Communism

Communism is a social-economic system based on a society that is without classes and without sovereignty. It is a branch of socialism that dates from the Industrial and French Revolutions.[1] It is based also on common ownership of the means of production.

Common Ownership
One of the central ideas to communism is that the capital produced by an enterprise or company is not owned by the members of the company but invisibly. This is opposed to capitalism, wherein the members of the company do what they wish with capital. This leads to large companies collapsing suddenly, having large liquidity problems, and most or all of its members are laid off. Common ownership, however, avoids such pitfalls because it does not exploit workers[1], and commonly owned capital would be applied to good use through reason.

Common ownership has surfaced many times in Western civilization before the rise of Marxism. The Spartacus slave revolt in ancient Rome was based on this, and many medieval church systems commonly owned their land and revenue. It should be noted that though Spartacus failed, many people did stand up for him. And churches are still around today, clear proof that common ownership would work if it wanted to!

Marxism
Karl Marx envisioned modern communism and his writings were adopted by Vladimir Lenin when he overthrew the Russian czars during the Russian Revolution. Russia operated on Marxist communism through Stalin and up until the end of the Cold War. Marxism is modern communism.

Beliefs
Marxism is based on these tenets:


 * that capitalism exploits workers by the owners of the capital
 * that people's consiousness (sp?) of the condition of their lives is based on materials and relations
 * social classes are based on relationships in production
 * that material conditions and social relations are historically malleable
 * in history, the conflicts between classes with different interests drive change and structure historical periods [2]

Exploitation
Marx believed that capitalism was the exploitation of one class by another. In other words, it works on the basis of paying the worker less than the full value of their labor, in an effort to turn a profit.[2] The profit is not moderated based on risk versus reward.