on those of the Soviet Union (or, in some later versions, China or Albania) as a means for eventually attaining a communist society. a system of social organization in which property, particularly real property and the means of production, is held in common. With an uppercase C, the term refers to the movement that has sought to overthrow CAPITALISM through revolution. Forms of communism existed among various tribes of Native Americans, and it was espoused by early Christian sects. During the Middle Ages the MANORIAL SYSTEM provided communal use of the village commons and cultivation of certain fields, rights the peasants fought to retain in England (14th cent.) and Germany (16th cent.). By the early 19th cent. the rise of capitalism, reinforced by the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, had created a new industrial class living and working under appalling conditions. Utopian socialists such as Robert OWEN and Charles FOURIER, anarchists such as P.J. PROUDHON, and revolutionaries such as Auguste Blanqui all favored some kind of communal solution to this poverty. In Germany Karl MARX and Friedrich ENGELS published the Communist Manifesto (1848), the primary exposition of the doctrine that came to be known as MARXISM. It postulated the inevitability of communism arising from class war, the overthrow of capitalism, and the creation of a classless society. Marxism greatly influenced 19th-cent. SOCIALISM. The modern Communist political movement began when the Russian Social Democratic Labor party split (1903) into two factions (see BOLSHEVISM AND MENSHEVISM). The Bolsheviks, led by V.I. LENIN, called for armed revolution. After their triumph in the 1917 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, the Bolsheviks formed the Communist party (1918), established a party dictatorship, and founded the COMINTERN (1919), which claimed leadership of the world socialist movement. In the 1930s, Joseph STALIN's policy of socialism in one country prevailed in the USSR, but after WORLD WAR I...
