A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term "communist party" was popularized by the title of The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As a vanguard party, the communist party guides the political education and development of the working class (proletariat). As a ruling party, the communist party exercises power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Vladimir Lenin developed the idea of the communist party as the revolutionary vanguard, when the socialist movement in Imperial Russia was divided into ideologically opposed factions, the Bolshevik faction and the Menshevik faction. To be politically effective, Lenin proposed a small vanguard party managed with democratic centralism which allowed the centralized command of a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries. Once a policy was agreed upon, realizing political goals required every Bolshevik's total commitment to the agreed-upon policy.
The hammer and sickle is a communist symbol representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers. It was first adopted during the Russian Revolution at the end of World War I, the hammer representing workers and the sickle representing the peasants.
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English feminist and socialist, activist and writer. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, she worked to organise working-class women in London's East End. This, together with her refusal in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, caused her to break with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Pankhurst welcomed the Russian Revolution and consulted in Moscow with Lenin. But as an advocate of workers' control, she rejected the Leninist party line and criticised the Bolshevik regime.
Farrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist, trade unionist, politician, and historian.
The Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist) was a small Trotskyist group in the US which existed in various forms between 1968 and the mid 1990s.
The Communist Party of Indonesia was a communist party in the Dutch East Indies and later Indonesia. It was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world before its violent disbandment in 1965. The party had two million members in the 1955 elections, with 16 percent of the national vote and almost 30 percent of the vote in East Java. At the time, it was the largest communist party in the world after the Chinese and Soviet communist parties.
Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
James W. “Jim” Ford was an activist, a politician, and the vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in the years 1932, 1936, and 1940. Ford was born in Alabama and later worked as a party organizer for the CPUSA in New York City. He was also the first African American to run on a U.S. presidential ticket (1932) in the 20th century.
Dyer Daniel Lum was an American labor activist, economist and political journalist. He was a leading figure in the American anarchist movement of the 1880s and early 1890s, working within the organized labor movement and together with individualist theorists.
Socialist-style emblems usually follow a unique style consisting of communist symbolism. Although commonly referred to as coats of arms, most are not actually traditional heraldic achievements. Many communist governments purposely diverged from heraldic tradition in order to distance themselves from the monarchies that they usually replaced, with coats of arms being seen as symbols of the monarchs.
Left-wing populism, also called social populism, is a political ideology that combines left-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric often includes elements of anti-elitism, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking for the "common people". Recurring themes for left-wing populists include economic democracy, social justice, and skepticism of globalization. Socialist theory plays a lesser role than in traditional left-wing ideologies.
Workers World is the official newspaper of the Workers' World Party (WWP), a communist party in the United States. Sam Marcy led a faction out of the Socialist Workers Party and founded WWP in 1959; the first issue of Workers World was published in New York City in March of that year.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist), abbreviated CPGB-ML, is an anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist communist party in the United Kingdom, active in England, Scotland, and Wales. The CPGB-ML was founded by Harpal Brar after a split from the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) on 3 July 2004. The CPGB-ML publishes the bimonthly newspaper Proletarian, and the Marxist–Leninist journal Lalkar is also closely allied with the party. The party chair is Ella Rule.
Sam Ballan, known by his pen name Sam Marcy, was an American lawyer, writer, historian, and Marxist-Leninist activist of the post-World War II era. He co-founded the Workers World Party in 1959 and served as its chairperson until his death.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is a Marxist–Leninist communist party in the United States founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy. WWP members are sometimes called Marcyites. Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them their support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, their view of People's Republic of China as a workers' state, and their defense of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, some of which the SWP opposed.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist political party in the United States. PSL formed in 2004, when its members split from the Workers World Party.
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism. Depending on the type of government, the term socialism can be used to indicate an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism and may be the goal of the revolution, especially in Marxist–Leninist views. The idea that a proletarian revolution is needed is a cornerstone of Marxism; Marxists believe that the workers of the world must unite and free themselves from capitalist oppression to create a world run by and for the working class. Thus, in the Marxist view, proletarian revolutions need to happen in countries all over the world.
Andrew Dean Stapp was an American activist known for forming the American Servicemen's Union, an unofficial union for the U.S. military, in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Vincent Copeland was an American actor, labor official, writer, and political activist. A communist, Copeland was an actor during the 1930s but soon turned to political activism. Turning to industrial labor, Copeland was a welder, grievance officer, and editor of his unions' newspaper at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, New York. He "opposed the company's practice of denying black furnace workers better jobs by hiring outsiders to fill them" and 16,000 workers walked off the job in a wildcat strike. Copeland, however, was not rehired.
