KARL MAX

[myrna garsuta]

Adapting Marx's ideas The Communists elaborated on Marx's ideas, especially adapting them to countries – such as Russia and China – where conditions were different to those in the highly industrialized ones in Europe and the US. For example, Lenin's ideas about the importance of the Communist party – with its rigid hierarchy and extreme centralization of power – were known as 'Marxist-Leninism', which became the state ideology of the Soviet Union. At their worst, under Stalin, such ideas became known as 'Stalinism', which justified tyranny, terror and a complete lack of civil liberties. The Soviet Union became a totalitarian state in which personal freedoms were subordinated to the orders of the party bureaucracy. Similarly, Maoism adapted Marxist ideas to China, a country in which the huge majority of the population were poor peasants and in which industry was very underdeveloped. Instead of waiting for the embryonic industrial working class to make a revolution, Mao organized the peasants into soviets (local communities led by the Communist party) and took power in the countryside. In such cases, the left-wing liberality of Marxism soon became subordinate to the right-wing conservatism of practical politics.