Politics - Communism

Politics - Communism

Political - Communism

• Communism May mean either the type of society in which property is vested in the community every individual the revolutionary movement which seeks to achieve that type of society by overthrowing the capitalist system and establishing a dictatorship of  the proletariat. Modern communism has ts basis in Marxism, q.v. as developed by the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lyitch Lenin (1870-1924), who applied the Marx Ian analysis to the new arms of capitalism which had developed since the days of Marx. Lenin studied the trusts and combines which with the inevitable concentration of capital, had superseded the small producers who characterized the earlier stages of capitalism. He concluded that the state apt large capital interests were collaborating in imperialist policies leading to recurrent wars, that capitalists would pay higher wages to skilled workers who would then betray the proletariat by adopting moderate policies, and that the poorer classes of workers would continue to adhere to revolutionary socialism as the instrument of the ruling class and believed that the proletariat must destroy it and replace ti by a new state machinery of its own. Communists believe that their first task is the establishment of Socialism, and that the next stage is true communism. They say that under Socialism they give effect to the principle 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his work and that there are still distinctions between classes, between mental and manual labour and between state property and cooperative property. Under Communism social life would be guided by the principle 'From each according to his ability, to each according to  his needs' and class, labor, and property distinctions would disappear, eventually the machinery of Government would no longer be needed and the state would wither away.