Communism is the belief that society should be organized without private property, all productive property being
held communally, publicly or in common. A communist system is one based on a community of goods. It is
generally presented as a positive alternative to competition, a system that is thought to divide people; communism
is expected to draw people together and to create a community. In most cases the arguments for communism
advocate replacing competition with cooperation either for its own sake or to promote a goal such as equality, or
to free specific groups of people to serve a higher ideal such as the state or God.
The word communism appears to have first been used in the above sense in France in the 1840s to refer to the ideas
of thinkers such as Françoise Émile Babeuf (1760-97) and Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), both of whom advocated
the collectivization of all productive property. The concept is ancient, however. Early versions of a community of
goods exist in myths that describe the earliest stages of human culture; it was a major issue in ancient Athens, a
key component of monasticism and became the basis for much criticism of industrial capitalism.
The word communism later became associated with the teachings of Karl Marx and his followers and came
to refer to an authoritarian political system combined with a centralized economic system run by the state. This
form of communism has roots in the earlier idea because the ultimate goal of communism, as seen by Marx, was a
society in which goods are distributed to people on the basis of need. The older usage continues to exist in a
worldwide communal movement and as a standard by which to criticize both capitalism and Marxian communism.
The idea of communism as collectively owned property first appears in the Western tradition in classical Greece.
Plato's Republic contains a notable early defence (see Plato §14). Prior to the invention of the word, major
communist theories can be found in some parts of the Christian Bible, in medieval monasticism and in Thomas
More's Utopia (1516). In all these cases the basis for collectively owned property is that members of society are
freed from the need to devote their time to earning a living or caring for private property so that they can devote
themselves to something more important such as the pursuit of knowledge, God or personal fulfilment. The
assumption is that the need to provide for oneself or one's family gets in the way of matters considered more
important. For example, Plato advocates abolishing the family in his Republic because he fears that family ties will
both distract the individual from higher things and tempt people to favour one group (family members) over others
(non-family members). In monastic communism, which also abolishes the family, all property is owned by the
community and each individual member of the community owns nothing, not even their clothes. Everything is
provided by the community for each monk or nun; they are, thereby, freed from the burden of property to devote
themselves to God. In More's Utopia all houses and their furnishings are as near identical as possible and, since
location cannot be identical, people move from house to house in regular rotation.
Later, secularized versions of communism stressed the equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of, or at least
access to, resources, but the underlying principle is quite similar. Rather than freeing some or even all people in a
society to devote themselves to a higher cause, secular communism is designed to allow everyone to pursue
personal fulfilment. It may best be characterized by a slogan adopted by Marx that appears to have been first
published on the title page of Cabet's Voyage en Icarie (1840): ‘From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need'. In other words, each person contributes to society to the best of their ability in the areas of
work for which they are suited; in return, society provides their basic needs. The underlying assumption is that all
human beings deserve to have their needs met simply because they are human beings; differential ability and talent
does not make one person more deserving than another. A specific case is the assumption by most communist
theorists that there should be no difference in treatment of those who contribute to society through physical labour
and those who contribute through mental labour. For example, in 1888 Edward Bellamy published Looking
Backward, a utopian novel that became an instant bestseller and produced a worldwide movement. In it, Bellamy
advocated an absolutely equal income for all members of society that could then be used by each individual to
meet their own felt needs. An approach adopted by many intentional communities is for the group to make
collective or social decisions (either by consensus or by majority rule) about economic matters that affect the
community as a whole but to provide each individual member of the community with a discretionary income to use
as they wish.
Marx maintained major aspects of this approach in the stage of human development that he called ‘full' or ‘pure'
communism or just communism. The non-alienated people of this future communism will create a world in which
income will be distributed on the basis of need (see Alienation §§3-4; Marx, K. §4); since everyone will be a
productive labourer, there will no longer be any classes; and, because there will no longer be a need for political
power to enforce class dominance, the state will gradually disappear to be replaced with decentralized,
non-political administrative agencies. Since everyone will work, there will be high productivity and, therefore,
plenty for all. Given the changed social situation, people will begin to think differently and social distinctions
between occupations and between city and country will disappear. Thus, this form of communism is, in its
essentials, identical to the earliest communist tradition. At least one major twentieth-century Marxist theorist,
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) (1959) argued that this utopian goal
should be at the centre of Marxist theory.
While Marxism and its version of communism predominantly took a different road, the more fundamental and
historically earlier theory did not disappear. Non-Marxist forms of collective property have existed and been
defended as part of the communal movement best represented by the Israeli kibbutzim and the US communal
movement of the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and by some forms of anarchism (see Anarchism
§3). Communism as common property and as a vision of a better life for all is still a living tradition.
The arguments against communism take a number of different forms. The simplest rely on assumptions about
human nature radically at variance with those of communism's proponents. The assumption is made, with little
real evidence, that human beings are ‘naturally' competitive and that therefore communism cannot work (see
Human nature §1). A more developed analysis argues that communism is necessarily economically inefficient and
will, therefore, be unable to provide as high a standard of living as a non-communist system. Some go so far as to
argue that communism is impossible to sustain over long periods of time because its inefficiency is so great that
the economic system must sooner or later collapse. Of course, economic efficiency is very low in the scale of
values held by most supporters of traditional communism. Proponents of communism generally take the position
that economic efficiency symbolizes the competitive system that they oppose and stands in the way of the
cooperative community they hope to achieve.
Today, many believe that the time of communism has passed, largely because Marxist communism has been
discredited in much of the world. But communism is not, and never has been, reducible to the Marxist version.
Most fundamentally, it is the economic basis for dreams of complete human fulfilment, whether it is sought in
monastic orders, intentional communities or whole societies. That dream persists, and with it the ideals of
communism.
