Communist revolution

A political upheaval that seeks to overthrow capitalist rule and establish communist social ownership and political power. Revolutions identified as communist have produced sharply different institutions and outcomes.

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Vanguardism: A political strategy in which a disciplined revolutionary party claims to lead working-class political action. Leninist revolutions relied on a party claiming to organize and direct revolutionary power.
Chinese Communist Revolution: The decades-long struggle that ended with the Communist Party establishing the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It established communist rule after a peasant-based revolution and civil war.
Marxism: A political and social theory based on the analysis of class struggle, capitalism, and historical change developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It supplied the central analysis of capitalism and class emancipation behind communist revolution.
Social democracy: A political tradition that pursues social equality and worker protections through democratic institutions and reform. It seeks major social change without making violent overthrow of capitalist rule its defining route.
Communist state: A state governed by a communist party that claims to pursue a transition toward communism. Revolutionary victories have generally established party-states rather than stateless communist societies.
Proletarian revolution: A revolution in which workers overthrow the capitalist class and establish political rule in the workers’ name. Communist revolution is commonly framed as a specific route to proletarian rule.
Cuban Revolution: The armed struggle that toppled Fulgencio Batista’s government in 1959 and led to a socialist state in Cuba. Its leaders later aligned the revolution with Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union.
Communist Manifesto: An 1848 political pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that presents a program for communist transformation. Its call for workers to overthrow bourgeois rule became a foundational revolutionary text.
Anarchist revolution: A revolutionary project to abolish state and hierarchical authority in favor of voluntary self-governing communities. Anarchists reject the centralized state power many communist revolutions use as a transition.
Collectivization: The consolidation of individual farms or enterprises into collectively controlled units, often directed by the state. Post-revolutionary governments used it to transform agriculture and property relations.