Socialism
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with the emergence of full communism, the state would ‘wither away’ – once the class system had been abolished, the state would lose its reason for existence. The resulting communist society would therefore be stateless as well as classless, and would allow a system of commodity production to give way to one geared to the satisfaction of human needs. Orthodox communism The Russian Revolution and its consequences dominated the image of communism in the twentieth century. The Bolshevik party, led by V. I. Lenin, seized power in a coup d’état in October 1917, and the following year adopted the name ‘Communist Party’. As the first successful communist revolutionaries, the Bolshevik leaders enjoyed unquestionable authority within the communist world, at least until the 1950s. Communist parties set up elsewhere accepted the ideological leadership of Moscow and joined the Communist International, or ‘Comintern’, founded in 1919. The communist regimes established in eastern Europe after 1945, in China in 1949, in Cuba in 1959 and elsewhere, were consciously modelled on the structure of the Soviet Union. Thus, Soviet communism became the dominant model of communist rule, and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism became the ruling ideology of the communist world. However, twentieth-century communism differed significantly from the ideas and expectations of Marx and Engels. In the first place, although the communist parties that developed in the twentieth century were founded on the theories of classical Marxism, they were forced to adapt these to the tasks of winning and retaining political power. Twentieth-century communist leaders had, in particular, to give greater attention to issues such as leadership, political organization and economic management than Marx had done. Second, the communist regimes were shaped by the historical circumstances in which they developed. Communist parties did not achieve power, as Marx had anticipated, in the developed capitalist states of Western Europe, but in backward, largely rural countries such as Russia and China. In consequence, the urban proletariat was invariably small and unsophisticated, quite incapable of carrying out a genuine class revolution. Communist rule thus became the rule of a communist elite, and of communist leaders. Soviet communism, furthermore, was crucially shaped by the decisive personal contribution of the first two Bolshevik leaders, V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953).
KEY FIGURE
VLADIMIR ILICH LENIN (1870–1924) A Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Lenin was the first leader of the Soviet state (1917–21). In What Is to Be Done? (1902), he emphasized the central importance of a tightly organized ‘vanguard’ party to lead and guide the proletarian class. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he developed an economic analysis of colonialism, highlighting the possibility of turning world war into class war. The State and Revolution (1917) outlined Lenin’s firm commitment to the ‘insurrectionary road’ and rejected ‘bourgeois parliamentarianism’.
Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/ Getty Images
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