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Many communist societies ( communes) have existed throughout history, and many non-Marxist (or pre-Marxist) Western intellectuals advocated ideas quite similar to what is today known as communism.
The first Christians, as well as many later groups of monks and nuns, lived in communities organized according to communist principles. See religious communism for more information.
Thomas More's 16th-century work Utopia depicted a society organised along communist lines.Ideas of communal ownership evolved during the Enlightenment, exerting varying amounts of influence on the philosophes. The greatest of these influences were on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the abbé de Mably , Morelly (whose thoughts extensively influenced the French Revolution, in particular the Jacobins) and other revolutionary egalitarian clubs embodied in persons like Jean Paul Marat.
Many 19th-century idealists, disgusted by the ongoing oppression and mass poverty created by the Industrial Revolution, broke away from society to form short-lived communal "utopias". An example was Robert Owen's New Harmony community in Indiana. People who believe that communism can be implemented in such a way are called utopian socialists by Marxists.
The French philosopher Étienne Cabet, in his book "Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie" ("Travel and adventures of lord William Carisdall in Icaria") ( 1840), depicted an ideal society in which an elected government controlled all economic activity and supervised social affairs, the family remaining the only other independent unit. In 1848 he attempted to organize Icarian communities in the United States. His efforts were mostly in vain, but small Icarian communities existed even after his death, until 1898.
The short-lived Paris Commune ( 1871) was arguably the main example followed by revolutionaries of the early 20th Century, and also the largest historical example of a communist society. The Communards held Paris for two months against Prussian/German and French government soldiers. The Commune passed various laws reducing the power of property owners, such as cancelling rents and debts, before being bloodily suppressed. Marx later criticized the Commune for being too timid to secure its own survival, but praised it as the first successful revolution of the working class.
Today, a small number of people, primarily from industrialized nations, have, like the Owenites, opted to "drop out" of the existing society, preferring to live on communes of their own design. This movement saw its zenith during the counter-culture phenomenon of the 1960s and 70s in the West, and such people have been characterized as new bohemians or hippies.
Also in the present day, the tradition of religious communism continues in the form of Jewish kibbutzim.
As with all attempts to forsee the future, it is difficult to tell with any degree of confidence what is in store for communism. And, of course, any prediction depends on which "communism" we are talking about (the social system, the ideology, or the political movement).
As a political movement, made up of parties and individuals that consider themselves communist (in the Marxist-Leninist sense), communism is tied up practically and ideologically with the labor movement and the anti-globalization movement. The tide of the communist movement can generally be gauged by the success of the labor and anti-globalization movements.
Outside of the industrialized core of developed nations, the communist movement takes on legal and extra-legal dimensions. There are several dozen guerrilla groups in the world which identify themselves as communist in one form or another. In places like Peru, the Philippines, Nepal and south-east Asia, the success of communism can be gauged by the success of guerrilla wars. In countries with strong Communist Parties, such as India or Russia, the success of communism can be gauged by the success of those political parties.
As far as "communist states" are concerned, there are five countries still ruled by Communist Parties belonging to the Stalinist tradition: China (the PRC), Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam. However, the experiences of these five states have starkly diverged, especially since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. On the one hand, Cuba and North Korea were hit hard by the lack of Soviet economic assistance, trade and military support. On the other hand, the world's other three remaining communist states (all in East Asia) were far less dependent on Soviet subsidies (and in China's case, not at all, given the Sino-Soviet Split) at the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Following the lead of China under Deng Xiaoping, Vietnam and Laos have moved away from Soviet-style centralized planning, in favour of a private market economy that (at least in China's case) is very difficult to distinguish from outright capitalism. China has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of "socialism with Chinese characteristics", even to the point of admitting entrepreneurs to the Communist Party. Therefore, China today is generally regarded as being capitalist de facto, with just a little higher degree of government control than is seen in conventional capitalist countries. Many Marxists also regard the other four remaining "communist states" as being state-capitalist rather than socialist.
In the early 21st century, some thinkers have seen the prospect of communism emerging from a different direction. Economic and technological development have always been seen as key prerequisites to communism (Marx himself insisted on this point), and certain scholars are wondering whether our current technological development is leading in the direction of something that will essentially be a form of communism.
This vision is slowly coming to fruition. While the majority of Western economists and politicians follow Francis Fukuyama in the belief that capitalism will endure forever, or simply do not have any theories spanning beyond it, some paint a vision not unlike the one described by Marx. In a particularly well-publicized example, Marshall Brain , a renowned web entrepreneur, described in his book Manna [1] a world built with the help of robotics that fits the classic definition of communism perfectly. Thus, though they shy away from the word "communism" itself (because of its negative connotations), some authors today actually describe how communism could be built in the 21st century.
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