Communism
Etymology
From Latin communis, “common, shared,” via French communisme in the 1840s. The root sense is simply what is held in common. Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848) fixed the term to a theory of history ending in a stateless, classless order; in the twentieth century it also came to name the actually existing regimes that claimed that goal, whose record is judged very differently by different observers.
noun · /KOM-yuh-niz-um/
An ideology aiming at a classless society in which property is held in common and, in theory, the state eventually withers away.
What it names
A name for both an ideal of shared ownership and the twentieth-century one-party states that governed in its name — two things worth keeping distinct.
Example
The professor distinguished communism as a theoretical endpoint from the authoritarian states that adopted its vocabulary.
Related idea
Socialism is usually described as the broader, more varied family; communism as the specific strand seeking a fully classless, propertyless society.