Communism
The political and economic ideology โ most influentially formulated by Marx and Engels โ calling for collective ownership of the means of production and a classless society.
Origin
The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848) is the founding text. The Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the first communist state; by mid-20th century roughly a third of the world's population lived under self-described communist governments (USSR, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba). In practice these were one-party states with secret police, planned economies, and very different relationships with Marx's theory. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 ended the era; China retains the party but practices state capitalism; North Korea and Cuba carry on as much-shrunken cases.
Modern usage
Used loosely in American political invective ('that's communist!') to label anything from universal healthcare to a workplace policy on shared snacks. In Eastern Europe the word still carries the weight of lived authoritarianism. In Western academia 'communist' (capital-C, the Soviet system) and 'communism' (the ideal) are distinguished carefully. The hammer-and-sickle is global visual shorthand.
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