Communism = ideological end goal of all revolutionary/leftist/communist movements. Classless, moneyless society where production is centralized and in the hands of the working class. Originally conceptualized as a vague idea by Marx and Engels and others in the First International. Some people confuse pre-capitalism with communism - this is not the same and is the failure of primitivists. Communism is a redistribution of wealth, capital and all the means of production away from the capitalists and to the workers. Marxism = a critique and analysis of capitalism. It is entirely possible to be Marxist and non-revolutionary, although a lot of revolutionary Marxists will call you out on that. Basically the Marxist framework differs from other economists of his time in its analysis of history through the lens of class struggle, and application of Hegelian dialectics to labor and economics, known as dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism is essentially a study of history through the reactions of social classes to large events... sort of. Its complex, Id suggest a read-through of its wikipedia entry. Leninism = Lenin had a lot of revolutionary ideas, but he is heralded most for his contribution to the revolutionary-consciousness building end of the movement. His vanguard party organization was hugely successful in Russia, attracting massive numbers to one Party. Opponents of his argue that some of this membership was forced/coerced and that the vanguard model fails because it places too much in the hands of an educated elite. He also authored the term dictatorship of the proletariat which a lot of leftists like to toss around. Essentially its meaning is that the proletariat (working class) ought to have control of the political system before full communism can be established. Hence the soviet model of workers councils and representation. He also contributed a lot to the criticism of the state and its role in enforcing the status quo and appealing to the desires of the capitalists. Read State and Revolution for more on that. Stalinism = the typical scary autocratic communist state. Stalin implemented a governance strategy known as state socialism or wartime socialism using repression of opposition and free speech, state centralization, collectivization of industry and frequent purges of dissidents. This was all done in the name of eventually allowing the state to wither away, its worth noting. Its also worth noting that a lot of the militarization of the state and repression of dissidence was fueled by massive Western/capitalist/imperialist attacks (ideological and physical) on the USSR at the time. Additionally, a lot of the numbers of deaths and disappearances attributed to Stalin originated in America in the 30s and 40s and have since been ruled inaccurate. At the same time, Stalinism was irrefutably to blame for a whole lot of repression and state-murder, but the most important political methodology of Stalins was his organization of the state and his extension of Lenins vanguard model. Trotskyism = Put simply, counter-Stalinism. Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union and eventually assassinated as well. His major contribution to the communist theoretical body was the theory of permanent revolution, essentially the antithesis to Stalins socialism in one country model. Permanent revolution holds that the only way to achieve world communism is to allow the revolution to spread unimpeded from nation to nation, the theory that a revolution in one nation would ignite revolutionary fervor worldwide, and that full scale working class revolution must be allowed to germinate. Trotsky established the Fourth International in 1938 in opposition to the Stalin-dominated Comintern. The Fourth International was designed to reestablish the working class as the focus of communist progression, and navigate the direction of the communist world away from USSR-style bureaucracy
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 05:14:40 +0000
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