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COMMUNISMCommunism is a political theory that advocates collective ownership of the means of production (resources, land, capital), abolition of private property and equalisation of incomes. Communism differs from socialism because it contemplates revolutionary social change rather than just electoral politics. The first modern communist society was established in Russia after the revolution of 1917 and this political system was imposed by the Soviet Union, after the second world war, on many countries of Eastern Europe. In Asia, a successful communist-led revolution in China in 1949 led to the growth of communist regimes and political movements in other areas, including Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia.
These centralized and dictatorial communist systems were far from the model societies envisaged by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who believed that a communist revolution would create co-operative collective ownership a true community-based democracy and a weakening of the role of the state . Marxian analysis is largely macrosociological and structural, and emphasizes social class, means and modes of production, division of labour, class conflict, and crises. The body of philosophical, political, economic and sociological ideas associated with Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his life-long collaborator Frederick Engels (1820-1895). The term is also used more generally to refer to work in the social sciences and humanities that employs key ideas and concepts from Marx and Engels' original writings.
The core of Marxist ideas is the claim that each historical period has a distinct mode of production that rests upon particular forces - or technological organization - of production and distinct ways of organizing social relationships between people in the economy. This mode of production then exerts the primary influence in shaping social relations within the society in general as well as its politics, law and intellectual ideas.
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