Communism: The Basic Principles

In one line

Communism says that history is driven by the conflict between classes created by who owns the means of production, that capitalism produces the class which will end it, and that the result is a society without classes, without private ownership of production, and eventually without a state.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: communism is the political and economic ideology, derived from Marx and Engels, which holds that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles; that the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life of a society; that capitalism produces its own gravedigger in the proletariat; that the proletariat must capture political power and abolish private ownership of the means of production; and that the outcome is a classless and stateless society distributing according to the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

The seven principles

1. Historical materialism

The foundation. The way a society produces its material life, that is, its technology and its relations of ownership, conditions its social, political and intellectual life. Ideas, law, religion and morality form a superstructure on an economic base, and change in the base produces change in the superstructure.

What follows. History is not driven by ideas, by great men or by accident. It is driven by the development of the productive forces and by the conflict this produces with existing relations of ownership.

2. Class struggle

The Manifesto's opening proposition, that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, in a word oppressor and oppressed, standing in constant opposition to one another. Under capitalism the classes have been simplified into two: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

3. The analysis of capitalism

Labour theory of value. The value of a commodity derives from the socially necessary labour required to produce it.

Surplus value. The worker is paid the value of their labour power, that is, what it costs to reproduce it, and produces more value than that. The difference is surplus value, appropriated by the owner. This is Marx's account of exploitation, and it is a structural claim rather than an accusation about wage rates: it holds even where wages are generous and the employer is decent.

Alienation. Under this system the worker is estranged from the product of their labour, which belongs to another; from the act of working, which is imposed and unfulfilling; from their own human capacities; and from other people, who become competitors.

Concentration and crisis. Capital concentrates in fewer hands, small producers are driven into the proletariat, and the system produces recurrent crises of overproduction.