Where is communism

No one would strive to rise above others, and people would no longer be motivated by greed. Then, communism would close the gap between rich and poor, end the exploitation of workers, and free the poor from oppression. The basic ideas of communism did not originate with Marx, however.

Plato and Aristotle discussed them in ancient times, but Marx developed them into a popular doctrine , which was later propelled into practice.

The problems, he claimed, stemmed from the Industrial Revolution. The rise of factories, the reliance on machines, and the capability of mass production created conditions that promoted oppression and encouraged the development of a proletariat, or a working class. Simply put, in a capitalist system, the factories fueled the economy, and a wealthy few owned the factories. This created the need for a large number of people to work for the factory owners. In this environment, the wealthy few exploited the laborers, who had to labor in order to live.

So, Marx outlined his plan to liberate the proletariat, or to free them of the burden of labor. His idea of utopia was a land where people labored as they were able, and everyone shared the wealth. If the government controlled the economy and the people relinquished their property to the state, no single group of people could rise above another.

Marx described this ideal in his Manifesto, but the practice of communism fell far short of the ideal. For a large part of the 20th century, about one-third of the world lived in communist countries—countries ruled by dictatorial leaders who controlled the lives of everyone else.

The communist leaders set the wages, they set the prices, and they distributed the wealth. Western capitalist nations fought hard against communism, and eventually, most communist countries collapsed. However, as of , five proclaimed communist countries continue to exist: North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Laos. Photograph by J. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. Modern communist ideology began to develop during the French Revolution, and its seminal tract, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' "Communist Manifesto," was published in That pamphlet rejected the Christian tenor of previous communist philosophies, laying out a materialist and—its proponents claim—scientific analysis of the history and future trajectory of human society.

The Communist Manifesto presented the French Revolution as a major historical turning point, when the "bourgeoisie" —the merchant class that was in the process of consolidating control over the "means of production" —overturned the feudal power structure and ushered in the modern, capitalist era.

That revolution replaced the medieval class struggle, which pitted the nobility against the serfs, with the modern one pitting the bourgeois owners of capital against the "proletariat," the working class who sell their labor for wages. In the Communist Manifesto and later works, Marx, Engels, and their followers advocated and predicted as historically inevitable a global proletarian revolution, which would usher in first an era of socialism , then of communism.

This final stage of human development would mark the end of class struggle and therefore of history: all people would live in social equilibrium, without class distinctions, family structures, religion, or property. The state, too, would "wither away. Marx and Engels' theories would not be tested in the real world until after their deaths.

In , during World War I, an uprising in Russia toppled the czar and sparked a civil war that eventually saw a group of radical Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin gain power in The Bolsheviks, as this group was called, founded the Soviet Union on former Imperial Russian territory and attempted to put communist theory into practice.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had developed the Marxist theory of vanguardism, which argued that a close-knit group of politically enlightened elites was necessary to usher in the higher stages of economic and political evolution: socialism and finally communism. Lenin died shortly after the civil war ended, but the "dictatorship of the proletariat," led by his successor Joseph Stalin, would pursue brutal ethnic and ideological purges as well as forced agricultural collectivization.

Tens of millions died during Stalin's rule, from to , on top of the tens of millions who died as a result of the war with Nazi Germany. Rather than withering away, the Soviet state became a powerful one-party institution that prohibited dissent and occupied the "commanding heights" of the economy. Agriculture, the banking system, and industrial production were subject to quotas and price controls laid out in a series of Five Year Plans.

This system of central planning enabled rapid industrialization, and from to growth in Soviet gross domestic product GDP outpaced that of the U.

In general, however, the Soviet economy grew at a much slower pace than its capitalist, democratic counterparts. Weak consumer spending was a particular drag on growth. Central planners' emphasis on heavy industry led to chronic underproduction of consumer goods, and long lines at understocked grocery stores were a fixture of Soviet life even during periods of relative prosperity. Thriving underground markets — termed the "second economy" by some academics — catered to demand for cigarettes, shampoo, liquor, sugar, milk, and especially prestige goods such as jeans smuggled in from the West.

While these networks were illegal, they were essential to the party's functioning: they alleviated shortages that, left unchecked, threatened to spark another Bolshevik Revolution; they provided party propagandists with a scapegoat for shortages; and they lined the pockets of party officials, who would either take payoffs to look the other way or grow rich running illegal market operations themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed in , following a push to reform the economic and political system and provide greater room for private enterprise and free expression.

These reform pushes, known as perestroika and glasnost , respectively, did not halt the economic decline the Soviet Union suffered in the s and likely hastened the Communist state's end by loosening its grip on sources of dissent. Mao allied the country with the Soviet Union, but the Soviets' policies of de-Stalinization and "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist West led to a diplomatic split with China in Mao's rule in China resembled Stalin's in its violence, deprivation, and insistence on ideological purity.

During the Great Leap Forward from to , the Communist Party ordered the rural population to produce enormous quantities of steel in an effort to jumpstart an industrial revolution in China. Families were coerced into building backyard furnaces, where they smelted scrap metal and household items into low-quality pig iron that offered little domestic utility and held no appeal for export markets. Since rural labor was unavailable to harvest crops, and Mao insisted on exporting grain to demonstrate his policies' success, food became scarce.

The resulting Great Chinese Famine killed at least 15 million people and perhaps more than 45 million. The Cultural Revolution, an ideological purge that lasted from until Mao's death in , killed at least another , people.

After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping introduced a series of market reforms that have remained in effect under his successors. The U. The Chinese Communist Party remains in power, presiding over a largely capitalist system, though state-owned enterprises continue to form a large part of the economy.

Freedom of expression is significantly curtailed; elections are banned except in the former British colony of Hong Kong, where candidates must be approved by the party and voting rights are tightly controlled ; and meaningful opposition to the party is not permitted. The year marked the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War between that power and the United States. Born in Germany , Marx grew up to become a philosopher who based his beliefs on economics, history, journalism, political theory, revolutions, and sociology.

He established a way of thinking known as Marxism. Essentially at its core, Marxism advocates for the working class of an economy. It zeroes in on the differences between classes and how that impacts the functioning of a society.

The theory views Capitalism as the source of many problems, and Marxism is in direct conflict with capitalistic societies. Marxism views Capitalism as the cause of lower wages, heightened selfish behaviors, and greed surrounding wealth, as well as the ever-present emphasis on productivity in capitalistic societies. Through Marxism's lens, the political agenda that Communism promotes is seen as a form of socialism.

The two phases of Communism, as identified by Marx, explain how Communism unfolds and then becomes regularly practiced in a country. Marx conveyed that countries have to understand Capitalism before moving onto the elevated state that socialism provides. Karl Marx has said that nations will not understand how to uphold a country politically affiliated with Communism if they do not first master the art of Capitalism. This applies primarily to third-world countries that need to start from the ground up, not countries that already have a stable grip on their economy.

The end goal of the two-step process is a country that operates under Communist ideologies. In theory, it would be ideal for nations to make the jump from underdeveloped with no government to successful and functional without a government, but that is not how it would unfold in the real world. The reality of that situation would be a chaotic nation that experiences turmoil and corruption. For example, people would need to be paid based on the quality and quantity of their work. But if this understanding is not already deeply ingrained in a society, then everyone would act selfishly and seek success for themselves at the literal expense of everyone else.

The basics need to be instilled, first and foremost. From there, the country will be able to enter the second phase.

At this point, the nation would be viewed as a country that implements fully-realized Communism, where class divisions and government are no longer in existence.

Born on April 22, , Vladimir Lenin followed in Marx's footsteps in that Lenin was a philosopher who analyzed politics and crafted theories around what he saw. Lenin did not have identical beliefs to Karl Marx, but his ideologies were deeply rooted in Communism, much like Marx.

Leninism goes so far as to proclaim that socialism can only be achieved once the working class reaches a level of political consciousness that government officials withhold. Under Leninist beliefs, the working class can only overthrow the government and successfully instill socialism once the people understand how the government works.

The basic idea is to get inside the heads of government officials, figure out how they operate, and then find ways to unravel their power. Under the combined political theory of Marxism and Leninism, the concept of private property and an economy centered on profits are replaced with public ownership.

Overall communal control of both natural resources and the means of production are also characteristics of Communism.