Communism

2 Key excerpts on "Communism"

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  eBook - ePub

  Marxism

  Karl Marx's Fifteen Key Concepts for Cultural and Communication Studies

  • Christian Fuchs(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” is a central communist principle. In a fully developed communist society, there is no wage-labour and no compulsion to work. Everyone works as far as he can and work is largely self-fulfilment. Goods are not sold or exchanged, but given to humans freely as gifts. There is distribution not according to the possession of money, but according to human needs.

  10.2.4.2 Communist Politics

  Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement , and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; Communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i. e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.30

  Freedom is an important principle of democratic societies. For Marx, Communism means the abolition of alienation and the realisation of true freedom that allows humans to fully develop their potentials. Communism is a democracy and a humanism, in which the freedom of all interacts with individual freedom. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.31

  It has often been argued that Communism is totalitarian but for Marx and Engels, democracy is a precondition of Communism. This circumstance becomes, for example, very clear in the following two passages: “Question 18 : What will be the course of this revolution? Answer: In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat”.32

  Democracy nowadays is Communism. […] Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses. The masses may be more or less clear about this, the only correct meaning of democracy, but all have at least an obscure feeling that social equality of rights is implicit in democracy. The democratic masses can be safely included in any calculation of the strength of the communist forces. And if the proletarian parties of the different nations unite they will be quite right to inscribe the word ‘Democracy’ on their banners, since, except for those who do not count, all European democrats in 1846 are more or less Communists at heart.33

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  The Importance of Being Civil

  The Struggle for Political Decency

  • John Hall(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Communism should be defined, first of all, as an attempt to institutionalize the sharing of land or women in the face of the complexity represented by agroliterate polities. 11 Consequently, Communism is neither equality nor communalism: it is a dream of moral unity, an example of what Freud called “the oceanic feeling,” in the face of complexities that are felt to be threatening. To stress all this is to disagree with Durkheim. This is particularly true of the distinction drawn between socialism and Communism—a contrast that parallels that drawn by Élie Halévy between freedom and organization. 12 Certainly, some socialists—notably Sidney and Beatrice Webb—were keener on the extirpation of waste than on freedom; and it is quite correct to say that modern socialism does habitually take the problem of organizing the industrial machine very seriously. Nonetheless, modern socialism in the end is an example of Communism: differently put, socialism is inconceivable without the emphasis on solidarity, equality, and sharing. In practice, socialism proved, of course, to be a hugely Durkheimian affair: the Webbs, for instance, were driven by moral purpose far more than by a penchant for economic planning. The purpose of socialism was that of creating a new moral order. In other words, the very nature of Marx’s writings—the desire to abolish splitting and to have the benefits of advanced technology—makes nonsense of Durkheim’s basic distinction. The historical record shows that there were in fact three types of Communism in premodern circumstance, each of which deserves brief discussion before general analytic points are made. The Greek world remembered a simpler tribal past for all that it possessed private—or at least household—property

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