Communism 101

INTRODUCTION

Communism and Socialism were major political movements in the 20th Century, and yet now they have largely retreated into history. What caused them to emerge, and what made them disappear?

TASK

Note to Teacher: This is a two period task. If you have run short of time to complete this task, consider the Alternative Task, provided at the very bottom of this page.

Early in the 20th Century, the concepts of Communism and Socialism became widely accepted as liberating alternatives to Things As They Were. You need to find out what Things As They Were were, and how Karl Marx’s economic theories on control of the means of production became such devastating (and, in some cases, genuinely liberating) forces in global human destiny.

You’ll need to be able to compare and contrast Communism/Socialism with such things as Capitalism and Monarchism, and show what each had to offer citizens of the world in the first half of the 20th Century. This will assist you in determining what made Communism/Socialism so popular. The next objective will be to consider why this form of equality fell out of favour in the second half of the 20th Century in almost every place it had been able to get a foothold, and yet why it still persists (in a modified form) in a few places today.

So, in a way, it’s like a debate, in that you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each of the systems, and how they all relate to Communism/Socialism. So, even if your group isn’t specifically doing one of the forms of Communism/Socialism, you’ll still need to understand, say, Capitalism, in terms of how it is an alternative to Communism/Socialism… and vice versa.

Your presentation will take the form of a panel discussion between people/groups aligned with each of the major political systems of the 20th Century:

  • Soviet Communism;
  • Maoist Communism;
  • National Socialist Fascism;
  • Capitalism;
  • Monarchism.

PROCESS – SMALL GROUP

  1. Investigate the various forms of Communism/Socialism and their alternatives
  2. Assign one member of your team to act as a representative of each political system
  3. In a panel presentation, explore the factors that led to the changes in success and acceptance of the political system (e.g. the rise and fall of Soviet Communism, the rise of capitalism under post-Maoist Communism, etc)
  4. You can use your creativity in setting up the context of this panel – for example, you may choose a “Before The Game” footy show style approach, in which “coaches” are grilled by knowledgeable commentators on their “team’s” performance in the season so far…

PROCESS – WHOLE CLASS

  1. Your teacher will divide your class into five small groups of between three and five students each.
  2. Your group will be assigned a political system from the list given at the end of the Task section above.
  3. Assign teamwork roles within your group (see team roles listed below).
  4. As a whole team, gain an overview of the political system (using the resources list below) and identify key areas to investigate further – you will most likely do this as homework.
  5. As a whole team, discuss your research, and divide the key areas up amongst your team for further research.
  6. Individually, or in pairs, investigate those key areas – your aim is to be able, in the round-table panel debate, to support the contention that your political system is the best of the five on offer.
  7. Therefore, consider how your political system compares and contrasts with the alternatives, and develop arguments for your system, defences of your system, and arguments against the other systems.
  8. In the round-table panel presentation, your teacher will use focus questions to assist you to strive to support the contention that your political system is the best option, while the other groups strive to do the same for their political systems.

Sample transcript of a round-table panel discussion:

TEACHER: So, Soviet Communists, one of your key approaches to social equality is in strategies such as Collectivisation, where the state owns the farms, the factories… how is that working out for you?
SOVIET COMMUNISTS:  Well, comrade, we are seeing huge increases in the output of farms now that we have implemented our Five Year Plan, and a well-fed worker is a happy worker…
TEACHER: Capitalists, what do you have to say about that?
CAPITALISTS: More like a starved-to-death worker is a silent worker… You have office workers ploughing fields, you’ve put all the actual farmers into gulags or you’ve killed them because they refused to surrender their farms, and now your workers have to lie about production figures so that they don’t get shot themselves! The only way, the only way to drive down prices and increase productivity is to use the Free Market system of competition. Stealing farms and banning money won’t work in the long term, because you can’t make an iPad out of wheat. If you want to have a reasonable standard of living for your citizens, you need to be able to trade with other nations for things like iPads, and, you know, we can grow our own wheat, we don’t need yours…
SOVIET COMMUNISTS: Maybe we could take out a sub-prime loan and buy all the iPads we like? How is your Global Financial Crisis going, by the way? We may have “banned” money, but at least we are not pretending that we have money that doesn’t exist…

TEAMWORK ROLES

An effective team will have clearly assigned roles for each member. Here is a typical list of possible roles. Note that some roles may be performed by the same person (e.g. Discussion Leader and Speaker are usually a sensible overlap, but Recorder and Speaker also overlap effectively).

Essential roles are denoted by an asterisk.

  • Discussion leader*
    Keeps the discussion on task, monitors time, decides when to move on to new ideas when discussion becomes bogged down.
  • Recorder*
    Takes down notes of whole group discussion in point form, ordering and structuring the outcomes of discussions.
  • Speaker*
    Presents the group’s findings to the larger group, working from the team’s notes but also bringing in any ‘flavour’ of discussion not necessarily captured in the notes.
  • Gopher
    Runs and gets things.
  • Actualiser
    Known for their artistic and creative flexibility, the Actualiser constructs things, like posters and bodycopy.
  • Encourager
    Provides constructive feedback to the group on their progress, comes up with team name, logo, etc.
  • Googler
    In charge of pursuing online resources to add to group discussion.

RESOURCES

PLEASE NOTE: These links are to websites beyond the control of GWSC. They were checked on 26th November 2013, but their content and nature could be changed by their owners at any time. A link that previously went to an article on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, for example, was redirected by somebody out there to an article on “fur”. Please take this into consideration when using these links.

Soviet Communism

Key words

Marxism; Leninism; Stalinism; Totalitarianism; Collectivisation; Five Year Plan; Bolshevik; the Personality Cult; double-speak;  Expansionism; Russo-Japanese War; Tsar Nicholas II; Romanov; gulag; Soviet; glasnost; perestroika; Iron Curtain; Berlin Wall; Die Wende.

Clickview videos

  • The Russian Revolution – From the last Tsar to Lenin (22 mins)
    Presents the origins of the Soviet Communist movement from the beginning of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to the death of Lenin (Note: includes scenes of actual and simulated death/killing)
  • Life under Stalin – a totalitarian regime (20 mins)
    Following the struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky, the victorious Stalin reformed Russia with scant regard for the basic human rights of his people.

YouTube video

SlideShows

Dewey Classification Numbers (Library)

947.084; 335.4; 330.947; 943.155

Useful links

National Socialist Fascism (Nazism)

Key words

Nazi; Hitler; Goebbels; Holocaust; Munich Putsch; anti-Semitism; heimat; Anschluss; Mussolini; blitzkrieg; Great Depression; Weimar Republic; kristallnacht; pogroms.

Clickview videos

  • Life under Hitler – a totalitarian regime (23 mins)
    In Germany between 1933 and 1945, every aspect of life was influenced or affected in some way by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. In some cases, this worked for the betterment of the average German – ordering economic effort, stimulating industry, creating employment, improving standards of living, and re-igniting a sense of pride in the nation. In other cases totalitarian control directed the nation down paths which had an opposite effect.
  • The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler (excerpt – 20 mins)
    This BBC documentary seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich?

Dewey Classification Numbers (Library)

943.085; 943.086; 940.5318; 335.609.

Useful links

Maoist Communism

Key words

Cultural Revolution; Little Red Book; Mao Suit; Mao Zedong; Deng Xiaopeng; Liu Shaoqi; Gang of Four; Maoism; Chiang Kai-shek; Korean War; Great Leap Forward; Great Chinese Famine; feudalism; Autumn Harvest Uprising; the Long March; collectivisation; cult of personality; Tiananmen Square; Red Guard.

YouTube video

  • The Great Leap Forward (6 mins)
    Mao’s fifteen year plan to bring China into line with developed nations was a disaster that killed over 30 million people from starvation.

Dewey Classification Numbers (Library)

951; 951.05

Useful links

Capitalism

Keywords

Wall Street; consumerism; supply and demand; standard of living; credit; venture capitalism; developers; productivity; employment; recession; depression; Great Depression; economic collapse; Global Financial Crisis (GFC); sub prime; run on the banks; investment; research and development (R&D); return on investment (ROI); incentivisation; advertising; stock market; means of production.

YouTube videos

  • Bill Gates and Creative Capitalism
    Onetime richest man in the world Bill Gates tries to put forward a case that capitalism can be not only caring, but philanthropic.
  • The American Dream today
    The American Dream traditionally means that anyone can become anything, so long as they are prepared to work hard enough to achieve it, and they are ruthlessly selfish. In today’s economic climate, it is claimed, this Dream has now changed to something less material.

Dewey Classification Numbers (Library)

330.122; 338.5

Useful links

Monarchism

Key words

Royalty; heredity; constitutional monarchy; divine right of kings; God King Emperor; cargo cult; Royal Family; crown jewels; empire; commonwealth; throne; castle; palace; usurper; abdicate; republic.

YouTube videos

Dewey Classification Number (Library)

941

Useful links

ALTERNATIVE TASK

The Task above will require at least two periods. If your class runs out of time to fit this task in, your teacher may choose this alternative task instead.

Animal Farm is based upon Orwell’s observations of Soviet Communism, and the way that Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin used “double-speak” and propaganda, as well as simple brutality, to alter the reality of the people enough that they were prepared to go along with programs which were clearly both insane and inherently doomed.

Using the resources listed under Soviet Communism, the whole class can view either or both of the two Clickview videos, The Russian Revolution and Life under Stalin. Note that both videos would take a full period to view.

Following a guided discussion of these videos and the ideas that they raise, students can work in small groups of two or three to investigate the key words (through Google or Wikipedia), and to examine and consider the linked websites under Useful links. If time does not permit, this could be completed as homework.

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