Communism in Europe - Karl Marx And The Origins Of Modern Communism, Non-marxist Communism, Marxism And European Socialism
class industrial development spectre
"A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism." The famous opening line to The Communist Manifesto evokes the expectations and fears that have been associated with European communism. Published in 1848 amid a tumultuous period of political unrest across the continent, this polemical pamphlet was an idealistic call to arms directed at an emerging male working class ("the proletariat") that was identified with the growth of industrial capitalism. The authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, predicted that this new class would become the agent of a revolutionary transformation of the existing social order and that they would in turn create a new form of society in their own image: communism. This they foresaw would be an egalitarian proletarian civilization that abolished divisions based upon private property and the market and in which oppressive states would disappear to be replaced by "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." All other social groups would disappear, in particular the industrial middle class ("the bourgeoisie"), which they identified as the dominant force in the modern world. The struggle to create this new form of equal society, as close to perfect freedom as possible, would be one of the most titanic and final in human history.
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In articulating this powerful vision of a future society, the authors of the Manifesto appropriated the concept of communism to themselves—so much so that communism and Marxism have often been taken as inseparable, if not synonymous, establishing a line of political thinkers and activists from Marx onward who contributed to the development of both. This link was strengthened further after t…
Ironically, after the collapse of the German Communist League in 1850 The Communist Manifesto remained largely unread until rediscovered later as a prophetic work. No new political creed and form of political organization followed its publication, nor did Marx or Engels wish to separate themselves from other revolutionary currents. In fact, no other movements describing themselves as "commu…
If not all communists were Marxists by the 1880s, more strangely, hardly any Marxists actually called themselves communists at this time. Most mainstream socialists began to describe themselves as Marxists, but hardly any labeled themselves as "communists." From 1850 until his death in 1883, Marx himself never again felt the need to distinguish his notion of socialism as communist. T…
World War I and its aftermath shattered the delicate unity of the International. With the outbreak of war the overwhelming majority of socialists abandoned their pacifist and antinationalist stance. With the exception of the Serbian and both Russian movements, all the parties pledged themselves to their respective war efforts and in many cases joined governments of national unity. They gained resp…
It was Bolshevism that self-consciously promoted itself as a model for a new kind of revolutionary Marxist party and ideology. After February 1917 and considerable discussion within the movement, the Bolsheviks declared their opposition to the liberal government. While the Mensheviks concentrated on the liberal-democratic phase of revolution, Lenin declared that this could be skipped and that a &#…
What would turn out to be a significant shift in Soviet leadership occurred in 1985, when the reform-minded and relatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became head of state. His plans for more open debate (glasnost) about new ideas and policies were accompanied by an attempt at restructuring (perestroika) the Soviet economic system. Gorbachev also made waves on the foreign policy front. Early in his…
Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism 1929–1985: A Documentary Analysis of the Movement. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Bebel, August. Women and Socialism. London: Zwan Books, 1988. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Kautsky, Karl. The Class Struggle…
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