The common, in Latin, is communius. A social system with no class division, no government, and no private property, all goods are free, and one works voluntarily for the common good. Communism is one of the projects that tried to change the world.
According to Marxist theory, communism can be divided into a lower stage, usually called socialism, and a higher stage, communism itself. If under socialism the principle “from each according to his abilities – to each according to his labor” should operate, under communism, it’s “from each according to his abilities – to each according to his needs”.
The ideologues of communism as quickly as possible hoped that labor productivity would rise so rapidly that all the “reasonable” needs of the people would be satisfied, commodity-money relations would disappear, and government coercion would become unnecessary. But as industrial society developed, the needs only increased; the urban population demanded not just enough production but high quality.
Around 1980, it became clear that the rapid achievement of communism in the near future was impossible; communist ideologues declared that “advanced socialism” would continue for a long time. Maoism and other radical communist movements attempted to achieve communism quickly but also unsuccessfully.
Only North Korea is the world’s only intact sanctuary of communism, or rather Stalinism, where the elements of the market economy are virtually absent, and collectivism is reduced to a ban on curtains on the windows.
Example of a Communism government system
In 1921, exactly one hundred years ago, the Communist Party of Switzerland was founded. It emerged from the merger of the “Communist Group”, and the extreme left wing of the Socialist Party formed immediately after World War I. Because of the personal ties of Switzerland’s Communist leaders with Communists all over the world and Switzerland’s favorable geopolitical position in Europe, the CPP played an important role in The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, an international organization that brought together the Communist parties of various countries in 1919-1943. During World War I, the idea that some radical social changes and a qualitatively new society should occur at the end of the war was also popular in Switzerland. The social consequences of the war were terrible in this country, with the working class here undergoing a process of relative impoverishment. The country was neutral, so foreign revolutionaries were allowed to remain in the country.
The founders of the Swiss Communist Party were mostly skilled workers, and many were civil servants and also from “free” bourgeois professions. However, compared with other countries, the Communist Party failed to win the sympathy of the peasantry in Switzerland. That is because of the social stratification of the Swiss agricultural sector, in particular, because most farmers in Switzerland owned and worked the land themselves. And so it was that Switzerland was not only the international center of the communist movement but also a hub for the anti-communist structures. All of this led to a series of anti-communist laws in the 1930s and then the banning of the Communist Party in Switzerland in 1940.