Communism

Other pages about communism

The hammer and sickle is a symbol of communism.

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Communism is an idea in politics consisting of economical equality that wants a world without different social class groups. Communists believe these differences are extremely bad behaviour by the powerful. They say that things like factories, tools and farms (the relations of production) are owned by the bourgeoisie, which gives them unfair power over workers. Communists want these things to be owned by the workers instead of the bosses.^[1] They believe this will bring about the end of all money and private property.^[2]

This is the opposite to capitalism where there is money, and a state and class structure. In capitalism, there is a working class (people who don't own the means of production, also called the proletariat) and the owning class (people who own the means of production, sometimes called the ruling class or the bourgeoisie).

Communist thinkers believe a communist world can happen if the working class take away the power of the bourgeoisie and start to control the means of production.

Countries that officially follow forms of communism include Vietnam, China, Cuba and Laos, which are Marxist–Leninist, and North Korea, which follows Juche.

The most famous communist thinkers were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; other prominent thinkers include Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong.

1. ↑ The ABC of Communism, Nikoli Bukharin, 1920, Section 20
2. ↑ Principles of Communism, Frederick Engels, 1847, Section 18. "Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain."