Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and reaching global dimensions during the Cold War. Anti-communists argue that the repression in the early years of Bolshevik rule, while not as extreme as that during Joseph Stalin's rule, was still severe by reasonable standards, citing examples such as Felix Dzerzhinsky's secret police, which eliminated numerous political opponents by extrajudicial executions, and the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion and Tambov rebellion. Some anti-communists refer to both Communism and fascism as totalitarianism, seeing similarity between the actions of communist and fascist governments. Historian Robert Conquest has argued that Communism was responsible for tens of millions of deaths during the 20th century.
Opponents argue that Communist parties that have come to power have tended to be rigidly intolerant of political opposition. These opponents claim that most Communist countries have shown no signs of advancing from Marx's socialist stage of economy to an ideal communist stage. Rather, Communist governments have been accused of creating a new ruling class (a Nomenklatura), with powers and privileges greater than those previously enjoyed by the upper classes in the non-communist regimes.
François-Noël Babeuf (23 November 1760 - 27 May 1797), known as Gracchus Babeuf (in tribute to the Roman tribunes of the people and reformers, the Gracchi brothers, and used alongside his self-designation as Tribune), was a French political agitator and journalist of the Revolutionary period. In spite of the efforts of his Jacobin friends to save him, Babeuf was arrested, tried, and convicted for his role in the Conspiracy of the Equals. Although the words "anarchist"and "communist" did not exist in Babeuf's lifetime, they have all been used to describe his ideas, by later scholars. The word "communism" was coined by Goodwyn Barmby in a conversation with those he described as the "disciples of Babeuf".
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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Soviet newsstands do not sell foreign anti-Communist papers, and it is not even possible to buy every issue of the Communist periodicals. Even informative periodicals such as America are in very short supply. They are on sale only in a very small number of kiosks, and are immediately snapped up by eager buyers, generally with a "makeweight" of non-saleable printed matter.
Any person wishing to emigrate from the Soviet Union must have a formal invitation from a close relative. For many people this is an insoluble problem, e.g. for 300,000 Germans who wish to travel to the German Federal Republic (the emigration quota for Germans is 5,000 a year, which means that one's plans would have to cover a sixty-year period!). This is an enormous tragedy. The position of persons who wish to be reunited with relatives in non-Socialist countries is particularly tragic. They have no one to plead their case, and on such occasions the arbitrary behavior of the authorities knows no bounds.
Freedom to travel, freedom to choose where one wishes to work and live, these are still violated in the case of millions of kolkhoz workers, and in the case of hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars, who thirty years ago were cruelly and brutally deported from the Crimea and who to this day have been denied the right to return to the land of their fathers.
