What is Communism?

 

What Is Communism?

July 18, 2026

Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes have started screaming “communist” at progressive Democratic candidates who call themselves “democratic socialists.” There is only one conceivable reason why they’re doing so, and it isn’t that democratic socialists are really communists. It’s because the rise of politicians who actually care about the people and are prepared to do things like raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pay for social programs scares them to death. So rather than debate Democrats on the level of policy preferences they dig up the old smear term communist, hoping to scare American voters off of candidates who actually do something to improve the people’s lives.

Now, it’s possible to respond to Trump’s newfound passion for throwing the term communism around the way I just did, and doing so would be to tell the truth. However, intelligent people will want more than that. They will want to know what communism actually is so they can compare it to the programs of social democratic politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani to see whether the label communist really applies. So here I want to explain, perhaps unfortunately at some length, what communism really is both in Marxist theory and in Soviet reality—and those two are a long, long way from the same thing.

Before I undertake to explain communism, let me briefly set out my qualifications for doing so. I have a PhD in Russian history, and Russia was a fully communist country at least from 1922 to near the end of 1991. As part of my training as a Russian historian, I learned Marxist ideology. Not because anyone was trying to make me a Marxist but because you couldn’t begin to understand the USSR without understanding Marxism. I went to Russia twice. I was there first in the summer of 1968 on a Russia language study tour through Indiana University. More importantly, I spent the 1975-76 academic year in Russia doing dissertation research. My wife, our son, and I lived in the dormitory of Moscow State University. I did most of my work in Moscow but also spent some time in what was then Leningrad, now, of course, once again St. Petersburg. I had certain advantages that Soviet citizens didn’t have, but I still learned a good deal about what it meant to live in that communist country. So I think I can describe communism both in theory and in practice with some authority.

As a matter of historical reality, the term “communism” originated, or at least became important, with the politico-economic theory of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx was a German philosopher who did most of his work in England. He develop a philosophy called “dialectical materialism.” Both of those words are important. By “materialism,” Marx meant that only the material is real. Reality consists only of that which we humans can perceive with our senses. Philosophical materialism denies the reality of the spiritual dimension of human existence. True Marxists are, therefore, assertively atheistic. Many Americans used to throw around the phrase “godless communism,” and that phrase does indeed fully apply to Marxist ideology.

To understand the term communism, however, we need to understand what Marx meant by the term “dialectical.” Though he denied any spiritual reality, he did believe that human history progresses through what he called a dialectic. He learned dialectical philosophy from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), but he applied it in a way Hegel never did. In a dialectic, you start with a position or proposition or, for Marx, an political economic system. This starting point is called the “thesis.” According to this philosophy, a thesis produced its opposite, called the “antithesis.” Then, eventually, the thesis and the antithesis somehow merge to create an end state called the “synthesis.”

Marxist ideology is called dialectical materialism because Marx asserted that human history progresses through such a dialectical progression. Most significantly for our purposes, Marx took capitalism to be a thesis and socialism to be its antithesis. For Marx, everything was about class and how different classes relate to the means of production, that is, to things like land and factories, etc. In capitalism, the capitalist class owns all of the means of production. The whole system is based on private property, and the private property that matters belongs to a small class of owners and entrepreneurs. Most of the people in a capitalist system are workers who work for the capitalists under conditions set by the capitalists. Marx was working within the capitalist system of nineteenth century England, and he saw that system as consisting of a class struggle between the capitalists and the workers, whom Marx called the proletariat.

Marx believed that that class struggle would eventually lead naturally and inevitably to a class revolution of the proletariat against the capitalist system. This revolution, he said, would lead to the creation of “socialism” not communism. This socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. In capitalism, a moneyed class owns the means of production. In socialism, the working class owns the means of production. The capitalist class, often called the bourgeoisie, is displaced if not physically eliminated, and their property passes to a state created by and for the proletariat. Marx anticipated that this socialist revolution would be violent, and he had no problem with it being violent. The capitalists and the institutions they created—and they created all of the society’s institutions from the state to the arts and the churches—would not go peaceably. The proletariat, through its socialist state, would have to force them out and eliminate them.

Socialism was not the end of Marx’s historical inevitability. Rather, over time, as the elimination of the class distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat progressed, the socialist state would “whiter and die.” Once the proletariat eliminated the bourgeoisie and appropriated the means of production, there would be no more class distinctions within society. Only the proletariat would remain. And because there would be no longer any class conflict, there would be no need for a state. So the socialist state, created to bring about the elimination of all class conflict, would simply disappear.

This situation, in which there is no longer any state, is Marxist communism. All property would be held communally. There would no longer be any conflict between people because all conflict is the result of conflict between socioeconomic classes, and there would be only one class, the proletariat. It’s not entirely clear to me how Marx’ communism is a synthesis between capitalism and socialism except perhaps that in it both the bourgeoisie and, essentially, the proletariat disappear into a classless society. In any event, the historical dialectic would end in the state of communism.

That, of course, is not what essentially anyone means by the term communism today. It is, actually, what the Soviet communists meant by the term. They never claimed to have created a communist nation. They created a socialist nation and claimed to be transitioning to communism not that they had attained it. However, in the world today the term communism usually means something quite different from pure Marxist communism. That’s because of what people, first in Russia but also in China and elsewhere, who claimed to be communists did when they came to power. To a review of those horrors we now turn.

The Bolshevik wing of the Russian Democratic Socialist Workers Party staged a coup de état in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 25, 1917 (old style).[1] The Soviet communists would come to call this coup the “Great October Revolution,” but, at first at least, it was nothing of the sort. It was a coup that displaced the so-called Provisional Government that had assumed power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated earlier in the year. A civil war followed that lasted until 1922. Only when the Bolsheviks finally won that civil war did Russia and most (if not quite all) of the Russian Empire become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ruled by the Bolsheviks, who changed their name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Soviet communism became a totalitarian regime founded in and enforced by terror. The terror began early. Very early on, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin put a man named Felix Dzherinsky in charge of an organization we know as the Cheka. This organization went through various name changes over the following years, but it is best known today as the KGB. The Cheka conducted a campaign of murderous terror against anyone it took to be an enemy of the Bolshevik regime. It surely murdered at least tens of thousands of people during the Russian civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup. Both Lenin and Dzherinsky, along with all of their Bolshevik associates, believed that terror was necessary to establish their socialist state and defeat its class enemies, all of it enemies being of course class enemies. In later decades it became popular to think of Lenin as a more peaceful Bolshevik. He wasn’t. He set himself up as a murderous tyrant.

The terror that Lenin instituted grew by orders of magnitude under Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin.[2] Before Hitler invaded the USSR in 1942, Stalin and the Cheka (usually called the NKVD in Stalin’s years) killed at least twenty million Soviet people. He imposed an artificial famine on Ukraine and elsewhere, known as the Holodomor, as part of his effort to enforce the collectivization of agriculture. At least four million Ukrainians starved to death. Stalin killed all of the so-called “old Bolsheviks,” the men who had known and worked with Lenin in creating the Soviet state. He eliminated nearly all of the members of the leadership of the Soviet Red Army, supposedly because they were enemies of the Soviet state (which, of course, they were not).

Stalin created the infamous Gulag system of prison camps, where millions of people disappeared and died. I have read of NKVD agents whose job, in eight hour shifts, was to shoot people in the back of the head. All Soviet citizens came to live in fear of the “black Mariahs,” the black cars the secret police used when coming to arrest some innocent person as an enemy of the people. No one could trust anyone, not even close friends or family members, not to file a false complaint against them with the secret police. Stalin made heroes of children who reported on “counterrevolutionary” acts by their parents.

In June, 1942, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin was able to rally the Russian people (and others) to defeat them, but they did it at the cost of between twenty and thirty million lives.[3] And during the horrors of the Nazi invasion, Stalin never called off the NKVD. It continued to arrest, imprison, and execute supposed enemies of the Soviet state in large numbers. They even did during the unspeakable horror of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, in which more than one million people starved to death. Stalin died in 1953, and the terror of the Soviet regime abated to a significant extent after he was gone; but it ended only with the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991 (which is not Christmas in Russia).

So, that’s what communism is in theory and what it became in practice. It is responsible for some of humanity’s greatest grimes against humanity, particularly in the USSR and in Communist China. The Trump administration wants Americans to believe that progressive, social democratic Democrats are in fact communists. They aren’t. They aren’t Marxists. They aren’t all atheists. Your humble author, for example is a social democrat but not an atheist. They believe in democracy and in the civil rights of all people. They—we—don’t want to remake our country into anything remotely like Soviet Russia. Far from it. American social democrats abhor violence and have no intention whatsoever to use it to bring about their—our—goals.  

So, Trump and his bootlickers will probably continue to accuse American social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani of being communists. They aren’t, but the MAGA crowd cares not who whit about factual truth. Trump and his acolytes throw the term communist at social democrats because they know that the word communism is still a scare word for most Americans. We Americans would have every reason to be scared if anyone were seriously trying to turn our country communist, but for all practical purposes no one is. The emerging social democratic wing of the Democratic Party certainly isn’t. I just hope and pray that Trump’s attempt to label social democrats as communists fails as badly as essentially everything else he has tried to do has failed.

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[1] Until the Bolsheviks changed it after they came to power, Russia used the older Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world. In the 20^th century, there was a twelve day difference between the two. Thus the date the west knew as Nov. 7 was known in Russia as October 25. The Soviets celebrated their “Great October Revolution” on Nov. 7. In my imperial Russian history seminar in graduate school, my major professor asked us why we thought the Russians didn’t adopt the more accurate Gregorian calendar. I said it was probably because they thought that calendar, promulgated by a Pope Gregory, was some sort of papist conspiracy. My major professor said: “Yes, that’s precisely why they didn’t do it.”

[2] Stalin was not Russian. He was Georgian. His family name was Dzhugashvili not Stalin. He took the name Stalin to style himself as a man of steel.

[3] By comparison, the United States’ losses in all of World War II totaled less than 500,000, which is, of course horrible enough in its own right but is nothing like what the Soviet people suffered.