Is Bolshevik and Menshevik still a thing in modern Communist Parties or are they obsolete terms nowadays?
It looks like the Mensheviks may be no more. According to the Menshevik wiki page, “Menshevism was finally made illegal after the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. A number of prominent Mensheviks emigrated thereafter. Martov went to Germany, where he established the paper Socialist Messenger. He died in 1923.” I think the Bolsheviks just became “Communists”.
Are there any modern Communist Parties, at all?
Certainly. We have one in the U.S.. And, of course, several countries, including China and Cuba, are still run by organizations which title themselves Communist Parties – though one might argue whether they are still true to the original ideals of Communism, versus just being authoritarian governments.
The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were specific political organizations consisting of specific people. The weren’t philosophies.
They stem from the Russian communist party conference of 1903. The two wings had different ideas, but Lenin’s faction won a majority. He immediately named his side Bolsheviks – meaning ‘majority’ – and the Mensheviks got their name from the Russian word for “minority.” The names stuck, even though the two factions varied as majority and minority over the years.
The Mensheviks eventually lost out to Lenin and the faction was banned.
Note that the terms only existed in Russia. Communists outside of Russia didn’t have that differentiation.
Can you name some modern democratic countries that do not have a communist party?
If there is political freedom, that means they are not banned. Which is not the same as saying they are not going to splinter, merge, or necessarily get even 1% of the votes.
Sure. In fact it is only in countries calling themselves Communist that there is only one of them.
In larger Western countries there are multiple ones, hating each others’ guts. For example in Germany on the federal ballot there is the DKP (that was loyal to the leadership of the CPSU as long as that still existed) and the MLPD (which argues that the Soviet Union deviated from the true path with Khrushchev). In my youth there was a multiplicity of Communist groups in Germany - Brezhnevites, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Leninists, Maoists, Titoists, Hoxhaists, also the ‘undogmatic’ i.e. unaffiliated groups.
Communists only became organised and labelled as Communists after the Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Communist International. Communist parties outside Russia were only founded from 1919/20 onwards. Before that, they were largely within the Social Democratic Party in their country, though these were starting to split, chiefly over attitudes to WW1.
In Canada, we have the Communist Party of Canada:
And we have the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada:
They don’t like each other much. In any event, they rarely get more than 10,000 votes combined, in a federal election.