What is communism? Marx's idea and how states tried it

Communism is the idea of a society with no social classes, no private ownership of factories, land and other means of production, and in the end no state, where goods are shared by need. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set it out in 1848. The word also names the one-party states, such as the Soviet Union and China, that ruled in its name in the 20th century and never reached the society it describes.

In short

• In theory, communism is the last stage of history Marx predicted: after workers overthrow capitalism, classes, money and finally the state fade away.
• In practice, communism meant states run by a single communist party that owned most of the economy and allowed no organized opposition.
• Most of those states fell or changed between 1989 and 1991. Five countries are still ruled by communist parties, and three of them, China, Vietnam and Laos, now run largely market economies.

What did Marx and Engels actually argue?

Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in February 1848, a short pamphlet written for a small workers' league. Its central claim is that history is driven by struggle between classes. Under capitalism, they argued, the bourgeoisie, the class that owns factories and capital, lives off the work of the proletariat, the class that owns nothing but its labor and must sell it for wages.

They believed this system would break down on its own terms. Competition would push wages down and concentrate wealth in fewer hands, crises would repeat, and workers would eventually take power. Their remedy was to end private ownership of the means of production, not of personal belongings: the Manifesto says the aim is not to abolish property in general but "bourgeois property", the ownership that lets one class employ another.

Marx said little about how a communist society would run day to day, and that silence matters. His clearest sketch is in a letter of 1875, later published as the Critique of the Gotha Programme. There he described two phases. In the first, just out of capitalism, people would be paid according to the work they did. Only in a "higher phase", once scarcity was overcome, could society live by the rule "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." By then, he expected, the state as an instrument of one class ruling another would have withered away.

How is communism different from socialism?

The words overlap, which is where most confusion starts. Vladimir Lenin, who led the Russian Revolution, gave the usage that communist parties followed. In 1917 he wrote that "what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the 'first', or lower, phase of communist society." So in Marxist language, socialism is the stage on the way, and communism the end point. That is why the Soviet Union called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: it claimed to be building socialism, not to have reached communism.

Outside that tradition, socialism is a much wider family. Many socialists want public or shared ownership of key industries while keeping elections, rival parties and a market for most goods. Communist parties in the Leninist tradition rejected that path and argued that only a revolution led by a disciplined party could get there.

	Communism as Marx imagined it	Communist states in practice	Democratic socialism
Who owns factories and land	Society as a whole	The state, run by the party	A mix: some public, most private
How goods are shared	By need, after scarcity ends	By central plan, later partly by markets	Mostly by markets, plus public services
The state	Withers away	Large and all-powerful	An elected government
Political parties	None needed	One, the communist party	Many, competing in elections
Examples	None has existed	Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam	Parties in many democracies

How did states try to build communism?

The first was Russia. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took power in October 1917 and founded the Soviet Union in 1922. Under Joseph Stalin from the late 1920s, the state took over farms and industry, ran the economy by five-year plans, and turned a largely rural country into an industrial power. The same period brought a famine in 1932–33 that killed millions, a network of forced-labor camps called the Gulag, and purges in which hundreds of thousands were executed.

After 1945 the model spread. The Soviet army installed communist governments across Eastern Europe. Mao Zedong's Communist Party won China's civil war and founded the People's Republic on 1 October 1949. North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba after 1959, and others followed. Mao's Great Leap Forward, a drive to industrialize fast through collective farms, led to a famine from 1959 to 1961 in which millions more died. The rivalry between these states and the West became the Cold War.

The systems had features in common: one party with a monopoly on power, a state-owned economy run by central planning, censorship, and secret police. They also claimed real gains, including mass literacy, universal schooling and health care, and fast industrial growth in their early decades. Their economies, though, struggled to produce consumer goods people wanted, and shortages were common.

What happened to communist states after 1989?

Most of them ended within three years. In 1989 the communist governments of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania fell, most of them peacefully, after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made clear he would not send troops to save them. The Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989. In the Soviet Union itself, a failed coup by hard-liners in August 1991 broke the party's hold, and Gorbachev resigned as president on 25 December 1991, the day the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time.

As of 2026, five countries are still ruled by communist parties: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea. China, Vietnam and Laos have moved from central planning to largely market economies while keeping one-party rule: China began its market reforms in 1978, and Vietnam and Laos followed in 1986. Cuba has moved much more slowly, legalizing small private businesses only in 2021, and North Korea still runs a planned economy. These are communist states in the political sense, a single ruling party, rather than economies in which the state owns nearly everything.

Still argued

Why communism in power ended in dictatorship and economic failure is still argued. One view, held by critics from Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek onward, is that the problem is built into the idea: abolishing markets and private property puts all economic power in the state, and planners cannot gather the information prices carry, so coercion and shortage follow. Another view, held by many on the left, is that the ideas were betrayed by circumstances and leaders: revolutions came in poor, mostly rural countries rather than the industrial ones Marx expected, under war and siege, and Lenin's and Stalin's choices turned a theory of workers' self-rule into one-party rule. The record shows every attempt took the one-party path; it cannot settle whether another path was possible.

Communism is usually placed on the far left, the opposite of fascism on the far right, though both produced one-party states. Its long rival is capitalism, the system of private ownership and markets that Marx was describing when he wrote. And its record is a large part of why many people now judge political systems by the test democracy sets: whether people can vote their rulers out.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what is the difference between communism as an idea and a communist state?
• In Marxist language, how do socialism and communism relate to each other?
• Which countries are still ruled by communist parties, and how have three of them changed their economies?

Sources

• Manifesto of the Communist Party — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848, Marxists Internet Archive
• Critique of the Gotha Programme, part I — Karl Marx, 1875, Marxists Internet Archive
• The State and Revolution, chapter 5 — V. I. Lenin, 1917, Marxists Internet Archive
• Karl Marx — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Collapse of the Soviet Union — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
• Communist state — Wikipedia