Communist state
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a form of government that combines the state leadership of a communist party, Marxist–Leninist political philosophy, and an official commitment to the construction of a communist society. Modern communism broadly grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe as a program to replace capitalism with a stateless, classless, and moneyless society, but its application as Marxism–Leninism began later in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
In the 20th century, several communist states were established, first in Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. The institutions of these states were heavily influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and others. However, the political reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev known as Perestroika and socio-economic difficulties produced the revolutions of 1989, which brought down all the communist states of the Eastern Bloc bar the Soviet Union. The repercussions of the collapse of these states contributed to political transformations in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and several other non-European communist states. Presently, there are five states which are officially communist in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
In accordance with Marx's theory of the state, communists believe all state formations are under the control of a ruling class. Communist states are no different, and the ruling communist party is defined as the vanguard party of the most class conscious section of the working classes, particularly the proletariat but sometimes including the peasantry, such as under its Maoist formulation. Communist states usually affirm that the working class is the state's ruling class and that the most class-conscious workers lead the state through the communist party, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat as its class system and, by extension, the socialist state, which will eventually wither away into a communist society free of oppressions. However, not all communist states chose to form this class system, and some, such as Laos, have opted to establish a people's democratic state instead, in which the working class shares political power with other classes. According to this belief system, communist states need to establish an economic base to support the ruling class system by creating a socialist economy, or at the very least, some socialist property relations that are strong enough to support the communist class system. By ensuring these two features, the communist party seeks to make Marxism–Leninism the guiding ideology of the state. Normally, the communist state constitution defines the class system, political, economic system and guiding ideology of the state.
The political systems of these states are based on the principles of democratic centralism and unified power. Democratic centralism seeks to centralise powers in the highest leadership and, in theory, reach political decisions through democratic processes. Unified power is the opposite of the separation of powers and seeks to turn the national representative organ elected through non-competitive, controlled elections into the state's single branch of government. This institution is commonly called the supreme state organ of power, and a ruling communist party normally holds at least two-thirds of the seats in this body. The supreme state organ of power has unlimited powers except for the limits it has set itself by adopting constitutional and legal documents. What would be considered the executive or judicial branches in a liberal democratic system are in communist states considered part of the supreme state organ of power. The supreme state organ of power usually adopts a constitution that explicitly gives the ruling communist party leadership of the state.
The communist party controls the supreme state organ of power through the political discipline it exerts on its members and, through them, dominates the state. Ruling communist parties of these states are organised on Leninist lines, in which the party congress functions as its supreme decision-making body. In between two congresses, the central committee acts as the supreme organ. When neither the party congress nor the central committee is in session, the decision-making authorities of these organs are normally delegated to its politburo, which makes political decisions, and a secretariat, which executes the decisions made by the party congress, central committee and the politburo. These organs are composed of leading figures from state and party organs. The leaders of these parties are often given the title of general secretary, but the power of this office varies from state to state. Some states are characterised by one-man dominance and the cult of personality, while others are run by a collective leadership, a system in which powers are more evenly distributed between leading officials and decision-making organs are more institutionalised.
These states seek to mobilise the public to participate in state affairs by implementing the transmission belt principle, meaning that the communist party seeks to maintain close contact with the masses through mass organisations and other institutions that try to encompass everyone and not only committed communists. Other methods are through coercion and political campaigns. Some have criticised these methods as dictatorial since the communist party remains the centre of power. Others emphasise that these are examples of communist states with functioning political participation processes involving several other non-party organisations such as direct democratic participation, factory committees, and trade unions.
Etymology
No state that is conventionally described as a "communist state" has ever officially referred to itself in those terms. In practice, such states have employed a variety of alternative designations—national-democratic, people's democratic, socialist-oriented, or workers' and peasants' states—to emphasize their self-understanding as communist party-run polities since none of them have claimed to establish a communist mode of production. As David Ramsay Steele observes, the label communist state originated with external commentators: "Among Western journalists, the term ‘Communist’ came to refer exclusively to regimes and movements associated with the Communist International and its offspring: regimes which insisted that they were not communist but socialist, and movements which were barely communist in any sense at all."These states generally identify themselves as socialist states, on the grounds that they do not claim to have achieved communism. Within Marxist theory, communism presupposes a stateless society, so the very notion of a "communist state" would be oxymoronic. The economist Jozef Wilczynski explains: "Contrary to Western usage, these countries describe themselves as 'Socialist'. The second stage, or 'Communism,' is to be marked by an age of plenty, distribution according to needs, the absence of money and the market mechanism, the disappearance of the last vestiges of capitalism and the ultimate withering away of the State."
Other scholars emphasise the same point. John Barkley Rosser Jr. and Marina Rosser note that Karl Marx himself envisaged communism as entailing the eventual withering away of the state, with the dictatorship of the proletariat conceived as a strictly transitional arrangement. "Well aware of this", they write, "the Soviet Communists never claimed to have achieved communism, always labelling their own system socialist rather than communist and viewing their system as in transition to communism." Similarly, Raymond Williams traces the modern terminological divide to 1918, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party reconstituted itself as the All-Russian Communist Party. From that point onward, "a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism."
From the standpoint of Western political science, however, the term communist state remains analytically useful, insofar as such states display a common institutional pattern. According to scholars Stephen White, John Gardner, and George Schöpflin, four features define them: the adoption of Marxism–Leninism as the official state ideology ; the predominance of state ownership and centralized economic planning; a one-party state dominated by a highly centralized and disciplined communist party, sometimes alongside subordinate parties; and the party's constitutionally enshrined leading role in both state and society.