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World communism, also known as global communism or international communism, is a form of communism placing emphasis on an international scope rather than being individual communist states. The long-term goal of world communism is an unlimited worldwide communist society that is classless, moneyless, stateless, and nonviolent, which may be achieved through an intermediate-term goal of either a voluntary association of as a global alliance, or a world government as a single worldwide state.
A series of internationals have proposed world communism as a primary goal, including the First International, the Second International, the Third International (the Communist International or Comintern), the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, Maoist Internationalist Movement, the World Socialist Movement, and variant offshoots. The methods and political theories of each International remain distinct in their pursuit of the global communist society.
During the early years of the Stalin era (1927–1953), the theory of socialism in one country flew in the face of the generally accepted practice of Marxism at the time, and became part of the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. According to Joseph Stalin and his supporters it was naïve to think the world revolution was imminent in the 1920s–1930s after the USSR's failure to conquer Poland in 1919 and the defeat of the People's State of Bavaria. With the rise in socialist states post-WWII various splits occurred, namely the Tito-Stalin split, the Mao-Khrushchev split, and the Sino-Albanian split, further exacerbating the prospect of a soon-to-be worldwide revolution, alongside nationalistic tendencies in countries such as Romania and Juche fomenting a non-aligned front.
The end of the Cold War, with the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is often regarded as the fall of communism. Nevertheless, the international communist tendencies remain among Maoism, Trotskyism, Left communism, and some present-day Russian communists among others seeking to further refine and revise the theory of dialectical materialism.
Theorists have differed on whether world communism may be achieved peacefully despite evidently ongoing class conflict. Those who believe the capitalist class would not put down their property rights to become workers again believe the transition to world communism must be more contentious. World communism as the utopian final goal of the class conflict can only be achieved by world revolution as "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" in the words of noted one time socialist, Martin Luther King Jr. As such, World communism is ultimately incompatible with the permanent existence of the nation state formation as a means of organizing people and property. To be a socialist is to believe that people are people everywhere, even within and they must unite to end their own exploitation by the would be elitists of capitalism. Whether the people unite in a supranational unions of sovereign states or a world government to progress through the socialist phase of human development is guided by the desire to end this capitalist exploitation of humankind.
This transitional period of Socialism is considered to then continue to develop the productive forces and alleviate drudgery until either the state becomes irrelevant to organizing human activity and the people agree to the abolition of the state, or the now useless state undergoes what Marx and Engels call the withering away of the state. When governance no longer requires state or state power no one would desire it nor wield it. In other words, the people of a utopian communist society would be self-governance via direct democracy so direct that the state would not even exist.
Abolition of the state is not in itself a distinctively Marxist doctrine. It was sometime it was happened by any of the country held by various socialist and anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century as well as some present-day anarchists (Libertarianism are anti-statism typically in a subtly different sense, in that they support small government although not absence of government or state). The crux here is a text of the Friedrich Engels, from his Anti-Dühring. It is often cited as "The state is not 'abolished,' it withers away".. The passage was not in the first edition of 1878.
This is from the pioneer work of historical materialism, a formulation of Marx's idea of a materialist conception of history. The withering away of the state is a graphic formulation, that has passed into cliché. The translation (Engels was writing in German) is also given as: "The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out".. The passage was not in the first edition of 1878.
Reference to the whole passage shows that this happens only after the proletariat has seized the means of production. The schematic is therefore revolution, transitional period, ultimate period. Although the ultimate period sounds like a utopia, Marx and Engels did not consider themselves utopian socialists, but rather scientific socialists. They considered violence necessary for resistance of wage slavery.
Whereas for Engels the transitional period was reduced to a single act, for Lenin thirty to forty years later it had become extended and "obviously lengthy". In the same place, he argues strongly that Marx's conception of communist society is not utopian, but takes into account the heritage of what came before.
This gives at least roughly the position on world communism as the Comintern was set up in 1919: world revolution is necessary for the setting up of world communism, but not as an immediate or clearly sufficient event.
In a 1936 interview with journalist Roy W. Howard, Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and stated that "We never had such plans and intentions" and that "The export of revolution is nonsense".
Nevertheless, Stalin also supported revolutionary socialism around the world to continue to work toward world communism, however distant it might be. Thus it backed the 26th of July Movement in the Cuban Revolution, the in the Vietnam War and the MPLA in the Angolan Civil War. The domino theory of the Cold War was driven by this intent as anti-communism feared that isolationism by capitalist countries would lead to the collapse of their self-defense.
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