Communism
The theory that has never been fully implemented, the experiments conducted in its name that killed millions, and why the gap between those two facts matters.
The short version
- Communism as a theory — the common ownership of production, the abolition of class distinctions, the end of the state — has never been achieved anywhere. Every regime called communist has been a one-party state claiming to be on the road to communism.
- The 20th-century experiments conducted under communist ideology — the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — caused tens of millions of deaths through famine, purges, and mass violence.
- Marx's analysis of capitalism — that it concentrates wealth, alienates workers, and produces cycles of crisis — has proven analytically durable even among people who reject his prescriptions.
- Contemporary communist parties exist primarily in academic and activist contexts; China, the world's largest nominally communist state, operates a market economy with state direction and rejects the ideological framework of classical Marxism in practice.
What it is
Communism is a political and economic theory originating primarily in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, articulated most accessibly in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and more rigorously in Marx's Capital (1867). At its theoretical core, communism envisions a classless, stateless society in which the means of production — factories, land, resources — are held in common rather than owned privately, and in which goods are distributed according to the principle 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.' Marx did not regard this as a moral aspiration but as a historical inevitability: he argued that capitalism contained internal contradictions — the tendency toward monopoly concentration, the falling rate of profit, the alienation of workers from the products of their labor — that would produce its eventual collapse and supersession by a socialist and then communist order.
Marx's framework distinguished between socialism and communism as stages, not synonyms. Socialism was the transitional period following the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, in which a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would manage the economy and dismantle class hierarchy before the state itself gradually withered away, leaving a fully communist order. The permanent abolition of private property, money, and the state — the endpoint — is communism proper. No 20th-century government came close to achieving these conditions. What the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, and other self-described communist states actually created were single-party authoritarian states with centrally planned economies — systems that claimed to be socialism in transition to communism but never approached the endpoint Marx described. This gap between theory and historical practice is central to understanding what communism actually means.
The Soviet experiment, initiated by Lenin's Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and consolidated under Stalin, pursued rapid industrialization, agricultural collectivization, and one-party control through mechanisms that included mass surveillance, political purges, forced labor camps (the Gulag), and engineered famines. The Ukrainian Holodomor (1932–33), resulting from Stalin's forced collectivization policies, killed an estimated 3.5–7.5 million people. The Stalinist purges of 1936–38 executed approximately 750,000 people and imprisoned millions more. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958–62) produced a famine killing an estimated 15–55 million people. The Khmer Rouge's revolution in Cambodia (1975–79) killed approximately 1.5–2 million people — between 25–33% of the country's total population — in pursuit of an agrarian communist utopia. The aggregate death toll of 20th-century communist regimes is estimated by scholars in the tens of millions, though precise figures are contested because the causal attribution of famine deaths is methodologically complex.
The analytical toolkit Marx developed — historical materialism, the labor theory of value, the critique of capitalist alienation, the concept of ideology as the intellectual superstructure of economic relations — has remained influential in social science, history, and philosophy far beyond the circles of committed communists. Scholars who would not describe themselves as Marxists use Marxist analytical categories to study capitalism's dynamics, inequality, and power structures. The specific predictions Marx made about capitalism's collapse have not been validated — capitalism has proven adaptive and durable in ways Marx did not anticipate — but his observations about capital's tendency to concentrate, its production of inequality, and its periodic crises have found empirical support. It is possible to find Marx's diagnosis of capitalism useful while rejecting his prescription as historically catastrophic. Many scholars across the political spectrum do exactly that.
Why it matters
Communism is the primary political boogeyman of 20th-century American politics, invoked so broadly — against civil rights activists, labor unions, proponents of social insurance, and anti-war movements — that it became largely meaningless as a descriptive term. McCarthyism's defining feature was the expansion of the 'communist' label beyond any analytical precision into a tool for political suppression. Understanding what communism actually is and is not matters because the inflation of the term has impaired American political discourse's capacity to discuss the state, markets, and the distribution of economic power with any precision. Calling something 'communist' because it involves government action is not analysis; it is reflex.
The historical record of communist governance is a genuine and important argument against communist prescription, and it needs to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. The consistent pattern across regimes — Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, Cambodian — of authoritarian single-party rule, suppression of dissent, and periodic catastrophic violence is not a coincidence that can be explained away by implementation error alone. Many serious scholars have argued that there are features of Marxist-Leninist political theory — specifically the vanguard party model, the rejection of democratic pluralism, and the claim to represent historical necessity — that make authoritarian outcomes structurally probable rather than incidental. The historical critique of communism is not Cold War propaganda; it is based on an extensive empirical record.
At the same time, the association of communism with its Soviet implementation has been used to delegitimize arguments and policies — social democracy, labor rights, public healthcare, progressive taxation — that have functioned well in European democracies for decades without producing anything resembling Soviet outcomes. When universal healthcare is called 'socialism' or 'communism' as a rhetorical move to terminate debate rather than analyze policy, the historical crimes of communist regimes are being instrumentalized rather than genuinely reckoned with. The distance between Denmark's mixed economy and Stalinism is enormous; treating them as points on the same spectrum is a category error that serves to protect existing arrangements from legitimate criticism.
China's current political-economic model complicates any simple mapping of historical communist experience onto contemporary ideology. The People's Republic of China maintains the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power and ideological primacy, but operates a market economy that has integrated deeply into global capitalism, produced a large private sector and billionaire class, and explicitly abandoned Maoist economics since Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the late 1970s. Chinese officials describe the current system as 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' — a formulation that satisfies ideological continuity while authorizing virtually any economic policy. Whether China is meaningfully communist in any Marxist sense is a question most scholars answer in the negative. It is, straightforwardly, an authoritarian state-capitalist regime — which makes it relevant to discussions of authoritarianism but not a working model of Marxist theory.