Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist 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 the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)
Problems of Peace and Socialism (Russian: Проблемы мира и социализма), often referred to by the name of its English-language edition World Marxist Review (WMR), was a joint theoretical and ideological magazine of communist and workers parties around the world. It existed for 32 years, until it closed down in June 1990. The offices of WMR were based in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Each edition of the magazine had a circulation of above half a million, being read in some 145 countries. At its height, WMR appeared in 41 languages, and editors from 69 communist parties around worked at its office in Prague. The master copy of the magazine was its Russian-language edition Problemy Mira i Sotsializma.
He became First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1954 and remained on this position for 35 years, until 1989, thus becoming the longest-serving leader of any Eastern Bloc nation, and one of the longest ruling non-royal leaders in history. His rule marked a period of unprecedented political and economic stability for Bulgaria, marked both by complete submission of Bulgaria to Soviet rule and a desire for expanding ties with the West. His rule remained unchallenged until the deterioration of East-West relations in the 1980s, when a stagnating economic situation, a worsening international image and growing careerism and corruption in the BCP weakened his positions. He resigned on 10 November 1989, under pressure by senior BCP members due to his refusal to recognize problems and deal with public protests. Within a month of Zhivkov's ouster, Communist rule in Bulgaria had effectively ended, and within another month the People's Republic of Bulgaria had formally ceased to exist.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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“All that arises is worthy of perishing,” says the dialectician, Goethe. The destruction of the Bolshevik party – an episode in world reaction – does not, however, disparage its world-wide historic significance. In the period of its revolutionary ascendance, that is, when it actually represented the proletarian vanguard, it was the most honest party in history. Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world.
The clerks of the ruling classes call the organizers of this party “amoralists”. In the eyes of conscious workers this accusation carries a complimentary character. It signifies: Lenin refused to recognize moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Whoever fawns before precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!
The “amoralism” of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supra-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action, from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to an “ordinary” worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that “amoralism” in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?
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