Communism

Communism is a political and economic system that emerged in the 19th century and gained currency as a response to the problems of industrialization in Western Europe and the United States. Communism centered upon common ownership of property and distribution of goods and services based on need and not individual wealth or social class. Based in part upon utopian and socialist writings, communism was presented as a form of socialism in the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in 1848.

With the Russian Revolution in 1917, communism became the ideological framework that would guide the Soviet Union and eastern bloc nations for the next 60 years. Revolutionaries in China turned to a form of communism in their rise to power in 1949 and ...