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 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. 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...)
Al-Ansar (Arabic: الأنصار, 'the Partisans') was a guerrilla force attached to the Iraqi Communist Party, active between 1979 and 1988. When the alliance between the Communist Party and the Baath Party ended, a wave of harsh repression against the Communist Party followed. In 1977 the regime launched a crackdown against the communists. A number of communist cadres fled to the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq to escape arrest. By January 1979, the exiled communists had established ansar (partisan) fighting units. By April 1979 the ansar movement was operational. Headquarters of the partisan units were established in Kirkuk and as-Sulemaniyah, and bases were established in Irbil. Later, bases were also set up in Dohuk and Nineveh. The build-up of the ansar movement did however occur without the full consent of the politburo of the party.
In South Yemen, a number of Iraqi Communist Party cadres began military training before joining the guerrillas in northern Iraq. The training was administered by the South Yemeni government.
Blas Roca Calderio (24 July 1908 – 25 April 1987) was the First President of the National Assembly of People's Power in Cuba, leader of the Communist Party of Cuba, editor of the communist newspaper 'Hoy', and influential member of Castro's government. Blas Roca, a leading theoretician of the Cuban Revolution who led Cuba's prerevolutionary Communist Party, left school at the age of 11 and began shining shoes to help support his poor family. He changed his name to Roca, meaning 'rock', after he joined the Communist Party in 1929.
1929, was elected Secretary General of the Union of Shoemakers of Manzanillo. In August 1931 he was co-opted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and head of his organization in Oriente Province. During this stage displayed a wide journalistic activity in the labour press and led the popular protests that culminated in the historic general strike of August 1933, which overthrew the Machado dictatorship.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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Equally unjustified in my view is the legend widely disseminated in the West that if Trotsky had come to power there would have been a more democratic development than under Stalin. It suffices to think of the discussion on the trade unions in 1921 to understand that this is a pure legend. ... I don’t want to deal with this problem at length. But it is certain that, in the years that followed, Stalin followed de facto ... Trotsky’s line and not that of Lenin. If Trotsky later on sometimes reproached Stalin for appropriating his program, we can readily concede that he was in many respects right. It follows, according to my judgment of the two personalities, that what we today regard as despotic and undemocratic in the Stalin period has quite close strategic connections with the fundamental ideas of Trotsky. A socialist society under Trotsky’s leadership would have been at least as undemocratic as that of Stalin, but it would have faced the dilemma: a catastrophic policy or capitulation. ... (The personal impressions which I received from my meetings with Trotsky in 1931 aroused in me the conviction that he as an individual was even more inclined to the “cult of the personality” than Stalin.) ...
Let us return to the main subject. With his well-deserved victories in the discussions of the twenties the difficulties in Stalin’s position did not disappear. What was objectively the central problem, that of sharply accelerating the tempo of industrialization, was in all probability hardly to be resolved within the framework of normal proletarian democracy. It would be useless today to ask whether ... Lenin would have found a way out. We can see in retrospect on the one hand the difficulties of the objective situation, and on the other the fact that to overcome them Stalin, as time went by, went farther and farther beyond the limits of what was strictly necessary. It must be the task of ... Soviet science to bring to light the exact proportions. Closely bound up with this problem (but not identical with it) is that of Stalin’s position in the Party. It is certain that he built up little by little during and after the period of the discussions that pyramid of which I spoke at the beginning. But it is not enough to construct such a mechanism—it must be kept in continuous working order; it must always -react in the desired way, without possibility of surprises, to day-to-day problems of every kind. This is the way in which little by little the principle, which today is usually called the “cult of the personality,” must have been elaborated. The history of this too should be radically re-examined by Soviet scholars in command of all the material (including material so far unpublished). What could be observed even from outside was, in the first place, the systematic suppression of discussion within the Party; in the second place, the growing use of organizational measures against opponents; and in the third place, the transition from these measures to procedures of a judicial and administrative character. This last development was naturally received with silent dread. During the second stage the traditional sense of humor of the Russian intelligentsia was still active. “What is the difference between Hegel and Stalin?” people asked. The answer was “in Hegel there are thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in Stalin report, counter-report, and organizational measures..”..
