Communism is a broad political, social, and economic tradition whose classical Marxist conception aims ultimately at a classless society in which the means of production are held in common and the political state, understood as an instrument of class domination, eventually becomes unnecessary and withers away. The word is used in several different senses, however.
It can refer to the ultimate social condition described in Marxist theory, to revolutionary communist movements, to communist parties, or to states governed by parties identifying themselves as communist. These meanings must not be conflated. In everyday political language, communist states of the twentieth century are often called communist countries, but classical Marxist theory distinguishes socialism as a transitional phase from fully developed communism. The exact relationship between socialism and communism varies across traditions, but the distinction is important because Marxist communism describes an eventual classless and stateless order rather than simply government ownership of industry.
The modern political meaning of communism developed during the nineteenth century and became particularly associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 presented a revolutionary analysis of capitalism and class struggle and argued that the proletariat could become the political agent of transforming capitalist society. Earlier communal and utopian traditions also used ideas of common property, but modern Marxist communism connected communal ownership to a theory of capitalist development and class struggle.
The Industrial Revolution created the economic and social conditions in which Marx and Engels developed their analysis, including large scale industrial production, wage labour, urbanisation, and increasingly organised working classes. The term therefore acquired a specific historical meaning distinct from the broader idea that a community might share property or resources.
In the classical Marxist conception, communism is associated with common ownership, abolition of class divisions, and the disappearance of political domination based on class. Marx did not provide a detailed institutional blueprint for fully developed communist society, and his writings contain relatively few precise descriptions of its final administrative structure. The basic principle is that productive resources cease to function as private capital owned by a separate capitalist class.
Once class divisions have disappeared, the coercive political state would no longer perform the same role it performs in a class society. The famous formulation associated with the higher phase of communist society concerns distribution according to needs rather than distribution through wages or private accumulation. This represents an ideal of social cooperation in which material production is sufficiently developed to permit a fundamentally different relationship between individual needs and collective resources.
Communist theory is therefore different from the simple nationalisation of private companies. A state can own factories while retaining wage labour, hierarchical administration, unequal political power, and a separate state apparatus. Classical communism instead concerns the abolition of capitalist class relations themselves. Marxist theorists have consequently distinguished between public ownership by a state and common ownership by society.
Communist economies attempted in different historical periods to approximate aspects of social ownership through nationalisation, central planning, collectivisation, and state controlled investment, but these institutions did not constitute the fully stateless and classless society described in classical theory. The historical experience of communist states must therefore be studied separately from the theoretical definition of communism, even though those states claimed to be building socialism as a transition toward communism.
Communist movements have differed greatly in strategy and political organisation. Marxist communists generally emphasised the revolutionary transformation of capitalist class relations, while Lenin developed the theory of a disciplined vanguard party capable of organising revolutionary political power. Later communist traditions developed different strategies for countries with different economic and social structures.
Maoism emphasised peasant mobilisation and protracted revolutionary warfare, Trotskyism emphasised international revolution and permanent revolution, and other communist traditions emphasised workers councils, mass strikes, parliamentary participation, national liberation, or other approaches. Consequently, communist politics cannot be reduced to one universal method of revolution. The common historical denominator is the aspiration to overcome capitalist class society through collective ownership and revolutionary or transformative political action.
The twentieth century produced communist governments in numerous countries, most prominently the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and states in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These governments generally operated through communist parties that claimed to represent the working class and often established centralised political systems, state ownership, planned economies, and restrictions on political opposition. Their institutions varied substantially and changed over time.
Some undertook collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, others combined planning with markets, and some introduced extensive reforms that altered the role of state ownership. The historical record therefore cannot be represented by one uniform communist model. Political repression, economic achievements, industrialisation, social transformation, military mobilisation, welfare provision, famines, economic crises, and institutional changes all occurred in different communist states and periods, requiring case specific analysis.
Communism is often confused with socialism because the two terms overlap historically and conceptually. Socialism is the broader category encompassing many theories of collective ownership and economic transformation, while Marxist communism describes a more specific ultimate objective involving the abolition of class divisions and, ultimately, the coercive state. Some socialist traditions reject communism entirely, some democratic socialists favour socialism without a communist end state, and some communist traditions describe socialism as a transitional stage. Communism is also distinct from anarchism, although anarchist communists and Marxist communists can share opposition to capitalist private property and the coercive state. Their disagreements concern authority, organisation, revolutionary strategy, and the institutional structure of post revolutionary society.
The meaning of communism consequently depends heavily on context. In political theory, it can denote a classless and stateless social ideal. In historical writing, it can refer to communist movements and parties. In comparative politics, it can describe states ruled by communist parties, although those states generally described themselves as socialist while pursuing communism as a long term objective.
In ordinary political debate, the word is sometimes used loosely for any extensive government intervention in the economy, but that usage obscures important distinctions between communism, socialism, social democracy, public ownership, and welfare capitalism. Accurate analysis therefore requires identifying whether the subject is Marx's theoretical conception, a particular communist movement, a specific communist party, or the institutional system of a particular historical state.
