A social and political ideology advocating that authority and property be vested in the community, each member working for the common benefit according to capacity and receiving according to needs.

The ideal of communism has been embraced by many thinkers, including Plato, the early Christians and the 16th-century humanist Thomas More, who saw it as expressing man’s social nature to the highest degree. It became the basis of a revolutionary movement through the work of Karl Marx, who saw communism as the final outcome of the proletarian revolution that would overthrow capitalism. According to the theories of Marx, a communist society will emerge after the transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the preparatory stage of socialism. In a fully communist society the state will, according to Marx, ‘wither away’ and all distinctions between social classes will disappear. Marx’s theories were influential in 19th-century Social Democrat parties, and were the moving force behind Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the establishment of the political system in the Soviet Union.

In the hands of Lenin and his successors in the Soviet Union, Marxism was transformed into a doctrine justifying state control of all aspects of society. The doctrine had two main elements. The first was the leading role of the Communist Party, seen as representing the true interests of the working class. The party was to control the organs of the state, and was itself to be organized according to the principles of ‘democratic centralism’. The second major element in communist doctrine was the social ownership of property and central planning of the economy. In principle, all private ownership of the means of production and all elements of the market economy were to be abolished, and economic life was to be controlled by planning ministries, which would set production targets for factories and collective farms. Although this principle was never fully implemented, Soviet communism was a society whose every aspect was controlled by a small political élite (during the Stalinist period, 1928–53, by a single individual), and was thus the leading example of totalitarianism. Its economic and military achievements nevertheless inspired revolutionary movements in many other countries, and in some developing countries, such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, communist parties came to power and established regimes based more or less closely on the Soviet model. In eastern Europe, communist governments were installed under Soviet influence at the end of World War II. But the communist model was increasingly criticized in the West, even by those sympathetic to Marxism, for its economic inefficiency, its lack of genuine democracy, and its denial of basic human freedoms. During the 1980s this questioning of Soviet communism spread to eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, culminating in a remarkable series of largely peaceful revolutions, which removed communist parties from power and opened the way to liberal democracy and the market economy.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the communist countries of eastern Europe mostly adopted pluralist, democratic systems. Similar reforms were introduced in the Marxist-Leninist States of Africa. In the early 21st century there are only five remaining communist states: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Of these all save North Korea and Laos have introduced some elements of private enterprise and the free market. Such reforms have brought increased prosperity—spectacularly so in China—but the communist party retains a monopoly of political power. Only North Korea continues to practise unreformed Stalinism; and it is thought to be one of the poorest countries in the world.