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Portal:Communism

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THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and an authoritarian socialist, vanguardist, or party-driven approach under a socialist state, which is eventually expected to wither away. Communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far-left.

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 18th-century France, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. During the upheaval, communism emerged as a political doctrine with the writings of François-Noël Babeuf, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, and Sylvain Maréchal, all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism, according to James H. Billington. In the 20th century, several 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...)

Selected article

PCOT leaders in Jemmal
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.

Selected biography

Popularized cropped version of Guerrillero Heroico - Che Guevara at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre explosion.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (14 June 1928 – 9 October 1967), commonly known as El Che, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, diplomat, military theorist and Cuban guerrilla leader. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled "rough" throughout Latin America, bringing him into direct contact with the poverty in which many people lived. Through these experiences he became convinced that only revolution could remedy the region's economic inequality, leading him to study Marxism and become involved in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

Some time later, Guevara became a member of Fidel Castro's paramilitary 26th of July Movement, which seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in the Congo-Kinshasa (later named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA/ U.S. Army Special Forces-organized military operation. Guevara died at the hands of the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on 9 October 1967. Participants in, and witnesses to, the events of his final hours testify that his captors executed him without trial.

After his death, Guevara became an icon of communist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico (shown) has received wide distribution and modification. The Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century."

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Election mural of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist). In Nepal the swastika is used as a voting symbol in ballots.

Photo credit: Soman

9 February 2025 – Naxalite–Maoist insurgency
Thirty-one Maoist militants and two security forces are killed during a shootout around Indravati River in Chhattisgarh, India. (Al Jazeera)

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It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?

— Karl Marx (1818-1883)
The Civil War in France , 1871

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