Communism is like Socialism but with the safety wheels taken off. If you want to learn about some of the history of Socialism, you can read a previous blog entry in this set.
Communism is a social and economic political ideology. According to the founders of the philosophy, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (mid 1800s), authors of The Communist Manifesto, the exploited working class within a Capitalist society must rise up in a revolutionary manner to overthrow their Capitalist forms of government in order to implement a transitional Socialist dictatorship via the collective working class (think: philosophical modern Democracy ruled by only the “working class” ) in hopes to eventually evolve into a form of governance of communal classless society that equally shares ownership as well as the means of production.
Today there are a number of different forms of transitional Communism. The most famous forms are politically moderate Communist ideologies that push less for revolution and proletarian (working class) democracy but rather believe in parliamentary forms of governance where representatives would vote in place of the citizens. These moderate communist forms are often politically referred to as Reformists or Social Democrats.
In America in the 1800s New Harmony, Indiana underwent an attempting to form a Capitalist + Socialist form of economic experiment. Within 2 years it failed because Capitalism values personal ownership and personal sovereignty. But Socialism is only a transitional stage between Capitalism and Communism according to Karl Marx. In the early 1900 Vladimir Lenin lead Russia into a Socialist revolution which resulted in a similar incompatibility of values. 100 years earlier in America it was also said that the New Harmony Experiment failed because the leadership in the situation were all not embracing a purer form of Socialism (in the educated and motivated sense of the word.) Back in Russia Communism would not be allowed to failed because of such values.
After 4 years of civil war lead by the Bolsheviks under Lenin, a form of social communism had taken hold but the leadership still struggled with capitalist ideals like personal sovereignty. Joseph Stalin followed Lenin in leading the Russian Communist movement and crushed any remaining over capitalist ideals converting Russian Communism into a form now referred to as the Communist Totalitarian ideology. How did Stalin do this? Lenin opened the door to the Marxist economic philosophy in Russia. Stalin wanted to ensure that Communism continued and that he would remain the figurehead to that movement. As a result his implementation of Communism resulted in something called Stalinism which was most famous for maintain communism with him as the head by: enlarging the reach of his government in ways that reduced personal sovereignty, national and international spying, punishment by law enforcers that did not involve court-based judgments, political “purgings” by killing, suppressing or exiling political opponents, extensive use of propoganda to establish a “personality cult” around him in order to maintain control over the nation and his Communist party. This is what it took from the Stalinism form of Communism to crush the values found in Capitalism.
Nearly 80 years later we learned that the Soviet Union established by Lenin, bolstered by Stalin, was nearly bankrupt. America in the 1980 cranked up nearly every political and social pressure to hen reveal that the U.S.S.R. was a failed experiment in Socialism and Communism. By the end of the 1980s the Soviet Union was no more and former Soviet nations began to move back toward Capitalist economics.
So is America Communist? In my opinion, like socialist ideology in America, people still promote certain values found in Marxist ideals like “class war” or “political governance of the means of production”, or “the subjugation of personal sovereignty for the purpose of social reform” or even “communal ownership via federal governance (of certain resources or opportunities)” but fundamentally America itself and its founding documentation doesn't allow for the Elected to simply do away with our Capitalist Republic in favor of the current winner 's sociopolitical-economic ideology. Well, not inevitably. It will always take a revolution to undo our Constitution or Bill of Rights or the values found in the Declaration of Independence. That is not to say that various expensive sociopolitical-economic “experiments” could not be attempted in ignorance in such a way as to simply cause long and painful and sometimes irreparable harm to America without actually turning us into something we are not.
It is better that we know the definition of these ideologies and their historical experiments before we simply jump out-of-context into some new political movement.
Here are the links to the blog posts:
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