Communism

Communism Communism In the early 19th century, the idea of a communist society was a response of the poor and the dislocated to the beginnings of modern capitalism. At that time communism was the basis for a number of utopian settlements; most communistic experiments, however, eventually failed. Most of these small-scale private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process. Later the term communism was reserved for the philosophy advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's in their Communist Manifesto and the movement they helped create in Central Europe. Since 1917 the term has denoted those who regard the Russian Revolution as a model that all Marxists should follow. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, moreover, the center of gravity of global communism has shifted away from Central and Western Europe; from the late 1940s through the 1980s, communist movements were often linked with Third World strivings for national independence and social change. The first of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base. Its people, still largely illiterate, had no experience in political participation. In 1917, after a series of halfhearted reform measures and disastrous mismanagement of the war effort, communism, government, communist, economic, very, political, market, europe, world, work, term, system, social, russian, revolution, produce, problem, poor, people, number, nation, little, hard, goods, form, experiments, change, central, beginning, away, 1917, workers, western, way, war