Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.
Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. In the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism as an intermediate stage. The idea that a proletarian revolution is needed is a cornerstone of Marxism; Marxists believe that the workers of the world must unite and free themselves from capitalist oppression to create a world run by and for the working class. Thus, in the Marxist view, proletarian revolutions need to happen in countries all over the world; see world revolution.
Leninism argues that a communist revolution must be led by a vanguard of 'professional revolutionaries'—that is men and women who are fully dedicated to the communist cause and who can then form the nucleus of the revolutionary movement. Some Marxists disagree with the idea of a vanguard as put forth by Lenin, especially left communists but also including some who continue to consider themselves Marxists-Leninists despite such a disagreement. These critics insist that the entire working class - or at least a large part of it - must be deeply involved and equally committed to the socialist or communist cause in order for a proletarian revolution to be successful. To this end, they seek to build massive communist parties with very large memberships.
Li Dazhao (29 October 1888 – 28 April 1927) was a Chinese intellectual who co-founded the Communist Party of China with Chen Duxiu in 1921. Li was born in Laoting (a county of Tangshan), Hebei province to a peasant family. He began his high school education at Tangshan Number 1 High School in 1905. From 1913 to 1917 Li studied political economy at Waseda University in Japan before returning to China in 1918.
As a leading intellectual in the New Culture Movement, Li was recruited by Cai Yuanpei to head the library at Peking University. In this position he influenced a number of students in the May Fourth Movement, including Mao Zedong, who worked in the library's reading room. Li was among the first of the Chinese intellectuals to look to China's villages as a basis for a political movement and was among the earliest to explore the Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union as a possible model for China's reform. Even as late as 1921, however, he still maintained warm relations with other New Culture figures such as Hu Shi.
By many accounts, Li was a nationalist and believed that the peasantry in China were to play an important role in China's revolution. As with many intellectuals of his time, the roots of Li's revolutionary thinking were actually mostly in Kropotkin's communist anarchism, but after the events of the May Fourth Movement and the failures of the anarchistic experiments of many intellectuals, like his compatriots, he turned more towards Marxism. Of course, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution was a major factor in the changing of his views. In later years, Li combined both his original nationalist and newly acquired Marxist views in order to contribute a strong political view to China.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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Together with this inquestionable increase in the number of workers occupied in industry, we are also confronted in Soviet Russia with an increase in the number of unemployed registered on the Labour Exchange. The number of unemployed has attained about a million. There have been months when the number of unemployed has even exceeded that amount.
Unemployment is one of the most distressing phenomena in Russia at the present time, and we must take every measure to abolish it. Of the entire number of unemployed about one fourth, or 25%, are industrial workers, and the remainder is made up of the intelligentzia, the professions, office workers and unskilled labourers. I must admit that I personally do not place complete confidence in the official statistics of the Labour Exchange, because of that fact that all kinds of people are registered on the exchange for the sake of receiving those priveleges for the unemployed and those conditions of hire which are guaranteed by the laws of the Soviet Republic, and which are inflexibly carried out. Here are registered not only those who are looking for work, but also those who would not accept work, and are merely looking for the priveleges and exemptions which are connected with the category of unemployment. We have constantly discovered cases where people who have been arrested and sentenced to Pechora (a place of exile-to Archangel) on the charge of speculation, have been registered on the Labour Exchange as unemployed. Therefore in my opinion the official figures probably exceed the actual number of unemployed. But in general we must take cognizance of the growth of number of unemployed, which goes parallel with the growth of the number of workers occupied in industry.
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