Communism: The meaning and Idea

COMMUNISM

     According to Karl Marx, communism is the highest stage of socialism in which all forms of injustice, exploitation, man’s inhumanity to man and other deprivations will cease to exist. He went further to posit that even the state and its monopoly will wither away or cease to exist because it is a mere instrument of the ruling class to exploit the poor; the state is not an impartial being as claimed by the liberal scholars. Therefore, communism is the extreme form or last stage of socialism. It is a subset of socialism.

     Karl Marx was the founder of the extremist and radical revolutionary movement known as the Communist League in the 1840s. He conceptualized the notion of communism in his famous book entitled the Communist Manifesto which was co-authored by Frederick Engels and published in 1848. He criticized the asocial nature of capitalist society and called for revolution which will overthrow capitalist mode of production in place of socialism and subsequently communism. Marx was optimistic that capitalism will sow the seed of its own destruction by creating unjust and unequal society. He concluded his work with the following message to the working class in the world to unite in order to overthrow their oppressors (bourgeois ruling class). He put it thus in the last page of his work: working men of all countries unite! (Marx 1848: 82)

          Differences between Communism and Socialism

     Although many scholars and analysts used the terms interchangeably, they are not the same. According to the International Encyclopedia of Public Policy Volume 3-Public Policy and Political Economy, there are two main differences between communism and socialism. The latter generally prefers to peaceful, piecemeal reforms whereas communism favours violent revolutionary overthrow of the existing political system.

      In other words, socialism believes in incremental change more than communism which is more radical and revolutionary in approach for change. The results aimed at differ in the following ways although related: socialists want public ownership of the major means of production (factories, banks, mines, and so on), whereas communism envisions public ownership and bureaucratic control of almost all enterprises big and small. (See socialism).