Soviet state and its post-World War II offshoots in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba were generally called “communist.” Correspondingly, leaders of the Soviet Union, of other similarly constituted states, and of revolutionary parties worldwide that adhered to Marxist-Leninist doctrine were known as “communists.”
MARX’S VIEW OF COMMUNISM
More accurately, however, communism signifies only the very last step in the historical process and the ultimate and highly desirable goal of human development as outlined in Marx’s economic, social, and political philosophy. Influenced by egalitarian ideas current in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Marx was outraged by what he saw as the unjust nature of the economic system spawned by the Industrial Revolution, which he called capitalism. Marx and Engels portrayed history as determined inevitably by “scientific” laws, which divided human social evolution into five broad stages: “gentilism,” sometimes referred to as “primitive communism,” with individuals living in clans and holding property in common; “slavery” based on slave labor; “feudalism” dependent on serf labor; “capitalism,” in which entrepreneurs or capitalists exploited workers (the proletariat) and controlled the government; and “socialism,” with public ownership replacing private capital and the emergence of a classless society providing justice, equity and freedom for all. Since conflict and class struggle, the mechanism for social change, would not exist in this new order, socialism would be the final stage of history and the highest level of human development.
Marx noted, however, that socialism would have two phases: the lower phase, also known as “socialism,” and a higher phase, “communism.” The latter would be the ultimate good society benefiting all mankind. In the lower, socialist phase, the whole society would own its productive forces, or the economy, but work would still be valued and paid differentially and distribution of the society’s goods and wealth would not yet be equal. To reach the higher, communist phase, two requirements had to be met. First, the productive forces of society, restricted by the capitalists in a vain attempt to prop up their profits, would be liberated, and the economy, hugely expanded by modern scientific and technological inputs, would become capable of producing “a superabundance of goods.” This enormous output would permit everyone to have whatever they needed. Second, in counterbalance, an individual’s needs would be limited and sensible, because society would develop, through
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Young communists salute as they pass Lenin’s tomb on May Day. © HULTON ARCHIVE education and by example, “a new-type socialist person.” Reoriented individuals would desire only what was truly necessary to sustain life, eschewing ostentation and waste. They would also contribute to the socialist society altruistically, applying their work and varied talents to the common welfare. With the superabundance of goods and the new socialist individual, society could then be organized on the principle: “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Thus, communism would mark an end to coercion, want, and inequality.
Circulating in tsarist Russia by the 1880s, Marx’s views were adopted by Vladimir Lenin, who soon led the Bolsheviks, a Marxist-oriented revolutionary party. Lenin linked his effort in Russia to the global spread of capitalism, which he labeled “imperialism,” and counted on aid from successful workers’ revolutions in Europe to help the Russian proletariat achieve socialism. He was dismayed, therefore, when, after the “imperialist” World War I broke out, most European workers and their Marxist leaders chose patriotism over revolution and backed their own national governments in the war.
Many Marxists in Russia also rallied to support the tsarist war effort. Determined to keep his party in control after the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917 and to discredit other Russian Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin in 1918 changed the name of the Bolsheviks to the Russian Communist Party, and a year later he founded an international revolutionary organization called the Communist International. These actions were taken to broaden the appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution and to distinguish Lenin and his followers from other MarxCOMMUNIST ACADEMY ian socialists in Russia and throughout the world, whom he considered insufficiently revolutionary, if not collaborators with the hated imperialists.
Lenin added little to Marx’s sketchy ideas on the characteristics of communism, once mentioning cooperatives as a possible organizational basis for the future and another time referring to “accounting and control” and “the administration of things” as keys to establishing a truly communist society. Stalin proclaimed in the 1930s that the Soviet Union had achieved the lower phase, socialism, of Marx’s fifth stage of history, and after World War II Soviet theoreticians added that Soviet society had entered “the transition to communism.” But what communism would actually look like remained vague, except for speculation about free transportation, state-run boarding schools, and communal eating.
THE DISCARDING OF COMMUNISM
In the 1980s, as the weaknesses of the Soviet economy and system became apparent, the appeal of communism, so closely linked to the Soviet experience, dimmed. In 1989 and 1991, when socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers declared that communism was dead. Although nominally communist systems still existed in North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, even these governments made concessions to nonsocialist economic activity. Moreover, none of these regimes argued that it had achieved communism, or even that it was nearing the ultimate good society envisaged by Marx. See also: BOLSHEVISM; ENGELS, FRIEDRICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM; SOCIALISM
Daniels, Robert V. (1993). The End of the Communist Revolution. New York: Routledge. Heilbroner, Robert L. (1980). Marxism, For and Against. New York: Norton. Hunt, Carew R. N. (1983). The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction, 5th rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books. Mayo, Henry B. (1966). Introduction to Marxist Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyer, Alfred G. (1986). Leninism, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sowell, Thomas. (1985). Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. New York: Morrow.
JOHN M. THOMPSON
The Communist Academy (Akademiya kommu-nisticheskaya) was founded on June 25, 1918, by order of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Known until 1924 as the Socialist Academy, this institution was designed to rival the nearly 200-year-old Academy of Sciences. Indeed, although it was formally established “from above” by government decree, the Communist Academy also answered calls “from below” from the radical wing of the Russian intelligentsia, which had lobbied for an alternative to the conservative Academy of Sciences since the 1880s.
The Communist Academy served to coordinate communist higher education and research alongside the Institute of Red Professors and the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. It consisted of a number of institutes devoted to subjects ranging from philosophy, history, literature, and the natural sciences to economics, socialist construction, and international relations and development. It also boasted a number of specialized sections and commissions, as well as an array of societies revolving around groups such as the Militant Materialist Dialecticians, Marxist Historians, Marxist Orientalists, and Marxist Biologists.
Structurally reminiscent of the older Academy of Sciences, the Communist Academy supplanted its rival’s apolitical “bourgeois” approach to science and scholarship with an explicitly political agenda grounded in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Moreover, there was a fairly explicit division of labor between the two, with the Communist Academy attempting to monopolize the most important areas in the social and natural sciences and ceding only experimental, abstract work to the Academy of Sciences (along with arcane subjects like archeology and the study of antiquity). Scarcity of resources and the frequent overlapping of scholarly research, however, kept the two institutions in a state of fierce competition for much of the 1920s.
A bastion of party power in science and higher education, the Communist Academy was nevertheless symbiotically linked to the Academy of Sciences. In essence, the Communist Academy thrived as long as its rival was able to preserve its semi-autonomous, apolitical status. But by 1928, the Academy of Sci-ences-the longest- lasting of the powerful NEP-era bourgeois institutions-found itself under attack. In an effort to bring the Academy of Sciences under state control, the party leadership ordered the institution
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