." - James P. Cannon in History of American Trotskyism.

Trotsky, the Russian Revolution and Stalin

Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of "permanent revolution", and he argued that in countries where the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not triumphed already (in other words, in places that had not yet implemented a capitalist democracy, such as Russia before 1917), it was necessary that the proletariat make it permanent by carrying out the tasks of the social revolution (the "socialist" or "communist" revolution) at the same time, in an uninterrupted process. Trotsky believed that a new socialist state would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as well. This theory was accepted by Lenin and the Bolshevik party and guided their conception of the Russian Revolution as part of the world revolution. The Stalinist faction within the Bolshevik Party adopted the theory "socialism in one country" in 1924 in order to justify making deals with imperialist countries and in order to advance their own position and conception of Marxism by attacking the theories of the current group of leaders (e.g., Trotsky). On the political spectrum of Marxism, Trotskyists are considered to be on the left. They supported democratic rights in the USSR, opposed political deals with the imperialist powers, and advocated a spreading of the revolution throughout Europe and the East. The Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, grew in influence throughout the 20s, until Stalin used force against them in 1928, sending Trotsky into internal exile and jailing his supporters. The Left Opposition, however, continued to work in secret within the Soviet Union. Trotsky was eventually exiled to Turkey, then Norway, and finally to Mexico. After 1928, Stalin used his power in the USSR to gain bureaucratic control over the various Communist Parties throughout the world, and expelled Trotskyists from their ranks. At this point, inner party democracy, which was at the foundation of Bolshevism, was destroyed within the various Communist Parties. Anyone who disagreed with the party line was labeled a Trotskyist and a fascist. The Communist Parties then began to support capitalist governments, such as the CPUSA. Stalin did this to show that he was not a threat to capitalist rule and so hoped to avoid an invasion of the imperialist powers, as happened after the 1917 revolution. Trotsky later developed the theory that the Russian workers' state had become a "bureaucratically degenerated workers' state". Capitalist rule had not been restored, and nationalized industry and economic planning, instituted under Lenin, were still in effect. However the state was controlled by a bureaucratic caste with interests hostile to those of the working class. Trotsky defended the Soviet Union against attack from imperialist powers and against internal counter-revolution, but called for a political revolution within the USSR to restore socialist democracy. He argued that if the working class did not take power away from the Stalinist bureaucracy, the bureaucracy would restore capitalism in order to enrich itself. Much later, in the view of the ICFI, this is exactly what happened in the form of Glasnost and Perestroika. Many of Trotsky's criticisms of Stalinism were described in his book, [http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/index.htm The Revolution Betrayed]. In 1937, Stalin unleashed a political terror against all the remaining 'Old Bolsheviks' who had played key roles in the October Revolution in 1917. He also killed many of the Soviet Union's leading generals including Mikhail Tukhachevsky in a purge because they had served under Trotsky when he was the commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. "Trotskyist" has been used by Stalinists to mean a traitor; in the Spanish Civil War, being called a "Trot", "Trotskyist" or "Trotskyite" by the USSR-supported elements implied that the person was some sort of fascist spy or agent provocateur. George Orwell, a prominent socialist novelist, wrote about this practice in his book Homage to Catalonia and in his essay Spilling the Spanish Beans. He showed that instead of helping to fight against the fascist forces, the Stalinists did them a great favor by rooting out all the Trotskyists in Spain and then pulling out their forces, allowing Franco to win. In his book Animal Farm, an allegory for the Russian Revolution, he represented Trotsky with the character "Snowball" and Stalin with the character "Napoleon." Stalin pulled out of Spain in order to make a rapprochement with England and France. He later signed a deal with Hitler. This proved to many people that Stalin was selling out the revolution in order to defend an elite stratum within the Soviet Union, as Trotsky had been saying. Still not satisfied, he tried Trotsky in absentia, and killed almost all his relatives. An agent of the Russian government finally assassinated Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

Founding of the Fourth International

Main article: Fourth International Before his assassination, however, in 1938, Trotsky and the organisations that supported his outlook established the Fourth International. He said that only the Fourth International, basing itself on Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, could lead the world revolution, and that it would need to be built in opposition to both the capitalists and the Stalinists. At the time of the founding the Fourth International in 1938 Trotskyism was a mass political current in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and slightly later Bolivia. There was also a substantial Trotskyist movement in China which included the founding father of the Chinese Communist movement, Chen Duxiu, amongst its number. Wherever Stalinists gained power, they made it a priority to hunt down Trotskyists and treated them as the worst of enemies. Thus these movements had to deal with official repression as well as the violent attacks and treachery of the Stalinists. The Fourth International suffered repression and disruption through the Second World War. Isolated from each other, and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the USSR no longer could be called a degenerated workers state and withdrew from the Fourth International. After 1945 Trotskyism was smashed as a mass movement in Vietnam and marginalised in a number of other countries. The International Secretariat of the Fourth International organised an international conference in 1946, and then World Congresses in 1948 and 1951 to assess the expropriation of the capitalists in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the threat of a Third World War, and the tasks for revolutionaries. The Eastern European Communist-led governments which came into being after World War II without a social revolution were described by a [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/fi-2ndcongress/1948-congress02.htm resolution] of the 1948 congress as presiding over capitalist economies. By 1951, the Congress had concluded that they had become "deformed workers' states". As the Cold War intensified, the FI's 1951 World Congress adopted theses by Michel Pablo which anticipated an international civil war. Pablo's followers considered that the Communist Parties, in so far as they were placed under pressure by the real workers' movement, could escape Stalin's manipulations and follow a revolutionary orientation: Yugoslavia was their test case. The 1951 Congress argued that Trotskyists should start to conduct systematic work inside those Communist Parties which were followed by the majority of the working class. However, the ISFI's view that the Soviet leadership was counter-revolutionary remained unchanged. The 1951 Congress argued that the Soviet Union took over these countries because of the military and political results of World War II, and instituted nationalized property relations only after its attempts at placating capitalism failed to protect those countries from the threat of incursion by the West. The Fourth International split in 1953 into two public factions. The International Committee of the Fourth International was established by several sections of the International as an alternative centre to the International Secretariat, in which they felt a revisionist faction led by Michel Pablo had taken power. From 1960, a number of ICFI sections started to reunify with the IS. After the 1963 'reunification congress' which established the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, only the French and British sections of the ICFI decided against reunification. Expressed in derogatory language, they are described by their ideological opponents as "left deviationists" ("levye uklonisty", in Russian). Some Marxists who oppose Trotskyism regard it as being in the service of the right because, in their view, it is not an effective route to socialism. Trotskyists are mostly ignored by historians and politicians except when they faced police repression and slander. It is unusual for them to get a fair hearing of their views. However, the Sri Lankan Trotskyist party and the Bolivian Trotskyist party became the mass workers parties in those countries, prior to experiencing defeats and setbacks at a later stage. In both countries, however, there remains a large scale presence of competing Trotskyist groups. In recent years Trotskyism has also developed large scale support in a number of lesser developed countries in Latin America where it can count on some tens of thousands of supporters in both Argentina and Brazil. Elsewhere in the Third World support for Trotskyist ideas is more diffuse and generally confined to intellectuals but can be found in a diluted form among some sections of various progressive movements as in South Africa. No governing Communist party or successful Communist revolution has to this date professed Trotskyism, although Trotskyism's influence in some recent major social upheavals is very evident.

Trotskyism Today

There are a wide range of Trotskyist organisations around the world, with particular concentrations in Europe and North America. Most are linked to one or another of the various international Trotskyist tendencies. Probably the largest such tendency is the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. It derives from the 1963 "reunification" of ISFI with a majority of the ICFI. Its best known section is the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire of France. In France, the LCR is rivalled by Lutte Ouvrière and the Courant Communiste Internationaliste of Pierre Lambert. Each of the these groups maintains their own international tendency, as does the Socialist Workers Party, the largest Trotskyist group in Britain, which leads the International Socialist tendency from which the International Socialist Organization in the United States, the largest such group in that country, was expelled in 2001. Britain's SWP's support of George Galloway, a former Labour Party MP, and the