Communism

The meaning of the term communism is more elastic than has often been supposed by commentators or by its detractors or defenders. It gained purchase as a concept largely because Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (bent on distinguishing their doctrine from the Socialism of the 1840s, which was overwhelmingly middle class, reformist, and French) insisted on calling their celebrated document of 1848 The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx and Engels also decisively redefined and set their seal on communism by divesting the term of its heretofore clandestine and conspiratorial connotations. (Marx and Engels consented to the use of the term socialism to refer to their doctrine only when socialism itself had undergone shifts in its meaning.)

Upon the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Vladimir Lenin began calling Bolshevism (a term that had minoritarian connotations) communism, largely out of a felt need to distinguish it from the orthodox “evolutionary socialism” of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International (1885–1914). The success of what was now called communism—which by contrast with evolutionary socialism owed nothing to parliamentarism or the ballot box—was foreseen by few and planned by fewer. (Much the same could be said of the ultimate demise of Soviet communism.) Lenin drew inspiration both from the Paris Commune of 1871, the most celebrated working-class uprising of the nineteenth century, and from Marx's The Civil War in France (1871), a spirited defense of the commune. In calling the commune the ideal political form in which to emancipate labor, Marx effectively set his seal on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of communism.

The revolutionary success of communism in its Leninist incarnation did little to rob the term of its elasticity or to reintroduce a pre-Marxian conspiratorialism. The meaning of communism was now stretched to cover not just insurrection and expropriation, but also the more positive tasks of political, social, and economic reconstruction in the absence of private property relations. It is along these lines that communism may be understood as the major political innovation or experiment of the twentieth century, especially during its expansionist phase after World War II. Communism may also be understood, internationally, as the main twentieth-century counterweight to the ideology of the U.S. national security state. Communism, again, may also be understood as Serge Halimi understands it (with reference to its Marxian roots)—as a thoroughgoing critique in advance of capitalist globalization. Recent developments in China, where the shift to capitalism was effected under otherwise rigidly communist rule, may be regarded as an illustration of this last understanding.