Communist party

In modern usage, a communist party is a political party which promotes communism, the sociopolitical philosophy based on Marxism. Communist parties today may or may not formally use the term "communist" in their name. Even if they do, not all follow a strict interpretation of any of the main 'schools' of communism (chiefly Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism or Trotskyism). The original Communist Parties first started to be widely established across the world in the early 20th century, after the creation of the Communist International by the Russian Bolsheviks. Communist parties have held power in 21 nations throughout history, first and most notably in the Soviet Union.

As of 2006, parties that profess adherence to communist ideology govern Cuba, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In the case of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the adoption of a so-called "socialist market economy" — formally known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" — has led many communists and communist parties worldwide to argue that it has either partially or completely abandoned communism for capitalism and market society, a charge which the CPC vigorously denies. The Communist Party of Vietnam's adoption of doi moi has led to similar allegations from critics, as have recent Communist Party of Cuba policies dating from during and after the Special Period of the 1990s. In Moldova ruling communist party also declared adherence to "social state" after the elections instead of socialism and communism which declared main goals in the party's program.

In North Korea, Marxism has been officially "superseded" by the ideology of Juche. In July 2002, North Korea started running an experiment with capitalism in the Kaesŏng Industrial Region. A small number of other areas have been designated as Special Administrative Regions, or regions where free-market policies are allowed, including Sinŭiju along the China-North Korea border. Meanwhile, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, the Communist Party was elected back into power. However, as of 2004, this nominally communist government has not distinguished itself in any significant way from the capitalist government which preceded it.

There currently exist hundreds, if not thousands, of communist parties, large and small, throughout the world. Their success rates vary widely: some are growing; others are in decline. See the List of Communist Parties for details on today's communist parties.

History of Communist Parties

Early Communist groups

The first international Marxist organization was called the Communist League, advocates of the principles put forth in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto and inspired by the example of the Paris Commune. The group dissolved in 1852 after breaking into factional quarrels.

The Bolshevik party seized power in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In March, 1918, the party changed its name to "All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", and was generally known as "The Communist Party" from that point on.

Many other Communist parties, especially in Europe, were created in the 1910s and 1920s as the result of factional splits within most of the socialist parties that existed at the time. Some factions advocated the creation of socialism through existing legal channels, while others advocated armed revolution and the ejection of the bourgeois from power through the use of force. The revolutionary groups usually called themselves communists, while those who wanted a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism kept the names socialists or social democrats.

Shortly after the split, more differences between the two sides began to emerge. During the 1920s, communists supported the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism, while the socialists supported only Marxism and rejected Leninism. This rift grew even wider as both sides started to develop separate branches of their own.

Most mainsteam social democrats had abandoned Marxism by the 1950s. Trotskyism and several other branches of self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxism contend that, under the influence of Stalinism, the Soviet-influenced Communist Parties drifted far away from the original Marxist-Leninist position during the same period. In contrast, Anti-Revisionists, who also self-identify as revolutionary Marxists, say that the Soviet Union broke with true socialism with Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956. The latter subsequently supported the 1949 Chinese Revolution, Mao Zedong, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, though most abandoned support of China as it became clear (in their view) that Deng Xiaoping's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" pursued in the late 1970s and early 1980s signalled a return to capitalism.

Stalin-era Communist Parties

On Stalin's order, the Communist International was dissolved in 1943. In the period between 1945 and 1949, following the end of World War II, Moscow-controlled Communist parties such as the Polish United Workers' Party and the German Socialist Unity Party were put in power throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe, leading to the creation of the Eastern bloc.

The Communist Party of the United States was considered within the political mainstream during the 1930s and 1940s, but was declared illegal for a time at the advent of the Cold War. McCarthyism, a vigorous anti-Communist political repression movement in America during the 1950s, effectively destroyed the American Communist Party's influence.

Non-Soviet controlled Communist governments

In Yugoslavia, communist Partisans liberated the country from Nazi occupation and established a government without Soviet assistance. As a result, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was not controlled from Moscow. Indeed, it opposed the Soviet Union vigorously on a number of major policy points, leading to Stalin's excommunication of the Yugoslav communist government from the Soviet bloc.

In 1949, Chinese communists ended a civil war that had raged for decades, and established the People's Republic of China. Shortly thereafter, another communist party, the Workers Party of Korea, came to power in North Korea and was backed by the new communist Chinese government during the Korean War.

Pol Pot was heavily influenced by French Communists, and retaliated with war against Soviet influence in Vietnam.

Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong entertained major differences of vision, however, precipitating the Sino-Soviet split between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the early 1960s.

Albania was liberated by communist partisans in a similar fashion, but it developed in a very different way from Yugoslavia. The Albanian government sided with the Soviet Union early on, then took the side of the Communist Party of China in the Sino-Soviet split.

Western European Communist Parties after the war

Members of communist parties were persecuted in many countries in the early Cold War period, when anticommunist sentiment was fueled by Western governments as part of their Cold War strategy. Nevertheless, in capitalist countries such as Italy and France, large Communist Parties gathered lots of popular support and played a prominent part in politics throughout the post-war decades. They developed a variant of Communist ideology known as Eurocommunism. This called for a socialist planned economy under the administration of a democratic government, and a multi-party system of free elections. This was a clear break with the Soviet line, but many of these parties continued to maintain good, or at least diplomatic, relations with the Soviet Union.

Third world Communist parties

In the third world, communist parties became quite popular in some areas because they promised the overthrow of governmental structures that many people considered oppressive, and a higher standard of living for the poor. Often, communists played the dominant role in struggles for independence against colonial powers. The resulting wars usually became enmeshed into the Cold War, with the Soviet Union supporting communist forces and the United States supporting anti-communist ones. The two superpowers waged wars by proxy, as in, for example, the Vietnam War, where American troops fought local communists; or in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where Soviet troops fought mujahideen forces supported by the United States which sought to overthrow the pro-Soviet Communist government of Afghanistan. Vietnam and Laos are still ruled by Communist Parties.

Cuba

After Fidel Castro's nationalistic revolt in Cuba, he was snubbed by President Eisenhower, who went out to play golf on the day he was scheduled to meet with Castro, and assigned Vice President Richard Nixon to meet with Castro instead. Castro was extremely annoyed at the slight, and entered into negotiations with the Soviet Union. Castro aligned with the Soviets and declared himself a communist shortly afterward.

Cuba survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with careful market-oriented reforms and strategic alliances, known as the "Special Period," the Communist Party of Cuba remains in power as of 2006. Some question, however, how Castro's personal health will fare in the near future, and it remains to be seen if his party will remain in power after his death.

Post-Soviet Eastern bloc Communists

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist parties lost their power monopolies in most of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In many places, communist parties re-organized themselves as new socialist or social democratic organizations (though some have remained orthodox late-Soviet era communist). Many of the communist parties in those countries and their various successor organizations remain highly influential in local government elections and political struggles throughout the former Eastern bloc.

Structure of Communist parties

See: democratic centralism.

In theory, a party congress would elect a Central Committee to execute the will of the Congress between meetings. The Central Committee would elect a much smaller Politburo to elect a general secretary and handle day-to-day operations. In practice, the flow of power often became the reverse: the Politburo became self-perpetuating, and controlled the composition of the Central Committee, which in turn controlled the party congresses.

Some modern communist parties still hold to the democratic centralist tradition. Others have abandoned democratic centralism, often accompanied by a renouncing of Marxism-Leninism overall, and instead pursue a structure more in common with social democracy, advocating welfare-statism such as is found in Scandinavia and most parts of Western Europe.

The doctrine of ruling communist parties was typically that all property would belong to the state as the transition to a communist society (see socialism and state capitalism), and that the state would highly regulate all commerce in the country in the meantime. This policy stopped companies from driving each other out of business and in turn kept unemployment low.

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