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"Communist" redirects here. For the journal of the former Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, see Kommunist.

Communism (from Latin communis common, universal) is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterised by the absence of classes, money,[1][2] and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.[3] The movement to develop communism, in its MarxistLeninist interpretations, significantly influenced the history of the 20th century, which saw intense rivalry between the Communist states in the Eastern bloc and the most developed capitalist states of the Western world.[4]

Communism was first developed into a scientific theory by German philosopher and social scientist Karl Marx,[5] and the collective understanding of this scientific approach is today commonly referred to as Marxism. In the Marxist understanding, communism is the endpoint of human social evolution which will inevitably come into fruition through economic and social advances in socialism. Socialism, being the new order established after the demise of capitalism, is herein characterized by the working class having state power and undertaking the process of abolishing capitalist property and economic relations and establishing social (i.e. public, collective) ownership and management of society's political, economic, and cultural institutions. In accordance with the socialized processes of production, appropriation also becomes socialized as goods and services become consumed on a social basis with free access for the individual. Communism becomes fully realized when the distinction between classes is no longer possible and therefore the state, which has been used as an instrument of class dictatorship, no longer exists.[6][7] In the communist economy, production and consumption are fully socialized, and the processes for which are advanced into maximized automation, efficiency, and recycling. This results in the end of individual money calculation, hence relationships between individuals being based on free association and free access to all goods and services according to need.[8]

Leninism refers to the organizational principle of the vanguard party as a revolutionary strategy both to achieve revolution and to secure political power after the revolution in the interests of the working class. Marxism-Leninism is a combination of Marx's theory of socialism with Lenin's theoretical contributions, namely the understanding of imperialism and the development of monopoly capitalism as predicted by Marx, as well as organizational principles applied within the context of the 20th century communist movement. This body of thought formed the basis for all existing Communist movements in the 20th century and, as such, in the Western world, the term "Communism" came to refer to social movements and political regimes associated with the Marxist-Leninist Communist International (or "Comintern"). However, the distinction should be made that the systems that these movements presided over were in fact not fully developed into communism, and the degree to which they had achieved socialism in itself is debated.[9]

Council communists, Orthodox Marxists and non-Marxist libertarian communists and anarcho-communists oppose the ideas of a vanguard party. Anarcho-communists advocate for the establishment of full communism immediately following the abolition of capitalism. There is a very wide range of theories amongst those particular communists in regards to how to build the types of institutions that would replace the various economic engines (such as food distribution, education, and hospitals) as they exist under capitalist systemsor even whether to do so at all.[citation needed]

In the modern lexicon of what many Western sociologists and political commentators refer to as the "political mainstream", communism is often used as a broad term to refer to the policies of Communist states, i.e., the ones governed by Communist parties, in general, regardless of the diversity of economic models over which they may preside. Examples of this include the policies of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where the economic system incorporates "doi moi" and the People's Republic of China (PRC) where the economic system is described as a "socialist market economy".

Communism comes from the Latin word communis, which means "shared" or "belong to all".[10][11]

In the schema of historical materialism and dialectical materialism (the application of Hegelian dialectic to historical materialism), communism is the idea of a free society with no division or alienation, where the people are free from oppression and scarcity. A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions. In Marxist theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the means of ownership from privatism to collective ownership.[12]

In modern usage, the word "communism" is still often used to refer to the policies of past and present self-declared socialist governments typically comprising one-party states wherein the country's vanguard party is governing the state exclusively, operating centrally planned economies and a state ownership of the means of production, with the state, in turn, being legally obliged to represent the interests of the working class. A significant sector of the modern communist movement alleges that these states never made an attempt to transition to a communist society, while others even argue that they never achieved a legitimate socialism, often arguing that they established instead state capitalism. Most of these governments claimed to base their ideology on Marxism-Leninism (though this, too, may be erroneous[citation needed]), but they did not call the system they had set up "communism", nor did they even necessarily claim at all times that the ideology was the sole driving force behind their policies: Mao Zedong, for example, pursued New Democracy, and Vladimir Lenin in the Russian Civil War enacted war communism; later, the Vietnamese enacted doi moi, and the Chinese switched to socialism with Chinese characteristics. The governments labeled by other governments as "communist" generally claimed that they had set up a transitional socialist system. This system is sometimes referred to as state socialism or by other similar names.

"Higher-phase communism" is a term sometimes used to refer to the stage in history after socialism (or lower-phase communism), although just as many communists use simply the term "communism" to refer to that stage. The classless, stateless society that characterizes this communism is one in which decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made by a free association of equal individuals. In such a higher-phase communism the interests of every member of society is given equal weight in the practical decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

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