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Portal:Communism

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THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis 'common, universal') is a political and economic ideology 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 in society based on need. A communist society entails the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state. Communism is a part of the broader socialist movement.

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 to establish a socialist state, which is expected to wither away. Communist parties have been described as radical left or far-left.

There are many variants of communism, such as anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought (including Leninism and its offshoots), and religious communism. These ideologies share the analysis that the current order of society stems from the capitalist economic system and mode of production; they believe that there are two major social classes, that the relationship between them is exploitative, and that it can only be resolved through social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat (working class), who make up most of the population and sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie (owning class), a minority that derives profit from employing the proletariat through private ownership of the means of production. According to this, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a socialist 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 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered a new definition of communism in The Communist Manifesto. In the 20th century, Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism came to power, first in the Soviet Union with the 1917 Russian Revolution, then in Eastern Europe, Asia, and other regions after World War II. By the 1920s, communism had become one of the two dominant types of socialism in the world, the other being social democracy. (Full article...)

Selected article

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.

Selected biography

Pak Hon-yong (28 May 1900 – December 1956(?)) was a leader of the Korean Communist Party and Workers' Party of South Korea. One of the main leaders of the Korean communist movement.

He led of "Irkutsk Faction" and "Tuesday Faction", and "Kyongsong Communist Group" in Korean communist movement during Japan's colonial rule (1910–45). After the liberation of Korea, he participated in the formation of People's Republic of Korea in Seoul, but he strongly opposed the joint with the right-wing in South Korea. Eventually the government is dismissed. In the late 1940s, started the uprising and general strike in South Korea. In addition, he led factions involved in Jeju uprising. After returning to the failed uprising in South Korea, he go to North Korea for reunification talks, was remained in there. And his led Faction called "Domestic Faction" or "WPSK Faction" in Workers' Party of Korea. He led faction's Guerilla movements in the South continue until the Korean War. After 1955 he was not seen again, and it is widely believed that he was eliminated by Kim Il-sung's security forces.

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Selected image

4th Tamil Nadu state conference of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

Photo credit: Rspdrravindran

26 September 2025 – Human rights in Vietnam
Vietnamese activist Trịnh Bá Phương, already serving a 10-year sentence for anti-state propaganda, is sentenced to an additional 11 years after being convicted of writing statements against the Communist Party while in prison. (AP)
9 September 2025 – 2025 Nepalese Gen Z protests
The private residence of President Ram Chandra Poudel is stormed and vandalized by protesters while the headquarters of the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and the Nepali Congress party are both destroyed. (Israel Hayom)

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Selected quote

This way of describing modern society is so familiar and the attempts to analyse it recur so frequently in the course of later developments that it would be supererogatory to furnish further proof of it. What is of greater importance is the fact that the converse of this insight has not escaped notice either. After Hegel had clearly recognised the bourgeois character of the ‘laws of nature’, Marx pointed out that “Descartes with his definition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufacturing period, while in the eyes of the Middle Ages, animals were man’s assistants”; and he adds several suggestions towards explaining the intellectual history of such connections. Tönnies notes the same connection even more bluntly and categorically: “A special case of abstract reason is scientific reason and its subject is the man who is objective, and who recognises relations, i.e. thinks in concepts. In consequence, scientific concepts which by their ordinary origin and their real properties are judgements by means of which complexes of feeling are given names, behave within science like commodities in society. They gather together within the system like commodities on the market. The supreme scientific concept which is no longer the name of anything real is like money. E.g. the concept of an atom, or of energy.”

It cannot be our task to investigate the question of priority or the historical and causal order of succession between the ‘laws of nature’ and capitalism. (The author of these lines has, however, no wish to conceal his view that the development of capitalist economics takes precedence.) What is important is to recognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the objective forms of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of the pure observe of these – artificially abstract – processes, the attitude of the experimenter.

— György Lukács (1885-1971)
History and Class Consciousness , 1923

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General

Variations of Communism

Organizations and ruling parties, past and present

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Present and former Socialist states (under the direction of Communist parties)

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