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THE COMMUNISM PORTAL

Introduction

Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more authoritarian vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a socialist state, followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far-left.

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 18th-century France, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Criticism of the idea of private property in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century through such thinkers as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Henri de Saint-Simon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. During the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine under the auspices of François-Noël Babeuf, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, and Sylvain Maréchal, all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism, according to James H. Billington. 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...)

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PKI leader D.N. Aidit speaking at election meeting, 1955
The Communist Party of Indonesia (Indonesian: Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) was a political party in Indonesia. With growing popular support and a membership of about 3 million by 1965, the PKI was the strongest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The party had a firm base in various mass organizations, estimates claim that the total membership of the party and its frontal organizations might have at its peak organized a fifth of the Indonesian population. In March 1962 PKI joined the government. PKI leaders Aidit and Njoto were named advisory ministers.

Following the military coup in 1965, between 300,000 and one million Indonesians were killed in the mass killings that followed as the new regime cracked down on PKI. A CIA study of the events in Indonesia assessed that "In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...".

Selected biography

Popularized cropped version of Guerrillero Heroico - Che Guevara at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre explosion.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (14 June 1928 – 9 October 1967), commonly known as El Che, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, diplomat, military theorist and Cuban guerrilla leader. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled "rough" throughout Latin America, bringing him into direct contact with the poverty in which many people lived. Through these experiences he became convinced that only revolution could remedy the region's economic inequality, leading him to study Marxism and become involved in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

Some time later, Guevara became a member of Fidel Castro's paramilitary 26th of July Movement, which seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in the Congo-Kinshasa (later named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA/ U.S. Army Special Forces-organized military operation. Guevara died at the hands of the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on 9 October 1967. Participants in, and witnesses to, the events of his final hours testify that his captors executed him without trial.

After his death, Guevara became an icon of communist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico (shown) has received wide distribution and modification. The Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century."

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21 October 2024 –
The National Assembly of Vietnam appoints army general Lương Cường as the country's president, succeeding Communist Party General Secretary Tô Lâm. (VOA) (AP) (VnExpress)
5 October 2024 – Naxalite–Maoist insurgency
Indian police claim that 31 Naxalite rebels were killed in a shootout with Indian soldiers in the Abujhmad forest in Chhattisgarh, India. (Al Jazeera)

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Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
— Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Repressive Tolerance , 1965

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