Communism Essay -- Communism Essays

IIntroduction collectivism A conjecture and system of social and political organization that was a major force in world politics for much of the twentieth coulomb. As a political movement, collectivism sought to overthrow capitalist economy through a workers revolution and establish a system in which property is owned by the community as a entire rather than by individuals. In theory, communism would create a egalitarian society of abundance and freedom, in which only people enjoy able social and economic status. In practice, communist regimes have taken the plaster bandage of coercive, authoritarian governments that cared little for the plight of the working class and sought to a higher place all else to preserve their own hold on power.The idea of a society based on common ownership of property and wealth stretches far back in Western thought. In its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement of 19th-century Europe. At that time, Europe was belowgoing rapid industrialization and social change. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for creating a new class of poor, urban factory workers who labored under harsh conditions, and for widening the gulf between rich and poor. Fore close to among these critics were the German philosopher Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. Like other socialists, they sought an end to capitalism and the maturation of workers. But whereas approximately reformers favored peaceful, longer-term social transformation, Marx and Engels believed that violent revolution was all but inevitable in fact, they thought it was predicted by the scientific laws of history. They called their theory scientific socialist economy, or communism. In the last half of the 19th century the terms socialism and communism were often used interchangeably. However, Marx and Engels came to see socialism as merely an intermediate play of society in which most industry and property were owned in common but some class differences remained. They reserved the term communism for a final stage of society in which class differences had disappeared, people lived in harmony, and government was no longer needed.The meaning of the word communism shifted after 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik ships company seized power in Russia. The Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a repress... ...that lacked the preconditions he and Engels considered essential, namely capitalism and a mature industrial economy. The first-class honours degree of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base.IVCommunism in the Soviet UnionCommunism as a concrete social and political system made its first appearance in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the state erected by the victors of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. Soviet communism took some of the core notions of Marxis m to an extreme, realizing them through a tyrannical political structure. Within a decade, the Soviet dictatorship, having eradicated all dissent, unleashed an industrialization drive premised on near-total state control of physiologic and human resources. Authoritarianism reached its zenith during the long reign of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The particular reforms undertaken after his death in 1953 did not alter the essential calibre of communism in the Soviet Union. Destabilized by the far-reaching reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, the Soviet system disintegrated in 1991.