Communism

COMMUNISM. - A name given to several doctrinal currents, not always in agreement with one another, except in their aspiration to make the enjoyment of economic goods universal — that is, available to all — by means of more or less radical or coercive devices of socialization not only of the means of production (capital, land, enterprises) but also of consumer goods. By thus abolishing private property, it aims to arrive at the social equality of all men.

I. ANCIENT ERA

To trace communism, as it is conceived today, in primitive, oriental and classical antiquity is nonsense.

Among primitive peoples, alongside property held in common, private and family property always functioned quite distinctly. In classical antiquity, neither military institutions with strict discipline and living together outside the bosom of the family (as in Crete, Sparta and Megara), nor sudden and quickly repressed uprisings of the lower classes (such as those of Eunus in Sicily, of Aristonicus in Asia Minor and of Spartacus in Rome), nor attempts at redistribution of possessions, not so much for reasons of justice and economic balance as for political motives (such as the agrarian-communistic tendencies of the Spartan king Cleomenes III), can be qualified, except in a very broad and improper sense, as anticipations of communism in antiquity. On close inspection, one sees that, like the social reforms brought about by the struggles between patricians and plebeians in the Roman world, which called more or less considerable contingents of proletarians to participate in the goods of the land and to enter the class of property owners, these movements resolved themselves into a strengthening of the institution of private property, which communism instead aims to destroy.

To be sure, leveling utopias were not lacking in Greece, and the satire made of them by Aristophanes in Women in Parliament is evidence of this. Praxagora, the main character, finds the longed-for equality only in a common life for all: lands, money, women, meals held in common, whence a blessed life, which however must necessarily rest on the labor of slaves. The comedy suggests that communist ideas were already being discussed in the Socratic circle, from which Plato and Xenophon emerged. Plato, in the ten books of the Republic, holds it necessary to establish the most radical and complete communion in order to bring about the perfect state (nothing any longer one's own: neither money, nor possessions; neither lands, nor women, nor children). But this applies to the two ruling classes of warriors and governors (philosophers); with laborers, merchants and slaves Plato does not concern himself at all. In the twelve books of the Laws he returns to it and insists upon it: the ideal, divine state will be the one in which the greatest solidarity and community among citizens prevails (see especially V, 739). Xenophon too (De vectigalibus) makes proposals for socialization; but the classes of laborers and slaves are excluded, because they are considered mere instruments. Aristotle in his Politics (II, 2), while criticizing Plato's opinions, nevertheless follows him quite closely; he merely does not admit the extension of communism to private property. But in all these authors communism is seen from the vantage point of the political class; the Cynics, on the other hand, see it from the vantage point of the rejected classes, and they extend it to all men as such, that is, all equal and brothers.

Alongside the political demands from which communism sprang in the Hellenic world, which presupposed the slavery of a large part of the population, a higher communism, founded on love of neighbor and on equality among the children of God, arose in the first Christian communities (Acts, 4, 37). But it was not obligatory; just as each person could freely sell all or part of his goods and put the proceeds into common, so too he could keep them (cf. Acts 5, 1-10, the episode of Ananias and Sapphira). This, which was a voluntary poverty, later always practiced by the religious Orders, was not well understood by many other heretical movements of later centuries: in the Gnostic and Manichaean and Messalian heresies, which affirm the communion of goods as a divine natural law; in Montanism or millenarianism, in which the expectation of the end of the world is an incitement to abandon property for the common good. Unequal streams of a communist character, derived for the most part from Manichaeism, run throughout the Middle Ages: and under the name of Cathars, Patarines, Albigensians, or simply of the poor, they are found, scattered in Italy, in France and also in the Germanic countries, in Flanders and in Holland, even in the Balkans, welcomed and practiced by the Bogomils, Beghards, Joachimites, etc.

Sometimes this spiritual and religious veneer does not exclude collective violence. In 1248 it is the wool-carders of Léau in Brabant who revolt; two years later the Piccoli of Liège rise up; almost at the same time metalworkers and weavers rise up in Dinant and Huy; peasants and humble men follow, fanatical and desperate, the false Baldwin of Flanders, pretended emperor, from whom they expect a great and full social reform. Bruges, Ypres, Ghent are in revolt in 1348, and workers, with the weavers at their head, propose to exterminate the "good people," that is, the rich and the property owners. Siena and Florence are shaken by the disturbances of 1371-85 and 1378-82, which mark the extreme effort and the defeat of the common people after a century of slow and laborious ascent. The movements of the Bruco in Siena, of the Straccioni in Lucca, of the Ciompi in Florence represent the uprising of the classes sacrificed by the entrepreneurs, who attempt to seize power. The insurrections of the peasants of southern Germany and the famous French jacquerie of 1358 did not have pronounced ideal movements. The German movements were limited to the liberation of slaves and serfs: the revolt of the Jacques, on the other hand, was an explosion of discontent on the part of the peasants of the Île-de-France and the Beauvaisis, who, influenced against the nobility, plundered the masters' residences; at their head was a peasant, Caillet, whom the gentlemen contemptuously called "Jacques Bonhomme," whence the name of jacquerie given to the uprising.

While weapons were falling from the hands of the insurgents, the unsatisfied aspiration to a more equitable distribution of goods asserted itself in the fields of utopia (from the Greek οὐ τόπος "country [that is] in no place"). The first typical example is the Utopia of T. More (1516); it is imitated by the Mondi celesti of Doni (1562), La città del sole of Campanella (1623), L'histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-53), the Histoire des Sévarambes of Vairasse (1677), etc., down to the Îles flottantes of Morelly, where the communist principles of his Code de la nature (Amsterdam 1775) are applied, in which the principle is formulated: "work according to one's strength, products according to each one's need."

Of greater importance in the 18th century is the criticism made of private appropriation by numerous writers who declare it destructive of the natural equality among men. From Meslier to Rousseau, from D'Holbach and Linguet to Mably, to Morelly, it is a whole current, at least potentially, communist.

Celestino Melzi.

II. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ERA

The struggle for a communistic ideal presents itself, in the modern age, in terms profoundly different from the way it had presented itself in antiquity, in the Middle Ages or in the age of the Renaissance. The emergence of modern industry, the rise — parallel to it — of a modern proletariat, are the principal elements that contribute to giving a completely new formulation to the "social problem." Communistic programs tend, in broad outline, to become more concrete, the struggle becomes more close-knit. The economic and practical problems of the moment move to the foreground: but this does not mean that the utopias dear to past centuries are simply and entirely renounced, nor the ideal of "islands" administered according to criteria of justice and reason, nor appeals, according to the different countries, the different local situations and the different cultural level, to Plato or to Thomas More, to Spartacus or to Campanella, to Joachim of Fiore, Wyclif or Hus.

The term "socialism" and that of "c." often come to coincide or to interweave and become confused. It is almost impossible always to distinguish the two terms exactly, and one cannot trace the history of c. without in a certain way also tracing the history of socialism (v.).

In the climate created by the French Revolution — of that revolution which socialists and communists of every shade defined as a "bourgeois" revolution — one can, in broad outline, trace the first stirrings of modern c. Even in earlier revolutions of urban plebeians or of rural masses, communistic stirrings and ideals had appeared in more or less partial or primitive forms. But in the climate of modern France and of the great revolution, communistic ideals appeared for the first time on a plane, so to speak, universal, closely connected and interwoven no longer with backward plebeians, but with intellectual and bourgeois elements of one of the most advanced regions of Europe.

In the French Revolution (v.) communist tendencies arise under the impulse of a rationalistic fanaticism (rightly or wrongly there has been talk in this regard of a particular form of "lay theocracy") or else of a vague, traditional and primitive anarchic impulse. The characteristic messianic attitude that generally accompanies movements of a communistic character from ancient times onward seems at times to be attenuated or to disappear under the influence of the Enlightenment and of rationalism, but only to rise again, transformed and strengthened, through a new massive "creed," on rigidly enunciated classist foundations.

In August 1792 the most extremist revolutionary currents decisively gained the upper hand in Paris. The front of the revolutionaries thus began to split: the differentiation between "bourgeois" on one side, artisans and workers on the other, became more pronounced; in political terms, the differences between constitutional monarchists and moderate republicans appeared smaller than the differences between the latter and the republicans of the left, around whom the number of generic "social reformers" was ever more increasing. Robespierre's dictatorship identified itself with a fanatical will to struggle "against the internal and external enemy"; Robespierre was not averse to finding a formula of compromise with those elements that tended to abolish private property more or less integrally: in practice, however, the regime of the Incorruptible meant not only a merciless struggle against moderate elements, but also repression against groups of pronounced left (Hébert).

The counterposing of a "real" equality (which one would necessarily have had to reach) to a "formal and apparent" equality is perhaps the principal Leitmotif, starting from 1795, of Babeuf (v.), of Filippo Buonarroti (v.) and of those who took part in the "conspiracy of the equals." It is these who mark in a truly characteristic manner the passage from Jacobinism to revolutionary c. Of notable importance in particular was Buonarroti, who can be considered as one of the principal links in the chain that unites the "communists" of the late eighteenth century to those who carried on their activity at the time of the Paris Commune and who indeed preserved memories and traditions of him.

At the head of the new revolutionary regime, as true dictators, Buonarroti wanted to place men "free from prejudices" and "virtuous," strangers to the attraction of money and of honors, all of them instead intent on realizing the ideal of equality. To respect "true" democracy one would have had, according to Buonarroti, to attribute, at least initially, less value to the ballot paper than to the certainty of having energetic men at the head of the revolution. Buonarroti was the "master" of Blanqui, who absorbed from him in particular his energetic will and his dictatorial orientations.

The new, concrete demands of the modern proletariat asserted themselves more or less openly in the writings of Saint-Simon (v.), in the projects of "phalanstery" of Fourier (v.), in the experiment of "New Harmony" and, in general, in the entire activity of Owen (v.). These concrete and modern demands are interwoven, however, now with demands of a religious character, now with naive utopias, now with predominantly humanitarian attitudes. In these and in other "precursors" of socialism and of c. (whom Marxist c., having styled itself "scientific," later loved to define, not without a note of criticism and contempt, as "utopian") one notes ideological and spiritual connections with the French Revolution, or else with humanitarian orientations, in the eighteenth-century sense of the term: these "precursors" are, in broad outline, continuators of democratic, rationalistic, Enlightenment ideologies, which they intend to carry to their extreme consequences, which they wish above all to "develop" on economic ground, on the plane of so-called "social justice."

In England, a social thinker of the eighteenth century with a religious background, Robert Wallace, asking himself how it was that man, though endowed with so many gifts, still found himself at such a low material and moral level, believed he had found a panacea in c. Again in England, a typical exponent of a c. with an anarchistic background, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, can be considered William Godwin. The absolute contrast of interests between capitalists and workers was theorized, more or less contemporaneously, by Charles Hall, who was of the opinion that, with the development of modern civilization, wealth would be ever more concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the privileged. The so-called "Luddites" (machine-breakers) represented a characteristic aspect of the revolutionary movement in England, at the dawn of modern industrialization: in machines they saw the instruments of a more cruel capitalist domination, the cause of a very serious growth of unemployment (v. INGHILTERRA, storia; SOCIALISMO).

Even when "scientific" communism — rigidly classical, "hard" and authoritarian, ironic and polemical toward "bourgeois freedom" and all the petty-bourgeois and democratic ideals — had largely supplanted the eclectic and democratic ideals of its "precursors" (mentioned earlier), new adversaries would arise from time to time in the guise of "fellow travellers" and "companions on the road," who would soon become the new "heretics." In France, Proudhon (v.) would be a dangerous adversary for Marxist communism because of his markedly individualistic traits, not without attraction in France. In Bakunin (v.), authoritarian communism of the Marxist stamp would find an adversary even harder to defeat, because of his combativeness and his tireless dynamism (in his countless and violent pamphlets he would uphold with simple and materialistic formulas the integral freedom to be conquered and defended against any State, even against the one that wishes to call itself proletarian: the Russian exile placed more hope in the Russian, Italian and Spanish masses than in the mechanized and "embourgeoised" "modern proletarians" of England and France). Blanqui (Louis-Auguste, b. 18 Feb. 1805 at Puget-Théniers, d. in Paris on 1 Jan. 1881), akin in various respects to the ideologies of Marxist communism, delved into the technical aspects of insurrection, but disregarded the objective economic and political conditions. According to Blanqui, communism cannot be introduced from above, with Enlightenment and philanthropic intentions, but only through a tenacious and tireless struggle from below. With the victory of the revolution, all judges and all senior officials should be dismissed en masse: the other functionaries of the old regime should be kept in service only "conditionally." With particular reference to France, Blanqui planned a dictature parisienne, which was to direct the republic until the masses had become "mature" for democracy. Lassalle, whose thought can be fully understood only on the plane of German idealism, of which he was in a certain sense a curious epigone, organized the German proletariat, seeing the most important and most immediate goal in universal suffrage and seeking to reach momentary agreements and compromises with Bismarck himself. Much later, after Marx's death, Sorel (v.) would develop revolutionary syndicalism in opposition to "scientific" communism, with a marked hostility toward "embourgeoised" socialism and toward parliamentarism in general.

Communism, which called itself "scientific" and "critical" (and which in practice came increasingly to identify itself with modern communism), found its most notable ideological expression in the famous Manifesto of Marx (v.) and Engels (v.), of Jan. 1848, written in the name of the "Communist League."

The history of human society appeared to Marx and Engels as a history of continuous class struggles. Freemen and slaves, barons and serfs, masters of guilds and journeymen, oppressed and oppressors always waged an uninterrupted struggle, hidden or open. Modern bourgeois society, arisen from the ruins of feudalism, has not eliminated class contrasts, but has created only new classes and new forms of oppression. In the past, it is true, the bourgeoisie played a decisively revolutionary role in history, tearing apart feudal bonds and leaving between man and man no other tie than mere interest. "It has drowned in the icy water of egoistic calculation the holy shudders of religious exaltation, chivalrous enthusiasm, the sentimentality of the petty bourgeois." The bourgeoisie has subjected the countryside to the city, has created enormous urban centers, has made the backward or barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones. But by now the productive forces at the bourgeoisie's disposal no longer serve to favor the development of civilization and the relations of production: "too narrow have the conditions of the bourgeoisie now become to contain the wealth it has itself created."

In place of sentimental regrets and complaints, critical communism therefore intends to make an analysis of the real historical process. It looks with repugnance and contempt upon alms and philanthropy and instead wants to make the proletarians fully conscious of their concrete situation. Influenced by particular reflections of the English industrial situation in the first half of the 19th century, Marx and Engels hold that work in the great factories is becoming ever harder for the workers, that wages tend ever more to diminish; moreover, modern industry would increasingly transform "the little shop of the patriarchal master craftsman into the great factory of the industrial capitalist"; the more modern industry progresses, the more the work of men would be supplanted by that of women and children. As a whole, the middle class would be crushed by the competition of the big capitalists.

In the midst of the proletariat, the communists come to be the "most resolute and progressive" fraction. The immediate aim of the communists is the organization of the proletariat into a class party, the destruction of bourgeois dominion, the conquest of political power.

The proletariat must be put on guard against equivocal and non-"scientific" forms of pseudocommunism, against generic social enticements, which on a more careful analysis would reveal their decisively reactionary character. Thus one must be well on guard against that curious "feudal socialism, half elegy and half pasquinade, a bit an echo of the past and a bit a threat of the future, which often wounded the bourgeoisie with briskly bitter and ferocious judgments," but incapable of understanding history and a typical expression, however demagogic, of a dispossessed aristocracy. One must also combat "petty-bourgeois socialism," characteristic first of all of France, an expression of the ways of seeing and the criteria of small owners of town and country: this "socialism" would simply wish to re-establish the old means of production and exchange and with them the old property relations: it is, however, "reactionary and utopian socialism," under the veil of the idyll. As for the systems of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, etc., they — and other systems analogous to those — see the contrast between the classes, but do not discern in the proletariat its decisive and special historical function; they limit themselves to opening the way to the new ideologies, but with small, inane experiments devoid of scientific value.

"It is toward Germany that the communists especially direct their attention, because Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, which is being accomplished in conditions generally more advanced in civilization and with a proletariat much more developed than England had in the 17th century and France in the 18th. The reason why the German bourgeois revolution can be nothing but the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution." Marx and Engels held, in short, that, because of Germany's original historical developments, this country — relatively backward from the economic point of view — would, because of its contrasts, have become the leader of the revolution. This prediction proved entirely mistaken, but it served as a starting point — and it is very important to keep this in mind — for analogous considerations by Lenin and Trotsky on the concrete possibilities of a proletarian revolution in Russia. Where Marx deluded himself in 1848, Lenin and Trotsky saw tactically correctly in 1917.

The Manifesto concluded with the affirmation that the communists disdain to conceal their principles and their aims and ended with the well-known battle cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

The question of the origin of capital is resolved by finding a commodity that can increase in value, so that, by selling it, a profit comes to be realized. This commodity is precisely labor power. The wage for a day represents what is needed to maintain the worker, but it does not represent what the worker produces in a day's work. Labor power, by producing a value greater than what it is worth, that is, a surplus value, generates capital (v. MARX). The struggle of the proletariat against its "exploiters" thus comes to detach itself clearly from all generically democratic and humanitarian traditions. A mighty "myth" comes to take hold of vast strata of the working class.

This new "scientific" doctrine of communism is closely connected with the philosophical conclusions reached by historical materialism (v.). In polemic against Hegel's idealism and directly influenced by Feuerbach (v.), Marx and Engels in fact discerned in human needs the driving principle of History. "My method — said Marx — is not that of Hegel: because I am a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel's dialectic is the foundation of every dialectic, but only once it has been freed from its mystical form; it is precisely this that distinguishes my method." Marx therefore accused Hegel of discerning in the philosophy of history the history of philosophy, indeed reduced simply to his own particular philosophy. The founders of critical communism wanted to differentiate their communism, called precisely "historical" or "dialectical," from what they preferred to define as "vulgar." Between the two conceptions of materialism, in the intention of Marx and Engels, there were to be no possibilities of union or confusion. Moreover, the polemical attitude against the representatives of idealist philosophy (held to be reactionary) and the greater aptitude of Marx and Engels for dealing with the problems of revolution than with those of philosophy, gave rise to numerous uncertainties in their philosophical system, to affirmations that could perhaps be traced back to "vulgar" materialism. Nevertheless, one must not lose sight of the fact that, above the contradictions mentioned, "philosophy of praxis" meant for Marx a conception of history interpreted as the "continuous creation" of human activity. In fact, in Capital Marx affirmed: "As Vico says, human history is distinguished from natural history in that we have made the former and not the latter." Naturally, a fundamental question remained open: did historical materialism enunciate an absolute law of the becoming of reality, or was it merely a useful "red thread" of an empirical character for the revolutionary's use, so as not to lose the ground of reality beneath his feet?

Marx and Engels realized that communism and socialism were in a certain sense akin terms: they nevertheless preferred the first of these expressions, because the term "socialism" appeared to them more generic and perhaps also "profaned" by "humanitarians" and reformers of various tendencies. The abolition of the State — affirmed Marx and Engels — has for communists only one meaning, that of the abolition of classes (that is, the abolition of the need for the organized power of one class to keep another in subjection). This affirmation and others analogous to it suggested a future point of coincidence with anarchist communism: in practice, however, Marxists and anarchists never managed to agree on the concrete term in which the demolition of the State and the abolition of the "transitory" dictatorship should begin.

The First International was, as is well known, a terrain of bitter struggle between Marx and Bakunin. The Second International, formed after 1880, through the federation of various workers' parties, instead wished to define itself as socialist: it in fact accentuated the directing function of the party vis-à-vis the trade union, participated successfully in electoral competitions (especially in Germany), and achieved notable successes for workers on the wage and insurance plane.

The First World War, however, led to the adherence of many socialist parties to the war policy of their respective governments: from this the Second International suffered a very grave crisis. Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Russian Revolution waged an extremely violent campaign against the Second International, defined as the International of "social-patriots" and traitors. In opposition to it, they brought to life a new organization, the Third International, which, in order to differentiate itself from "opportunism," wished to invoke the term used by the young Marx and to call itself "communism."

From this moment on, socialism and communism appear again as well-differentiated movements, even if, in the face of massive communist dogmatism, identifying itself with the opinions of certain leaders of Russian policy, socialism displayed a whole series of nuances, ranging from direct or indirect support for communism ("maximalism," "fusionism," etc.) to a clearly democratic policy.

For the development of communist ideology in Russia, in the countries of Eastern Europe, as well as for the history of the principal communist parties, see the entry BOLSCEVISMO. Here we limit ourselves to treating the essential outlines of communism. Lenin (v.) underlined the most authoritarian elements inherent in Marxist communism, combating with energy all "petty-bourgeois," "social-patriotic" deviations, as well as Russian socialism with a more or less agrarian, petty-bourgeois and democratic background. Trotsky (v.) emphasized to the maximum the internationalist ideal and theorized the so-called "permanent revolution." Unlike Trotsky, Stalin (v.) instead affirmed the possibility of building the new society on Russian territory itself, through industrialization and a series of grandiose five-year plans. In emigration, Trotsky sought to give life to the Fourth International, which however had very scant development and which invoked the "universal" ideals of the Revolution of 1917. With the victory, in the Second World War, of the Russian armies, Soviet communism has taken on an increasingly accentuated nationalist character: Russia has in fact increasingly developed a policy characteristic of a great power and has refreshed ideologies inspired by Pan-Slavism and by certain national traditions of foreign policy.

Soviet communism, rigidly atheist, while accentuating its aversion to Catholicism, has found a way to conclude agreements and compromises with the "Orthodox" Church, always in the service of an expansionist foreign policy and of Pan-Slavic "appeals."

Bitter ideological crises have, however, recently characterized the life of communism: the most serious "heresy" was without doubt that represented by Marshal Tito, leader of Yugoslavia. This is the reaction of local communism to the danger of total integration into the plans of Russian political and economic expansionism. Analogous "heresies" have taken place in other satellite countries of Russia: they have been characterized as deviations inspired by a "national communism." Such movements (with the exception of that headed by Tito in Yugoslavia) have been rapidly and harshly repressed, in Hungary, Poland, etc.

World War II, with the threat of German expansionism, had brought about the alliance between communist Russia and the democratic powers of the West. With the end of the war, however, the momentary motives for this alliance fell away. Russian policy indeed skillfully knew how to take advantage of all the uncertainties and weaknesses of the "Westerners." Communism had the possibility of wide diffusion in Asia, above all through the total conquest of China. In Asia communism still presents itself in a phase that is in a certain sense initial, emphasizing above all very strongly the various "local" nationalisms in contrast with European and American interests. In these still "primitive" territories the properly communist postulates are generally kept in the background. In the West, on the other hand, communism encountered considerable resistance, strengthened through the Atlantic Pact. The policy of religious persecutions, of expansionist nationalism, of the extermination of "dissidents" (Rajk, Kostov, etc.) produced in America and in Europe vast and varied opposition, arising from different political and moral points of view, but united in practically recognizing the irreconcilability between communism and freedom.

Wolf Giusti

III. EVALUATION

The evolutionary process of modern communism is divided into two clearly distinct periods, each of which has its own characteristics and is dominated by certain theoretical principles that are not perfectly identical, although they lead to more or less the same conclusion. The first movement of ideas in a communist direction is linked in part to the utopian currents, which had taken pleasure in the fantastic description of perfect cities or islands, as, for example, in Campanella and in Thomas More, and predominantly to the humanitarian and egalitarian conceptions of the French Enlightenment, with which utopian elements are mingled. To vaporous humanitarianism it owes its messianic content of liberating man from the slavery of capital, for the constitution of a society in which the individual can find total satisfaction of his own needs. From the egalitarianism and absolute democratism of the Enlightenment derives its clear position of struggle against private property. In his work on the origin and foundations of inequality, Rousseau had already laid down the principles from which communist ideas were to develop. Starting from an abstract concept of nature, he had asserted that, although men are born with congenital physical and spiritual disparities, the inequality caused by them had little influence in the original state. True inequalities arise with the introduction of the institution of private property, for whose defense the system of social laws would have been deviously and deceitfully contrived. The two principles on which pre-Marxist utopian communism would leverage were clearly announced by Rousseau and in a more attenuated form by the Enlightenment thinkers of the Encyclopédie, Diderot and Voltaire, who were reluctant to deduce from the concept of equality the fatal consequence of the condemnation of property.

In the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and in the Constitution of 1791, the moderate current triumphed. The equality recognized for man was merely formal, equality before the law, and the institution of property was consecrated and defended with the sole mitigation of a generic social aspect. The revolutionary currents did not take long to uphold the necessity of passing, according to the logic of the egalitarian principle, to real equality and to demand the suppression of private property as the origin and source of all inequalities. From the agnostic philosophy of the Enlightenment two antagonistic movements thus depart: liberalism, which carries the principle of man's total autonomy to its ultimate consequences, and revolutionary communism, which presses upon the egalitarian principle, from which it deduces the condemnation of property. Its critical point consists, therefore, in this principle; once it falls, its theoretical construction falls.

The flaw in the formulation consists in the improper passage from the abstract equality of human nature to concrete and de facto equality. All men, considered in their essence, are perfectly equal, since in each of them the same nature is realized with its constitutive parts and its general requirements, from which certain fundamental rights derive for every individual, equally possessed by each. On the abstract plane of nature, therefore, all men are equal; they are not, however, equal on the concrete plane and in the machinery of social life. Rousseau himself already recognized that men are born physically and morally different; the first disparities on the concrete plane derive, therefore, from generation itself or from nature, which realizes human essence differently. To these undeniable disparities are added those that each individual develops through the use of the capacities originally received. Individuals, endowed with different physical strength and intellectual and volitional power, arrange themselves on a hierarchical scale almost spontaneously, according to the use or abuse of their faculties, according to the greater or lesser intensity of work, according to the vigor placed in the mastery of their passions and in the exploitation of subjective and objective possibilities, so that upon the equality of nature is grafted the inequality of fact, itself also natural. It is a manifest error to attribute to property alone the origin of all social inequalities and therefore to deduce condemnation from the concept of equality.

Property produces only economic inequalities; if these, however, are a consequence, as not infrequently happens, of the different capacities of individuals and of their particular industriousness in putting their gifts to use, they cannot in principle be condemned, as long as they do not exceed certain limits, beyond which a social malaise comes to be created. The claim, therefore, of the communist currents to achieve a total and real equality in social organization, by abolishing the institution of property, proves to be utopian. Social equality cannot be arithmetic but must be proportional: that is, every individual must in society enjoy particular rights, added to the universal ones emerging from nature, in proportion to his capacities and to the contribution he can give or has given to the common good. This proportion must be respected also with regard to possession.

One cannot, however, conceal or deny that in communist ideologies there exists a fund of truth, and this consists in the requirement of adapting, as far as possible to the economy of a country, the conditions of existence of the various classes, so as to attenuate excessively strident economic disparities, provide for a more equitable distribution of wealth, and attain a standard of social life that is not only bearable but of general well-being. This, however, can be achieved without the suppression of property and outside of any revolutionary movement, by means of appropriate structural reforms tending to bring out its social function.

The egalitarian principle and the utopian elements passed into the scientific communism of the second period, mingled, however, with others, deduced from a particular philosophical and economic conception, which forms the theoretical substrate of Marxism. Regarding the philosophical foundation of Karl Marx's theory, see the entries MARXISMO; MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO. In the present entry only those aspects of communism that concern economics, sociology, politics and religion will be critically evaluated.

1. Communist economics. The axiom from which the economic conception of Communism takes its start echoes the theme of total equality. Everything belongs to everyone; nature with its economic goods is the common banquet of all men; therefore particular appropriation with the exclusion of others is a violation of justice, whence the further consequence that earthly goods can belong only to the community. The sophism is evidently nested in this sequence of axiomatic assertions. First of all, as with the preceding theories, one must note the passage from the abstract to the concrete. In the abstract—that is, considering men in the most universal demands of their nature—all earthly goods are destined by the objective order to their use, so that through them men may attain the ends of life. Consequently all men have an equal right to their use, but this right is not a positive belonging of earthly goods to the whole of humanity, but rather a faculty of making them one's own, joining them to the ends of the human person, through a positive act of appropriation, from which real ownership takes its origin. In other words, the economic good is originally common in a negative sense, inasmuch as, so long as it is free, it can be occupied by anyone who wishes. If the economic good, as Communism affirms, belonged to all humanity in a positive manner, then even the possession of political collectivities would be against justice, since this would exclude the possession of other communities. Communism, therefore, affirms and denies at the same time the principle of the original belonging of economic goods to all men, since it admits the possession of the community. And if this common or national possession is not against justice, neither is private possession against it: a universal principle cannot suffer any exception. Communism kills itself with its own weapons; for a fuller justification of private property, however, see the corresponding entry.

Having condemned private appropriation as unjust, Communism affirms as its opposite the necessity of collectivist management, in which the State, owner of all the means of production, provides for administration and distribution. To individual capitalism it opposes a State capitalism. Its introduction, however, does not eliminate the defects rightly lamented in capitalist organization, but multiplies them, adding others more serious and more dangerous. First of all, it is uneconomic, since it suppresses the driving stimulus of every economy, removing the spur of the producer's immediate interest, a source of energy in the pursuit of profit that cannot be replaced by other incentives. It also makes saving impossible, the second vital spring of production, since, once private property is suppressed, man would no longer have any incentive to face sacrifices in order to provide for future needs. The State would have to replace individual savers, setting aside reserves, which will weigh upon the working classes more than happens under the regime of individual property. To disturb the economic process still further is added the inevitable intrusiveness of politics, before which the criterion of economic convenience in the organization of the factors of production will have to capitulate, and the State monopoly, afflicted by more serious defects than personal monopoly, because of the impossibility of escaping its pressure and of attenuating its suffocating effects through competition. The collectivist economy, finally, cannot escape the system of planning, which becomes its general rule and its normal process. A central authority would have to maneuver the whole varied, complex and colossal economic mechanism of an entire people, interfering, in order to obtain productive goals, in man's life in a capillary manner, to establish the production quotas of every commodity, regulate consumption, fix the professions and their distribution, introducing the slavery of labor. In the collectivist and planned economy the human person thus comes to lose every autonomous value, with the total suppression of his freedom of choice, which he will never be able to assert against an employer who possesses all the means of subsistence and can dispose of them in absolute independence.

The cornerstone of the economic conception of Communism is the Marxist theory of value, to which criticism has turned in a particular way, in order to demonstrate its total groundlessness. The value of a commodity does not derive solely from the quantity of social labor crystallized in it. Exchange value results from many components—from desire, from utility, from the rarity of the product, from the buyer's need and from other factors, among which labor is undoubtedly to be counted, inasmuch as it ordinarily increases the utility of the commodity. The first source of exchange value, as Aristotle had already established, is the need on the part of man and the aptitude on the part of the commodity to satisfy it, that is, utility.

2. Communist sociology. The social conception of Communism rests on the concept of class, of the struggle between classes, and of a messianic future in which, once the class division has disappeared, the struggle and competition will cease, giving way to an era of fruitful collaboration in the renewed society. "The history of all hitherto existing humanity is the history of class struggles," and bourgeois society, as the Manifesto of the Communists, drafted by Marx and Engels, affirmed, would not have destroyed the opposition of classes, although it had simplified it, reducing it to the opposition of only two, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There will come a time, however, it added, prophetically foreseeing the future, when fratricidal struggle will mark the advent of a new civilization, of a society without classes and without economic conflicts, without contradictions and without injustices. "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

The first difficulty that arises to break up this fantastic construction derives from the very concept of social class, which is hard to define in such a way as to attribute to it an exact and univocal content that can scientifically mark its limits and establish precisely where it begins and where it ends. The individuals of a given social complex are distributed into categories so different and so tenuously separated from one another that it is impossible to determine exact divisions. Without denying, however, the existence of classes, of which an approximate concept can be reached, it must be firmly denied that the sole cause producing their formation is, as Communism supposes, the economic one. Undoubtedly an economic element is mixed into the constitution of social classes, but it is an error to elevate it to an exclusive and determining factor, since other motives of a higher and spiritual order, pure of every economic consideration, contribute to associating men with one another and to making them feel a certain affinity. The concept of class in Communism remains falsified by the more general conception of history, whose evolutionary motion would be dominated by material interest.

The second stumbling block, on which the social theory of Communism founders, is the class struggle, likewise attributed to economic factors. History shows how classes can have other origins, as, for example, religion, which causes the priestly castes, and civil and military functions, which create special categories of citizens; history itself shows how the alleged class struggle has not always existed, even in those social organizations in which it should have arisen because of the exploitation of one class by another, as among the castes of India. The class struggle is therefore not a general and necessary law, nor, as has been observed, does it depend, even in contemporary society, on an exclusively economic fact, but on a complex psychological state of the masses, in which the proletariat's feeling of social inferiority enters to a great extent, and in which spiritual motives are mingled.

Equally gratuitous is the supposition of Communism regarding the homogeneity and compactness of the two classes into which contemporary society is said to have been simplified today. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat is so united as not to present internal fissures and deep and insuperable antagonisms, such as those that derive from national or patriotic reasons, or from the defense of labor and wages. The recent wars have seen the proletarians of one nation take up arms against those of the enemy nation, contradicting with their patriotic feeling the slogan of Communism, according to which the proletariat would have no fatherland. In the past and in the present the workers of one nation have risen up against the workers of others, and trade-union organizations have supported their antagonistic claims and their opposition to the immigration of foreign labor, in order to defend their own working conditions, often with manifest injustice toward the workers of overpopulated nations. We are therefore far indeed from the dream of a homogeneous proletariat marching like a compact army to the conquest of the new era, in the description of which Communism links up with the utopia of imaginary islands and ideal societies.

Even a superficial study of human nature, of its tendencies and its needs, suffices to dispel the messianic dream of a classless society, in which liberty, harmony, prosperity and justice would reign undisturbed. To achieve this goal the class struggle would have to work a total palingenesis of man, extinguishing in him the disordered stimulus of the passions and particularly of egoism, in order to root in his nature lasting virtues that would correct his defects. Such a transformation is not only in itself an unattainable utopia, but also, were it not so, it could never be brought about by a conception of life that denies moral and spiritual values and brutalizes man in the anxious pursuit of material well-being. Frictions and antagonisms, discords and injustices can be attenuated by a highly moral education of the people, but not totally suppressed, as long as man will be a being agitated by opposing tendencies.

Moreover, classes are not arbitrary formations that can disappear through voluntary action, but their birth is due to natural causes, which act spontaneously in the social environment and determine its stratifications. The reduction to a single class presupposes the leveling of humanity upon a wrinkle-free plane, on which the different capacities with which men are born should disappear, along with all the other differences acquired through personal initiative. As long as men will be different in temperament and in physical and moral qualities, and personal industry will be able to create new differentiating characteristics, there will be different classes in society. The proof of this is found in the Bolshevik experiment, which, after having overthrown the bourgeoisie, created new classes, with a different standard of living and unequal treatment. The spontaneous dynamics of social coexistence has prevailed over an abstract myth, supported by a fantastic optimism.

3. The politics of Communism. The political conception of Communism foresees a transitional phase of social organization, which will be reached through the dictatorship of the proletariat, after the overthrow of the bourgeois State, and a decisive and final phase, in which the State will finally disappear, to give place to a coexistence without authority and without laws among men moved solely by the enthusiasm of disinterested labor performed for the good of the collectivity.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, even in the eyes of the very prophets of Communism, remains an uncertain and wavering concept. According to Lenin, who glories in being its most genuine interpreter, the doctrine of the class struggle, applied to the problem of the State, issues in the recognition of the political dominion of the proletariat, that is, of a power not shared with anyone and founded immediately on the armed force of the working masses. This dictatorship is not a democracy with welcoming arms, but a democracy of the oppressed, who intend to annihilate the oppressors and therefore a ferocious and pitiless compression of the minority doomed to death. In its political action, as Lenin again expresses it, it knows no limits of any law, being an unlimited power, which rests on force and not on law.

The profoundly anti-human content of this conception cannot escape anyone who still keeps faith in spiritual values. In society man preserves his nobility as a rational being, who must be guided to the attainment of collective ends by moral and juridical norms that stimulate his conscience to ordered action. The dictatorship of the proletariat replaces these with pure material force, violence, reducing coexistence to a penal colony, dominated by the lash of the executioner. Liberty and justice remain empty words before the unlimited power of the proletarian State, which crushes the human person in its gears. If one then considers how the proletarian mass, incapable of governing itself collectively, must confer power on a fraction of itself, and this fraction on a single leader, one will see how the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of a class and of one man with the constitution of a totalitarian State, which oppresses the proletarian in the most extensive political slavery in the name of the proletariat.

In the description of the definitive phase, to which at some unspecified day the communist evolution must issue, Communism returns to draw upon utopia and borrows from it the nebulousness of its ideas. In the future society, according to Lenin, men liberated from capitalist slavery, from the innumerable errors, follies, absurdities and vulgarities of capitalist exploitation, will gradually accustom themselves to follow the most elementary rules of social coexistence, known for millennia and repeated for millennia in all traditions, and to respect them without violence, without subordination, without a special coercive apparatus of the State. Their labor will become so productive that they will spontaneously give all the activity of which they are capable, surpassing the narrow horizon of bourgeois law: criminality and misery will disappear.

The mere reading of this wandering through the heavens of fantasy, where the earthly reality of concrete man has totally vanished from view, suffices to show toward what chimerical end the evolution of history is directed. The State with its directive and coercive powers is grafted onto the human order with such necessity that no contrary force will avail to eliminate it. The death of the State is the death of social life and the establishment of anarchy with the collapse of all the moral forces that make civil coexistence possible.

4. Communism and religion. The irreconcilable antagonism between communism and religion, which the history of the movement displays in all its tragic violence in the war declared on every form of worship (v. BOLSCEVISMO), is not a phenomenon tied to particular contingencies or to the exaltation of some of its representatives, but necessarily springs from the materialistic conception of life and of the world, by which it is inspired in all its attitudes. In the Marxist vision, religion, like every other spiritual value, is one of the secondary products of the play of economic factors, mutable in content and form according to changes in the relations of production and exchange.

As Marx came to define it, religion in its essence is the nebulous region in which the creations of the human brain appear to come alive with a life of their own and to constitute themselves as independent beings, in relation among themselves and with men — a pure projection of alienated consciousness, which finds itself again only when it surpasses and destroys it. Religion, he further adds, is the sigh of the oppressed person, the soul of a world without heart, as it is the spirit of a civilization in which the spirit is excluded. Religion is the opium of the peoples.

Not different are the causes to which Lenin attributes its origin. Religion, he affirms, is an aspect of the spiritual oppression that is exercised always and everywhere upon the popular masses prostrated by perpetual labor for the profit of others, by misery and by isolation. Faith in a better life in the future is born inevitably from the impotence of the exploited classes in the struggle against the exploiters, just as belief in divinities, in devils and in miracles is born from the impotence of the savage in the struggle against nature.

The genesis of the religious sentiment would therefore be due, according to communism, to the sense of impotence of the oppressed classes, which, by virtue of a fantastic projection, imagine the existence of a future life and of an invisible divinity, and its essence would consist in a puerile chimera, which saps the agonistic impulse of the proletarian masses. Bound to an absurd state of consciousness, as Marx said, and to a particular economic arrangement, it would be destined to disappear, when the mystical cloudbank will have been swept away along with the classes and their ideological superstructures.

Truly real there is only matter, from which everything proceeds or into which everything is resolved, not excluding the higher values of the spirit. There exists therefore no personal and transcendent God, no absolute and most perfect being. There is not given, nor can there be given, a Revelation, a supernatural life and an otherworldly end, to which human life is destined. The end of existence does not surpass the limits of time, within which every ideal is arrested and exhausted. All the postulates of religious belief are thus radically denied, without any possibility of escaping from the opaque air of a materialism without fissures toward a more luminous atmosphere — a natural and spontaneous aspiration of the human soul in all times and in all latitudes. Atheism, not only ideological but also militant against every religious creed, becomes for communism a systematic necessity, and hatred against the sacred a destructive impulse.

There is no need to linger to confute an ideology against which human reason, the traditions of peoples, the spiritualism of Western civilization and the Christian Revelation all rise up. Its anti-religious essence explains why the Church has condemned communism from its very first appearance on the plane of history.

Already in 1846, Pius IX, in the encyclical Qui pluribus of 9 November, rose up against "that nefarious doctrine of so-called communism, supremely contrary to natural law itself, which, once admitted, would lead to the radical subversion of the rights, the things, the property of all and of human society itself." After this open reprobation, declarations of condemnation against the communist system and its political implementations have followed one another without interruption. The same reprobation and condemnation in the encyclical Quarta cura of 8 December 1864 (Denz-U, 1688 ff.) and in the Syllabus (ibid., 1718 a). Among the more recent pontifical documents, mention must be made of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, and Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno and Divini Redemptoris.

In the first, the illusion of any hypothetical conciliation between communism and Christianity is dispelled. "How much communism is a declared enemy of the Holy Church and of God himself — Pius XI asserts there — is a thing unfortunately demonstrated by experience and most well known to all." The nature of communism is impious and unjust.

Pius XII did not lag behind his predecessors. In the Christmas radio message of 1942 he openly renewed its condemnation. "Always moved by religious motives, the Church — he proclaimed — condemned the various systems of Marxist socialism and condemns them also today, as is her duty and permanent right to preserve men from currents and influences that endanger their eternal salvation." The exclusion from participation in the Sacraments of all those who consciously adhere to communist parties and militate in them, and the excommunication for all those who make themselves propagators and defenders of their atheistic and materialistic doctrine, established by decree of the Holy Office of 1 July 1949 (AAS, 41 [1949], p. 334), are nothing but the logical development of the Church's previous teaching, which separates from her organism those who have already separated themselves from her by their own initiative, with the rejection of faith in God and the denial of all the truths contained in Christian dogma.

Antonio Messineo