ABSTRACT
Until the ‘anti-communist' revolutions of 1989–91, approximately one third of the world's population lived in systems claiming to be building communism; such systems can be called communist. Even as of late 2002, almost 1.4 billion people lived in five still putatively communist systems, although most of these five – the People's Republic of China (PRC, or China), Cuba, Laos, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Vietnam – are likely to become ‘post-communist' in the next few years. Indeed, many commentators now question China's claim still to be communist, since its economic and social systems are increasingly capitalist. The first part of this essay is concerned with communist states as they were up until 1989 (with occasional references to the remaining communist states), while the second part focuses on the so-called ‘post-communist' states. Despite the continued existence of a small number of communist states, the past tense will be used for the analysis of actual communist systems, except where reference is explicitly to one or more of the remaining five; for the most part, the present tense is used for the more abstract, general parts of the discussion of communist systems.
