About Communism.

 Communism.

"Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals."

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845

Communism is a sociopolitical movement that aims for a classless and stateless society structured upon common ownership of the means of production, free access to articles of consumption, and the end of wage labor and private property in the means of production and real estate.

In Marxist theory, communism is a specific stage of historical development that inevitably emerges from the development of the productive forces that leads to a superabundance of material wealth, allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals. The exact definition of communism varies, and it is often mistakenly, in general political discourse, used interchangeably with socialism; however, Marxist theory contends that socialism is just a transitional stage on the road to communism. Leninists revised this theory by introducing the notion of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian revolution and to hold all political power after the revolution, 'in the name of the workers' and supposedly with worker participation, in a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism.

Communists such as council communists and non-Marxist libertarian communists and anarcho-communist oppose the idea of a vanguard party and a transition stage, and advocate for the construction of full communism to begin immediately upon the abolition of capitalism. There is a very wide range of theories amongst those particular communists in regards to how to build the types of institutions that would replace the various economic engines (such as food distribution, education, and hospitals) as they exist under capitalist systems—or even whether to do so at all. Some of these communists have specific plans for the types of administrative bodies that would replace the current ones, while always qualifying that these bodies would be decentralized and worker-owned, just as they currently are within the activist movements themselves. Others have no concrete set of post-revolutionary blueprints at all, claiming instead that they simply trust that the world's workers and poor will figure out proper modes of distribution and wide-scale production, and also coordination, entirely on their own, without the need for any structured "replacements" for capitalist state-based control.

In the modern lexicon of what many sociologists and political commentators refer to as the "political mainstream", communism is often used to refer to the policies of states run by communist parties, regardless of the practical content of the actual economic system they may preside over. Examples of this include the policies of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where the economic system incorporates "doi moi", the People's Republic of China where the economic system incorporates "socialist market economy", and the economic system of the Soviet Union which was described as "state capitalist" by some communists who increasingly opposed the post-Stalin era Soviet model as it progressed over the course of the 20th century (e.g. Maoists, Trotskyists and libertarian communists)—and even at one point by Vladimir Lenin himself.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism