MARX AND ENGELS  
In its modern form the term communism became associated with the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They jointly drafted the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848, Communist Manifesto) on behalf of a little-known German organization, the Communist League, hence the title of the Manifesto. Later this became one of the most popular texts in the rapidly developing socialist movement. Until the Russian Revolution (1917), no major working-class party or organization called itself communist. Nevertheless all socialist and social democratic parties envisaged that the society which would come into existence once capitalism had run its full course would be characterized by the abolition of private ownership of the main means of production, distribution, and exchange, in other words, a communist society.

Marx never offered a blueprint of how this would come about or how it would be organized. He and Engels were contemptuous of such endeavour: they saw their "scientific socialism" as superior to "utopian socialism". The chief purpose of Marx's theoretical works was to unveil "the laws of motion of capitalist society". However, it is possible to capture in his works an occasional glimpse of what communism would entail. In the first place a communist society would be one of extreme abundance of material goods. Human beings would find themselves emancipated from the harsh constraints of struggling for necessities. There would be no division of labour: "Society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner...without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" (Marx, Die Deutsche Ideologie, 1845-1846; The German Ideology). Where these conditions prevail, there are no social classes. Since, for Marx, the State regulates the division of labour and the appropriation of wealth in the interest of the ruling class, it follows that under communism there is no state. In later writings the terminology changes and the utopian fervour is less evident. Thus, in his Kritik des Gotha Programm (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme), Marx distinguished a lower stage of communism from a higher and, presumably, final phase. In its formative stage, communism, as it emerges from capitalist society, has abolished private property but there is still a division of labour and people are paid according to the principle "to each according to the work performed". In the higher phase—which is similar to the earlier vision expressed in Die Deutsche Ideologie—the organizing principle is "to each according to their needs". Thereafter Marx wrote little about communism. However in the third and unfinished volume of Das Kapital, not published in his lifetime, he returned to the idea of "associated producers" bringing nature under their collective control as a stage towards "the true realm of freedom" where production and work are ends in themselves