Communism In Albania, Albanian Communists

Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society.: "One widespread distinction was that socialism socialised production only while communism socialised production and consumption." Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by the withering away of the state.

Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarcho-communism and Marxist schools of thought, among others. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism as well as the political ideologies grouped around both. All of these different ideologies 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 (the working class), who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor to survive, and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), 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, which is 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, who blamed capitalism for 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. Along with social democracy, communism became the dominant political tendency within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. During most of the 20th century, around one-third of the world's population lived under Communist governments. These governments were characterized by one-party rule and suppression of opposition and dissent. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, several previously Communist governments repudiated or abolished communism altogether. Afterwards, only a small number of Communist governments remained, which are China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state led to communism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model, several scholars posit that in practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism.; ;

Public memory of 20th-century Communist states has been described as "a battleground" between the communist-sympathetic political left and the anti-communist political right. Many authors have written about excess deaths under Communist states and mortality rates, such as excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

Etymology and terminology

''Communism'' derives from the French , which developed out of the Latin roots and the suffix ''isme''. Semantically, can be translated to "of or for the community", while ''isme'' is a suffix that indicates the abstraction into a state, condition, action, or doctrine. ''Communism'' may be interpreted as "the state of being of or for the community"; this semantic constitution has led to numerous usages of the word in its evolution. Prior to becoming associated with its more modern conception of an economic and political organization, it was initially used in designating various social situations. ''Communism'' came to be primarily associated with Marxism, most specifically embodied in '' The Communist Manifesto'', which proposed a particular type of communism.

One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an ("communist author"). In 1793, Restif first used to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property. Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government. John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of ''communism'' in English, around 1840.

Communism and socialism

Since the 1840s, ''communism'' has usually been distinguished from ''socialism''. The modern definition and usage of the latter would be settled by the 1860s, becoming predominant over alternative terms ''associationist'' (Fourierism), ''co-operative'', and '' mutualist'', which had previously been used as synonyms; instead, ''communism'' fell out of use during this period.

An early distinction between ''communism'' and ''socialism'' was that the latter aimed to only socialize production, whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of common access to final goods). This distinction can be observed in Marx's communism, where the distribution of products is based on the principle of " to each according to his needs", in contrast to a socialist principle of " to each according to his contribution". Socialism has been described as a philosophy seeking distributive justice, and communism as a subset of socialism that prefers economic equality as its form of distributive justice.

By 1888, Marxists employed ''socialism'' in place of ''communism'' which had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for the former. It was not until 1917, with the October Revolution, that ''socialism'' came to refer to a distinct stage between capitalism and communism, introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution.: "By 1888, the term 'socialism' was in general use among Marxists, who had dropped 'communism', now considered an old fashioned term meaning the same as 'socialism'. ... At the turn of the century, Marxists called themselves socialists. ... The definition of socialism and communism as successive stages was introduced into Marxist theory by Lenin in 1917 ..., the new distinction was helpful to Lenin in defending his party against the traditional Marxist criticism that Russia was too backward for a socialist revolution." A distinction between ''communist'' and ''socialist'' as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where ''Communist'' came to specifically refer to socialists who supported the politics and theories of Bolshevism, Leninism, and later in the 1920s those of Marxism–Leninism, although Communist parties continued to describe themselves as socialists dedicated to socialism.

Both ''communism'' and ''socialism'' eventually accorded with the cultural attitude of adherents and opponents towards religion. In European Christendom, ''communism'' was believed to be the atheist way of life. In Protestant England, ''communism'' was too phonetically similar to the Roman Catholic ''communion rite'', hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels