operation, without classes or any social divisions requiring the exercise of
authority. Most post-Marxist writers, and especially the leaders of the October
Revolution of 1917 in Russia, have believed that there had to be an inter-
mediary phase between the overthrow ofcapitalismand the full realization of
communism. This phase is variously described, often associalism, but also as
the period in which it will be necessary to exercise thedictatorship of the
proletariator where the communist party will have to act as thevanguard of
the proletariat. This idea was strengthened by theBolsheviksin 1917 largely
because they could not pretend that their revolution, unlike the earlier one of
that year, was a popular revolution at all. Because it was so clearly acoup
d’e ́tator putsch, elements in Marxism which seemed to legitimize the rule of
the mass by the enlightened few were highlighted. This intermediate phase is,
roughly speaking, where the leaders of the Soviet Union, beforeGorbachev,
and its then Eastern European allies would have located themselves.
When used as a description of the former societies of the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe, or, adding yet another complexity, the continuing ones of
China and its Asian communist allies, the term indicates a set of political
practices that may not, necessarily, have very much to do with the Marxist
theory of communism. Communism in this second sense is a system where
there is little or no private ownership of major property, this being replaced
with state-owned and -run enterprises, and where the communist party rules,
non-democratically, both in its own right and through its control,de facto, of
the official state administration. Values of equality and social co-operation are
stressed, as opposed to individual self-seeking or betterment. The economy
will be entirely a planned one, with no serious element of competition,
although, especially in agriculture, this is often relaxed in minor ways. A
characteristic feature of communism as we have seen it develop is an inequality
based on position in the ruling party, but a genuine equality, and a very
thorough social welfare system, throughout the mass of the population.
Other aspects of a communist state are incidentals, more or less present in
different societies. Thus the communist attitude to religion, something
scorned by Marxist theory, has varied from hostility in the Soviet Union to
a major role forRoman Catholicismin Poland, and the extent ofindustrial
democracyvaried from Yugoslavia’s famous experiments to a minimum in
East Germany. From the mid-1950s there was an increasingly bitter conflict
between the Eastern European and the Chinese brands of communism, first
with the development ofMao Zedong’scommunist views. The reason for
this, apart from purely nationalistic territorial conflicts, was that the Chinese
communists were, originally, much less prepared to use the techniques, and the
associated professional hierarchies, of modern Western industrial production.
So while, to take one example, the Soviet Union continued to make steel in
huge industrial plants, giving great authority to professional engineers and
Communism