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Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a future classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production and the absence of private property.

Communism can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement. It also refers to a variety of political movements which claim the establishment of such a social organization as their ultimate goal. Early forms of human social organization have been described as 'primitive communism' by Marxists. However, communism as a political goal generally is a conjectured form of future social organization.

The notion of communism has a history long predating Marx and Engels. In ancient Greece the idea of communism was connected to a myth about the "golden age" of humanity, when society lived in full harmony, before the development of private property. Some have argued that Plato's The Republic and works by other ancient political theorists advocated communism in the form of communal living, and that various early Christian sects, in particular the early Church, as recorded in Acts of the Apostles, and indigenous tribes in the pre-Columbian Americas practiced communism in the form of communal living and common ownership. Christian communism espouses the idea that Christianity was meant to be communist in nature.

In his 1516 treatise Utopia, Thomas More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose leaders administered it through the application of reason. François Rabelais also described such a utopian society through the mythic Abbey of Thélème. In the 17th century, communist thought arguably surfaced again in England. Eduard Bernstein, in his 1895 Cromwell and Communism [3] argued that several groupings in the English Civil War, especially the Diggers (or "True Levellers") espoused clear communistic, agrarian ideals, and that Oliver Cromwell's attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile.[1]

Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Enlightenment era of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The word "communist" itself was coined in 1840 by Goodwyn Barmby, after the French word communisme, while discussing the egalitarianism associated with Gracchus Babeuf, one of the most radical participants in the 1789 French Revolution, and the Abbé Constant. A correspondent of Engels, Goodwyn Barmby himself founded the London Communist Propaganda Society in 1841. "Utopian socialism", a term itself coined by Marx in contrast with "scientific socialism" (a term coined by Engels), designed all utopian writings and foundation of settlements by writers such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Saint-Simon.

Karl Marx saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of mankind from which it arose. When humanity was capable of producing surplus, private property developed, society became unequal, resulting in classical society, and then to the feudal mode of production, to its current state of capitalism reached by a violent primitive accumulation of capital, which in part depended on the development of mercantilism. He then proposed that the next step in social evolution would be a return to communism, but at a higher level than when mankind had originally practiced primitive communism (in accordance with the influence of Hegel's dialectic on Marx).

In its contemporary form, communism grew out of the workers' movement of 19th century Europe. At the time, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for creating a new class of unskilled, urban factory workers who labored under harsh conditions, and for widening the gulf between rich and poor.