Portal:Communism/Selected article
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Selected articles list
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Marxism is the philosophy, social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German socialist philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary. Marx, often in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, drew on G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his most famous work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das Kapital.
Marx defined history on a strictly economic basis, stating that history had 6 steps (Tribe, Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism and Communism), where economic inequility caused each step to be replaced over time. He as a communist believed that a violent revolution would be the catalyst in the transformation from capitalism to socialism. Since its inception and up to the present day, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes survive in most countries around the world.
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The history of the Portuguese Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Português or PCP), spans a period of more than 85 years, since its foundation in 1921 as the Portuguese section of the Communist International (Comintern) to the present. The Party is still an active force within Portuguese society.
After its foundation, the party experienced little time as a legal party before it was forced underground after a military coup in 1926. After some years of internal reorganization, that adapted the PCP to its new clandestine condition and enlarged its base of support, the Party became a force in the opposition to the dictatorial regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar, despite being brutally suppressed several times during the 48 years of resistance and having spent several years with little connection with the Comintern and the World Communist Movement.
After the end of the dictatorship, with the Carnation Revolution in 1974, the party became a major political force within the new democratic regime, mainly among the working class. Despite being less influential since the fall of the Socialist bloc in eastern Europe, it still enjoys popularity in vast sectors of Portuguese society, particularly in the rural areas of the Alentejo and Ribatejo, and also in the heavily industrialized areas around Lisbon and Setúbal, where it holds the leadership of several municipalities.
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The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза, Kommunisticheskaya partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza; short: КПСС, KPSS) was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It lost its dominance in the wake of the failed August 1991 coup d'état attempt led by authoritarian hardliners.
It emerged from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The party led the 1917 October Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and established the world's first socialist state. Given the central role under the Constitution of the Soviet Union, the party controlled all tiers of government in the Soviet Union and tolerated no opposition. Its organization was subdivided into communist parties of the constituent Soviet republics as well as the mass youth organization, Komsomol. The party was also the driving force of the Third International (Comintern).
The party ceased to exist after the coup d'état attempt in 1991 and was succeeded by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Russia and the communist parties of the now-independent former Soviet republics.
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The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
The book contains Marx and Engels' Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism.
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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.
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Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and reaching global dimensions during the Cold War. Anti-communists argue that the repression in the early years of Bolshevik rule, while not as extreme as that during Joseph Stalin's rule, was still severe by reasonable standards, citing examples such as Felix Dzerzhinsky's secret police, which eliminated numerous political opponents by extrajudicial executions, and the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion and Tambov rebellion. Some anti-communists refer to both Communism and fascism as totalitarianism, seeing similarity between the actions of communist and fascist governments. Historian Robert Conquest has argued that Communism was responsible for tens of millions of deaths during the 20th century.
Opponents argue that Communist parties that have come to power have tended to be rigidly intolerant of political opposition. These opponents claim that most Communist countries have shown no signs of advancing from Marx's socialist stage of economy to an ideal communist stage. Rather, Communist governments have been accused of creating a new ruling class (a Nomenklatura), with powers and privileges greater than those previously enjoyed by the upper classes in the non-communist regimes.
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The Fourth International (FI) (founded in 1938) is the communist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky (Trotskyists), with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism. Historically, the Fourth International was established in France in 1938: Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Comintern or Third International to have become "lost to" Stalinism and incapable of leading the international working class to political power.
Trotsky's followers had been organised since 1930 as the International Left Opposition, which later became the International Communist League. By declaring themselves the Fourth International, World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Trotskyists, were publically asserting their continuity not only with the Comintern but also with the earlier Socialist International and the International Workingmens Association, the first international, which had been led by Karl Marx.
The International's rationale was to construct new mass revolutionary parties able to lead successful workers' revolutions. It saw these arising from a revolutionary wave which would develop alongside and as a result of the coming world war. The founding conference adopted the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution as the International's political platform.
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Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought (Chinese: 毛澤東思想, pinyin: Máo Zēdōng Sīxĭang) is an ideology derived from the teachings of Mao Zedong. In the People's Republic of China (PRC) Mao Zedong Thought has been the official doctrine of the Communist Party of China since the Cultural Revolution of the mid 1960s, although since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping the term has had little meaning in practice.
Outside the PRC, Maoism was a term, used from the 1960s onwards, usually in a hostile sense, to describe parties or individuals who supported Mao Zedong and his form of Communism, as opposed to the form practised in the Soviet Union, which these groups denounced as "revisionist." These groups usually rejected the term Maoism, preferring to call themselves Marxist-Leninists. Since the death of Mao and the reforms of Deng, most of these parties have disappeared, but various small Communist groups in a number of countries continue to advance Maoist ideas.
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The Conference of Communist and Workers Parties of Europe was an international meeting of communist parties, held in the city of East Berlin, on 29–30 June 1976. In all, 29 parties from across Europe participated in the conference. Notable participants at the meeting included Brezhnev, Ceaușescu, Gierek, Husák, Honecker, Kádár, Tito, Zhivkov, Carrillo, Berlinguer, Marchais and Cunhal.
The conference highlighted several important changes in the European communist movement. It exhibited the declining influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a widening gap between the independent and orthodox camps amongst European communist parties, with the ascent of a new political trend, Eurocommunism.
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The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (abbreviated CPI(M) or CPM; Hindi: भारत की कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी (मार्क्सवादी) Bhārat kī Kamyunisṭ Pārṭī (Mārksvādī)) is a communist party in India. The strength of CPI(M) is concentrated in the states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. As of 2013, CPI(M) is leading the state government in Tripura. Also leads the Left Front coalition of leftist parties. As of 2009, CPI(M) claimed to have 1,042,287 members.
CPI(M) emerged out of a division within the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1964. The CPI(M) was born into a hostile political climate. At the time of the holding of its Calcutta Congress, large sections of its leaders and cadres were jailed without trial. Again on 29–30 December, over a thousand CPI(M) cadres were arrested and detained, and held in jail without trial. In 1965 new waves of arrests of CPI(M) cadres took place in West Bengal, as the party launched agitations against the rise in fares in the Calcutta Tramways and against the then prevailing food crisis. State-wide general strikes and hartals were observed on 5 August 1965, 10–11 March 1966 and 6 April 1966. The March 1966 general strike results in several deaths in confrontations with police forces.
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The Workers' Party (Arabic: حزب العمال), formerly the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party (Arabic: حزب العمال الشيوعي التونسي, Ḥizb al-‘Ummāl ash-Shuyū‘ī at-Tūnisī; French: Parti communiste des ouvriers de Tunisie, PCOT), is a Marxist-Leninist political party in Tunisia. Its general secretary is Hamma Hammami. After their involvement in the uprising against Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, PCOT held their first conference as a legal party on July 22–24, with up to 2000 persons attending.
In the 2011 Constituent Assembly election, the candidates of PCOT's electoral formation ran by the name "Revolutionary Alternative" (Arabic: البديل الثوري al-badīl ath-thawrī; French: Alternative révolutionaire) and won 3 of the 217 seats, in Sfax, Kairouan and Siliana. In July 2012, the PCOT decided to remove the word "communist" from its name to avoid the stereotype associated with this term.
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The Provisional Central Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) is a communist political party in India. The general secretary of the party is Santosh Rana. The party is often referred to as CPI(ML) [Santosh Rana Group] or likewise.
The PCC, CPI(ML) evolved from the group loyal to Satyanarayan Singh from the original Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). Singh rebelled against the party leader Charu Majumdar in 1971, provoking a split. In April 1973, Singh's party was reorganised. When the Bihar movement was launched by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974, Singh's CPI(ML) decided to lend support to it. Narayan had been in contact with Singh since 1968, attempting to persuade him to support non-violent agrarian reform struggles.
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Paraguayan Communist Party (in Spanish: Partido Comunista Paraguayo) is a communist political party in Paraguay. PCP was founded on February 19, 1928. Later it was recognized as a section of the Communist International. It was brutally suppressed during the military regimes of the country. It gained legality for a brief period in 1936 and then again in 1946-1947. After the fall of the Alfredo Stroessner regime the party re-emerged as a legal party.
During 2008 presidential election, PCP supported the candidate of Patriotic Alliance for Change, Fernando Lugo, who won the election.
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The French Communist Party (French: Parti communiste français, PCF; French pronunciation: [paʁ.ti.kɔ.my.nist.fʁɑ̃.'sɛ]) is a left-wing political party in France which advocates the principles of communism. Founded in 1920 by the majority faction of the socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), it participated in three governments. It was also once the largest French left-wing party in a number of national elections, from 1945 to 1960, before falling behind Socialist Party in the 1970s.
Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a strong influence in French politics, especially at the local level. In 2012, the PCF claimed 138,000 members including 70,000 who have paid their membership fees.This would make it the third largest party in France in terms of membership.
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Al-Ansar (Arabic: الأنصار, 'the Partisans') was a guerrilla force attached to the Iraqi Communist Party, active between 1979 and 1988. When the alliance between the Communist Party and the Baath Party ended, a wave of harsh repression against the Communist Party followed. In 1977 the regime launched a crackdown against the communists. A number of communist cadres fled to the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq to escape arrest. By January 1979, the exiled communists had established ansar (partisan) fighting units. By April 1979 the ansar movement was operational. Headquarters of the partisan units were established in Kirkuk and as-Sulemaniyah, and bases were established in Irbil. Later, bases were also set up in Dohuk and Nineveh. The build-up of the ansar movement did however occur without the full consent of the politburo of the party.
In South Yemen, a number of Iraqi Communist Party cadres began military training before joining the guerrillas in northern Iraq. The training was administered by the South Yemeni government.
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Problems of Peace and Socialism (Russian: Проблемы мира и социализма), often referred to by the name of its English-language edition World Marxist Review (WMR), was a joint theoretical and ideological magazine of communist and workers parties around the world. It existed for 32 years, until it closed down in June 1990. The offices of WMR were based in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Each edition of the magazine had a circulation of above half a million, being read in some 145 countries. At its height, WMR appeared in 41 languages, and editors from 69 communist parties around worked at its office in Prague. The master copy of the magazine was its Russian-language edition Problemy Mira i Sotsializma.
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The Communist Party of Indonesia (Indonesian: Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) was a political party in Indonesia. With growing popular support and a membership of about 3 million by 1965, the PKI was the strongest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The party had a firm base in various mass organizations, estimates claim that the total membership of the party and its frontal organizations might have at its peak organized a fifth of the Indonesian population. In March 1962 PKI joined the government. PKI leaders Aidit and Njoto were named advisory ministers.
Following the military coup in 1965, between 300,000 and one million Indonesians were killed in the mass killings that followed as the new regime cracked down on PKI. A CIA study of the events in Indonesia assessed that "In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...".
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The Communist Party of Peru (Spanish: Partido Comunista del Perú), more commonly known as the Shining Path (Spanish: Sendero Luminoso), is a communist militant group in Peru. When it first launched the internal conflict in Peru in 1980, its stated goal was to replace the bourgeois democracy with "New Democracy". The Shining Path believed that by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, inducing cultural revolution, and eventually sparking world revolution, they could arrive at pure communism. Their representatives said that existing socialist countries were revisionist, and they claimed to be the vanguard of the world communist movement. The Shining Path's ideology and tactics have been influential among other Maoist insurgent groups, notably the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations.
The Shining Path is classified by the Peruvian government, the U.S., the European Union, and Canada as a terrorist organization. Since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992, the Shining Path has declined in activity.
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The Communist Party of Brazil (Portuguese: Partido Comunista do Brasil, PCdoB) is a communist and Marxist–Leninist political party in Brazil. It has national reach and deep penetration in the trade union and students movements. PCdoB shares the disputed title of "oldest political party in Brazil" with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). The predecessor of both parties was the Brazilian Section of the Communist International, founded on March 25, 1922. The current PCdoB was launched on February 18, 1962, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split. Outlawed after the 1964 coup d'état, PCdoB supported the armed struggle against the regime before its legalization in 1988. Its most famous action in the period was the Araguaia guerrilla (1966–1974). Since 1989, PCdoB has been allied to the Workers' Party (PT) at the federal level, and, as such, it participated in the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and joined the "With the strength of the people" coalition, which elected his successor, Dilma Rousseff.
PCdoB publishes the newspaper Working Class (Classe Operária) as well as the magazine Principles (Princípios), and is a member of the Foro de São Paulo. Its youth wing is the Union of the Socialist Youth (União da Juventude Socialista, UJS), launched in 1984, while its trade union wing is the Central of the Workers of Brazil (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil, CTB), founded in 2007 as a dissidence from the Unified Workers' Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT).
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Hoxhaism is a variant of anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism that developed in the late 1970s due to a split in the Maoist movement, appearing after the ideological dispute between the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labour of Albania in 1978. The ideology is named after Enver Hoxha, a notable Albanian communist leader, who served as the First Secretary of the Party of Labour.
Hoxhaism demarcates itself by a strict defense of the legacy of Joseph Stalin, the organization of the Soviet Union under Stalinism, and fierce criticism of virtually all other communist groupings as "revisionist"—it defines currents such as Eurocommunism as anti-communist movements.
The Albanians succeeded in ideologically winning over a large share of Maoists, mainly in Latin America (such as the Popular Liberation Army and the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador as well as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil), but they also had a significant international following in general.