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Today, the term "communism" is almost universally identified with its specifically Marxist meaning(s). However, the idea of a stateless, propertyless and classless society is not exclusively Marxist. In fact, the idea is much older (see for example religious communism). It is therefore possible to support communism without being a Marxist. Nevertheless, most people who support communism today are Marxists.
A communist system is essentially identical to the kind of society that is advocated by anarchism. However, unlike communists, the anarchists do not believe that any other stage is needed between capitalism and the society they wish to establish. In other words, the anarchists wish to implement communism right away, without going through socialism first. This, as well as fundamental disagreements over how capitalism should be overthrown, has resulted in a very deep rift between communists and anarchists. Their ultimate goal is the same, but their proposed methods for reaching it are extremely different.
According to the 1996 third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, communism and derived words are written with the lowercase "c" except when they refer to a political party of that name, a member of that party, or a government led by such a party, in which case the word "Communist" is written with the uppercase "C".
Although many small communist societies have existed throughout human history, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the first to write down a theoretical (and, according to them, scientific) basis for communism. The political ideology they created, namely Marxism, became the chief advocate of communism in the modern world.
Marxism seeks to explain historical phenomena in terms of class struggle. According to Marxists, human society consists of a number of social classes, which are differentiated by their relationship to the means of production. For example, capitalist society consists of the bourgeoisie (the capitalists; those who own the means of production) and the proletariat (the workers; those who must work for wages in order to make a living, because they do not posess any means of production of their own). One social class is the ruling class, and it uses its wealth and power to exploit the other class(es). For example, in capitalism, the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat by drawing a profit from the proletariat's work (a business owner's profit equals what the workers produce minus what the workers get paid - thus, in order for the owner to make a profit, the workers must get paid less than what they deserve; see surplus value). Eventually, one of the exploited classes rises up to overthrow the ruling class and the existing system, establishing itself as the new ruling class of a new system (for example, capitalism was established when the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism and the feudal ruling class - the aristocracy).
As a result of the process described above, class struggle is the engine of a cycle in which socio-economic systems are created, destroyed and replaced. Marxism identifies several systems that have been created and destroyed by it since the beginning of human history. However, social classes - and therefore class struggle - have not always existed. They were created at the dawn of human civilization, when nomadic tribes first settled down and started practicing agriculture. Before that, human beings lived in a kind of classless society that can be described as primitive communism. Primitive communism ended when agriculture created the conditions for private property over the means of production (which, at that time, simply meant private property over cultivated land). This private ownership of land differentiated people into land owners and those who needed to work other people's land for a living, and this in turn resulted in the slave-based system of the ancient world. That system eventually gave way to feudalism, which eventually gave way to capitalism.
According to Marxism, the class struggle within capitalism will eventually lead to the proletariat overthrowing the bourgeoisie and establishing socialism. Socialism, in turn, will result in the gradual fading of social classes (as the means of production are made public property), which will lead to the final stage of human society - communism.
And that is the Marxist foundation for communism. Communism cannot change into another system because class struggle - the mechanism that drives such changes - no longer exists.
Within Marxism, there are several different trends. The largest of these trends is Leninism, which was based on the writings and actions of Vladimir Lenin. According to Lenin, capitalism can only be overthrown by a proletarian revolution , not by parliamentary means. Furthermore, in opposition to Marx, Lenin argued that the revolution would occur first in the less developed nations, and that it would require a "vanguard of the proletariat" composed of a relatively small, tightly organized Communist Party of workers de-classed intellectuals (see the article on Leninism for an explanation of the differences between Lenin and Marx, and their basis).
Most (but by no means all) present-day communists are of the Leninist variety.
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