The word 'communist' first surfaced in a French letter around 1785
Around 1785 a Frenchman named Victor d'Hupay signed himself a communist author in a letter to the writer Restif de la Bretonne. Restif took up the word, using communisme in 1793 for a society of shared property. More than half a century later, Marx and Engels gave it the meaning that shaped the twentieth century.
The term joins the Latin communis, common or of the community, with the French suffix for a doctrine. Restif was the first to describe communism as a system of government, and John Goodwyn Barmby brought the word into English around 1840. It was then distinguished from socialism, whose modern meaning settled in the 1860s. An early way to tell them apart: socialists wanted to share production, communists wanted to share consumption too, captured in the principle of giving to each according to need rather than contribution.
The goal is a classless society with common ownership of production and distribution, and ultimately no private property, money or state. Communists agree that capitalism splits society into a working majority, who sell their labour to survive, and an owning minority who profit from it, and that only revolution can end the exploitation. They disagree sharply about method: libertarian currents favour workers' self-management and spontaneous uprising, while party-driven Marxist–Leninists set up a socialist state that is supposed eventually to wither away.
The modern movement emerged from nineteenth-century European socialism, which blamed capitalism for the misery of factory workers. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 redefined the idea. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then the Second World War, Marxist–Leninist governments took power across Eastern Europe and Asia, and for much of the century over a third of humanity lived under them. Those states typically combined one-party rule, state control of the economy and media, limits on religion and suppression of opponents. Some scholars argue the Soviet model was really a form of state capitalism.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, most such regimes ended. China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam remain nominally communist, and all except North Korea now allow more economic competition while keeping one-party rule. Economic inefficiency, authoritarianism and bureaucracy are commonly blamed for the decline, and death tolls under communist regimes remain a polarised subject among historians.
Source: Communism
