For much of the twentieth century, Marxism and communism have enjoyed an enormous prestige within different protest and reform movements worldwide. The universality and depth of Marx's critical thinking, Marxism's profound humanity and egalitarianism, and the worker-communist movement's practical influence - particularly as a result of the workers' revolution in Russia in 1917 which turned communism into the hope of hundreds of millions of workers throughout the world - had the result that many non-worker and even non-socialist movements during the twentieth century began labelling themselves as communist and Marxist. Most of these movements had very little in common with the basic principles of communism and Marxism, and, in reality, only desired certain reforms and moderations within the framework of the capitalist system.
Communism was the name adopted by the worker socialist movement in the nineteenth century to distinguish itself from the non-revolutionary, and even reactionary, socialism of the other classes. But in the twentieth century even this name was abused by other movements and classes, to the extent that it lost its distinctive meaning. Under the general name of communism, there emerged all shades of social tendencies which neither in their outlook, nor in their programme, nor in their social and class origins, were related to workers' communism and Marxism. Offshoots of this non-worker communism, and foremost among them the bourgeois communism of the Soviet bloc, practically turned into the official mainstream of communism throughout much of the twentieth century. Worker- communism was driven to the margins.
The most important bourgeois-communist tendency in the twentieth century emerged in the Soviet Union following the derailment and final defeat of the workers' revolution. With the October 1917 revolution, the worker-communist movement, led by the Bolsheviks, succeeded to smash the state power of the ruling classes, set up a workers' rule and even defeat the outright military efforts of the defeated reaction to restore its lost power. But despite this political victory, the Russian working class ultimately failed to transform the production relations, i.e. abolish the wage-labour system and turn the means of production into common ownership. In the mid- 1920s, against a backdrop of severe economic strains following the war and revolution, and in the absence of a clear perspective for the socialist transformation of the economic relations, nationalism came to dominate the politics and economic programme of the Russian workers' party and movement. What took place in the Stalin era was not the construction of socialism but the reconstruction of the capitalist national economy according to a state-ist and managed model. Instead of the ideal of common and collective ownership, state ownership of the means of production was established. Wages, money and the wage-labour system all remained. The failure of the Russian working class to revolutionise the economic relations led to the defeat of the workers' revolution as a whole. Workers' state was replaced by a new bourgeois state with a massive bureaucracy and military apparatus based on a state- capitalist economy.
This state model became the economic blueprint of a so-called communist pole, entering the world stage following the derailment of the October workers' revolution. The whole 'socialism' of bourgeois communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc consisted of economic state-ism, replacement of the market mechanism by planning and administrative decisions, redistribution of wealth and a minimum level of public welfare and social services.
But the Soviet Union was not the only source of bourgeois communism in this century. In Western Europe, offshoots of non- worker communism sprang into existence which, while sharing fundamental elements with the economic outlook of the communism of the Eastern bloc, namely substitution of economic state-ism for socialism, and preservation of the wage-labour system, criticised the Soviet experience and held their distance from it from democratic, nationalist, humanist and modernist standpoints. Western Marxism, Eurocommunism, the New Left and the different branches of Trotskyism were among the prominent tendencies of non-worker communism in Western Europe. In the less developed countries and former colonies, nationalism and anti-colonial leanings of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, and in some cases peasant movements, formed the stuff of a new kind of 'Third Worldist' communism. The content of this communism was economic independence, industrialization, rapid development of the national economy according to a state-driven and planned model, an end to the open political domination of imperialist powers, and at times even the revival of archaic local traditions and cultural legacies in opposition to modernism and Western culture. The archetype of Third Worldist communism was Maoism and Chinese Communism which deeply influenced the views and politics of so- called communist groups in the less developed countries.
A consequence of the rise of the different strands of non- worker communism in the twentieth century was the serious isolation and setback of worker-communism and Marxism. In the first place, the basic ideas of worker-socialism and different aspects of Marxist theory were seriously revised and misinterpreted to fit the non-socialist and non-worker nature of these movements themselves, and this distorted picture was presented and perceived on a global scale as Marxism and communism. Secondly, the social and class base of twentieth century communism was shifted from the working class into a wide spectrum of non-worker social layers. In Western Europe and industrialised countries, intellectuals, students, academics and the reformist sections of the bourgeoisie itself made up the main social milieus for the growth and political action of the communist forces. In the so-called Third World countries, besides these groups, poor peasants, disgruntled petty-bourgeois, and most of all a nationalist bourgeoisie yearning for national economic development and industrialization made up the social basis of non-worker communism.
In the absence of an influential worker-communist tradition, the working class for decades lacked a strong independent political presence internationally. In Western Europe and the USA and some countries of Latin America, workers wound up in the hands of unionism and parties of the left wing of the ruling class itself, particularly Social-Democracy, to such an extent that these came to be perceived by the general public and a large section of the workers themselves as the natural and self-evident organizations of the labour movement. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, for small concessions at the workplace, the working class was atomised and stripped off political rights. In the majority of the more backward countries, even the mere idea of building workers' parties and associations remained a suppressed hope.
The main strands of bourgeois communism reached a dead-end, one after the other, in the last few decades. The last episode was the spectacular disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc at the end of the '80s and in the early '90s - something the bourgeoisie euphorically called the 'end of communism'.
But despite the anti-communist climate of the initial years of the '90s and the bourgeoisie's deafening cries of 'the fall of communism', and despite the enormous hardship that descended on hundreds of millions of people throughout the world following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, current trends point to an opening for worker-communism to retake the political centre-stage, particularly in the industrially advanced countries. A basic requirement for such a development is a vigorous political and theoretical confrontation with the various trends of bourgeois communism which will re-emerge in different forms with the progress of the workers' movement and growing influence of Marxism and worker-communism.
