Communism is the most loaded word in modern political discourse. In American mainstream usage it is roughly synonymous with absolute evil. In Western European mainstream usage it is the name of a 20th-century catastrophe whose details most people no longer remember. In small left-wing circles it is variously the name of a betrayed promise, an ongoing project, a particular philosophical tradition, or all of the above. In China it is the official ideology of a one-party state that has produced the largest market economy in human history. None of these uses describe each other.

This piece is a short primer. The minimum definition that survives most strands. What the word actually means in the strict Marxian sense. The 20th-century operational forms that gave the word its current associations. What the tradition gets right that mainstream economic thought rarely concedes. What it got catastrophically wrong, recorded honestly. The specifically Irish strands of the communist tradition, which are smaller and stranger than the international versions but worth knowing. And what the word means now, in 2026, when the Soviet Union has been gone for 35 years and a Marxist-Leninist party governs the second-largest economy on Earth.

A definition that survives most strands

Communism, in the strict Marxian sense, is a predicted future state of human society in which the class system, money, the state, and private ownership of the means of production have all withered away. In its mature form, communism is stateless, classless, moneyless, and based on the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Production is socially coordinated, distribution is according to need, and the coercive apparatus of the state is no longer required because the conditions that produced class antagonism have been removed.

This is the predicted destination. No society in human history has ever reached it.

The 20th-century regimes that called themselves Communist were officially in a transitional phase, which Marx had called socialism, on the way to communism. Marxist-Leninist theory described this transition as requiring a workers' state, governed by a vanguard party representing the working class, that would suppress remaining capitalist resistance, build the productive forces required to make communism possible, and gradually dissolve itself once the transition was complete. The transition was never completed. Every state that began the transition either collapsed or, in the case of China and Vietnam, opened its economy to extensive market activity while retaining party-political control.

This means that a precise description of communism has to distinguish at least three different things. The theoretical end-state, which has never existed. The transitional state-socialist regimes that claimed to be moving towards it, which existed across the 20th century. And the broader Marxist analytical and political tradition that has produced both, but is not reducible to either. Most casual uses of the word "communism" conflate all three, and most political arguments that involve the word are built on the conflation.

The theoretical core

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the theoretical framework across the middle of the 19th century. The Communist Manifesto (1848) is the canonical short statement. Capital (Volume One published 1867, the rest posthumously) is the long technical analysis. The framework has several distinct components and the political programme depends on which of them you accept.

The historical-materialist analysis is the claim that the form of any society is determined principally by the way it organises the production of material goods. Hunter-gatherer societies have one form. Agricultural feudal societies have another. Industrial capitalism has a third. The dominant ideas, institutions, and political arrangements of each period are shaped by the underlying mode of production, not the other way around. Change the productive base and the rest changes with it.

The class analysis is the claim that within any non-primitive society, the dominant social conflict is between the class that owns the means of production and the class that does not. Slaves and slaveowners. Serfs and lords. Workers and capitalists. The history of class society is the history of these conflicts, sometimes overt, often hidden in religion, nationalism, or other displaced forms.

The labour theory of value, inherited from classical economics and refined by Marx, is the claim that the value of any commodity is ultimately determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Profit is the difference between the value workers produce and the wages they are paid. Profit is therefore, in this analysis, extracted from labour rather than created by capital.

The crisis theory is the claim that capitalism is internally contradictory in ways that produce recurring crises. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The cycles of overproduction. The concentration of wealth and the immiseration of the working class. Marx predicted that these contradictions would eventually become unmanageable and would precipitate a transition to a new mode of production.

The political programme is the claim that the working class, organised politically, would be the agent of this transition. The vehicle would vary by national circumstance. The destination would be a classless, stateless, moneyless communist society.

These components are separable. A serious modern reader can find the historical-materialist analysis and the class analysis useful while having reservations about the labour theory of value as classically formulated, and being entirely unconvinced by the political programme. Many modern academic Marxists hold exactly this position. The political tradition has tended to take the package as a whole, but the analytical apparatus does not require it.

The operational 20th century

The Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the first state to claim the Marxist political programme as its operational foundation. Lenin's adaptations to Marxism, particularly the vanguard-party doctrine in What Is to Be Done? (1902) and the theory of the state in The State and Revolution (1917), formed the basis of the Bolshevik regime. After Lenin's death in 1924, the regime was consolidated under Stalin and the system that became known as Soviet communism took its mature form: one-party rule, central economic planning, mass collectivisation of agriculture, rapid forced industrialisation, and the use of state coercion at very large scale.

The expansion through the second half of the 20th century produced state-Communist regimes across Eastern Europe (1945-1989), China (1949-present), North Korea (1948-present), Vietnam (1975-present), Cuba (1959-present), and various shorter-lived regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each was distinct, but the family resemblance was clear: a single ruling party identifying itself as the vanguard of the working class, central planning of large parts of the economy, suppression of organised political opposition, and a stated commitment to the Marxist transition towards communism.

The historical record of these regimes is mixed and largely negative. Worth being precise about both sides.

The catastrophic record is real and substantial. The Soviet Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 killed several million through deliberate grain requisition. The Great Purge of 1936-38 killed an estimated 700,000 to 1.2 million through executions and produced an additional several million deaths in the gulag system. The Chinese Great Leap Forward of 1958-62 produced the worst famine in human history, killing somewhere between 15 and 45 million depending on which estimate you accept. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 produced further large-scale repression and death. The Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge in 1975-79 killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million in a country of 8 million. Lesser repressions occurred across every state-Communist regime. The cumulative human cost is one of the largest political-violence totals in modern history.

The successes are also real and have to be acknowledged honestly. The Soviet Union industrialised at a rate no other country has matched. Literacy in Russia rose from around 30 percent in 1920 to near-universal by the 1960s. Life expectancy doubled. Women entered formal employment, education, and political participation at levels that took most Western countries decades longer to achieve. The post-1949 Chinese state lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty and built the infrastructure that has supported the country's subsequent economic transformation. Cuba achieved health and education outcomes that exceeded those of much wealthier capitalist neighbours. These are not exculpatory. They are part of the historical record and any account that excludes them is incomplete.

The defenders of these regimes argue that the catastrophic record was a function of specific historical circumstances (war, foreign intervention, internal sabotage) rather than structural to the model. The critics argue that the catastrophes were structural and recurrent, that no state-Communist regime ever delivered both the welfare gains and the political freedoms that any decent society requires, and that the consistent failure across diverse contexts indicates a problem with the model itself. The argument continues. My own view, for whatever it is worth, is that the structural argument is the stronger one. The vanguard-party model produces party rule. Party rule produces the institutional conditions for the catastrophes that occurred, regardless of the original intentions. Whether a different operational variant could deliver the gains without the catastrophes is an open question that the 20th century did not settle in favour of any actually-existing model.

The main internal variants

Worth distinguishing.

Marxism-Leninism is the doctrinal core of the Soviet model and most state-Communist regimes. Vanguard party, democratic centralism, central planning, dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional state.

Stalinism is the specific Marxist-Leninist variant developed under Stalin, characterised by extreme centralisation, mass terror, the doctrine of socialism in one country, and the cult of personality. The dominant form of state communism through most of the 20th century even in countries that were officially de-Stalinised.

Trotskyism is the anti-Stalinist Marxist current, descended from Trotsky's opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1920s. Permanent revolution rather than socialism in one country. Opposition to bureaucratic deformation. Sustained Marxist analysis of why the Soviet Union failed to produce communism. PBP and Solidarity in Ireland descend from this tradition.

Maoism is the Chinese revolutionary variant emphasising peasant rather than industrial-worker revolution, and the use of cultural revolution to prevent bureaucratic ossification. Influential beyond China in 20th-century anti-colonial movements.

Council communism is the libertarian Marxist current that opposed both Leninism and social democracy from the 1920s onwards. Workers' councils as the basis of revolutionary organisation, hostile to the vanguard-party model. Anton Pannekoek and Karl Korsch are the canonical figures. Marginal politically but theoretically important and influential on later libertarian-socialist currents.

Eurocommunism was the 1970s Western European Communist Party current that broke with Soviet democratic centralism, accepted parliamentary democracy and civil liberties, and pursued a national-democratic road to socialism. The Italian and Spanish parties were the largest exponents. The current dissolved into broader social-democratic and post-communist formations after 1989.

Modern academic Marxism is the analytical-theoretical tradition that has continued in universities since 1989. Analytical Marxism (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer), open Marxism, world-systems theory (Wallerstein), political Marxism (Robert Brenner), and various ecological and feminist Marxist currents. The tradition has continued doing serious analytical work and has, in some cases, decoupled the analytical apparatus from the political programme entirely.

Modern political communism outside China is small and dispersed. The Communist Party of Ireland exists. The Communist Party USA exists. The British Communist Party exists. None are politically significant. The 21st-century resurgence of communist self-identification on the left is mostly confined to specific subcultures and online discourse, with limited institutional expression.

What communism gets right

Worth being explicit about, because the dominant framing in Western political discourse makes it hard to acknowledge any.

The Marxist analytical machinery is, on its strongest points, useful and largely correct. The class analysis identifies real structural features of modern capitalism that mainstream economics often ignores. The historical-materialist analysis correctly identifies the productive base of any society as a major determinant of its institutional form. The crisis theory correctly anticipated, in broad outline, the recurring instabilities of capitalism that have continued to produce major crises across the 20th and 21st centuries. The work that has continued in modern academic Marxism is doing serious analytical work that the post-1989 political collapse should not overshadow.

The communist tradition is correct that capitalism, in its actual operation, is a system of structural extraction in which the surplus produced by working populations is captured by the owners of capital. The mainstream economic counter-argument, that wages and profit are simply the market prices of labour and capital, depends on assumptions about market function that have not held up well. The class-analytical reading of the post-1980 wealth concentration is more empirically accurate than the mainstream-economic alternative.

The tradition is correct that political and economic systems are historically contingent, not natural, and that they can be changed if the will and the analysis are present. This is a basic point that easy-going centrist political discourse tends to obscure. The capitalist arrangement that organises modern Ireland is no more eternal than the feudal arrangement that organised medieval Ireland. It can change. The question is in which direction.

What it got catastrophically wrong

Equally worth being explicit about.

The vanguard-party doctrine produces party rule, not workers' rule. Once in power, a vanguard party representing the working class becomes a vanguard party representing itself. The institutional conditions for this drift are present in every Marxist-Leninist regime that has lasted, regardless of original intent. The democratic-centralist mechanism that was designed to prevent it has consistently failed.

Central planning at the scale of a national economy has performed badly relative to its ambitions and to its alternatives. The information-coordination problem that Friedrich Hayek identified in the 1930s and 1940s, that no central authority can match the dispersed knowledge embedded in price signals, has been substantially vindicated by the historical record. This does not vindicate everything the Hayekian tradition argues. It does identify a specific defect of large-scale central planning that the communist tradition consistently underestimated.

The dictatorship-of-the-proletariat phase, intended as transitional, has in every historical instance become the permanent dictatorship of the party apparatus. The withering-away of the state has not occurred. The conditions Marx described as the prerequisite for communism (abundance, the disappearance of class antagonism) have not been produced by any state-Communist regime. Whether they could be produced by any imaginable Marxist-Leninist regime remains an open question. The empirical track record is not encouraging.

The political and human-rights record of state-Communist regimes is one of the most catastrophic in modern history. Whatever else can be said about the tradition, the willingness of its 20th-century operational variants to use mass repression, mass deportation, mass execution, and mass starvation as political instruments is not in serious dispute. Any account of communism that does not engage with this record honestly is incomplete.

These are not small problems. They are the reasons the 21st-century left has, almost everywhere, moved away from explicit Marxist-Leninist political identification, even where it retains analytical interest in the Marxist tradition.

What it is commonly mistaken for

Three persistent confusions.

First, communism is often confused with any state ownership or central planning. Most modern capitalist states own substantial enterprise and do substantial planning, particularly during wars and crises. None of this is communism in any meaningful sense. The conflation makes it impossible to discuss the actual structural questions clearly and tends to function as a conversation-stopper.

Second, communism is often identified entirely with what the Soviet Union did. The Soviet Union was one operational variant of one strand of the Marxist political tradition, in one specific historical context. Other variants existed. Other variants might exist in future. The Soviet experience is informative but is not the whole of the tradition.

Third, communism is sometimes used as a generic insult for anything to the left of mainstream centrist economics. This usage is too imprecise to discuss seriously. A Nordic-mode social-democratic policy is not communism. A wealth tax is not communism. A public housing programme is not communism. A health service is not communism. The word has specific content. Using it imprecisely makes argument harder.

Where you find communism in Irish politics

Ireland has a small and historically interesting communist tradition.

The Communist Party of Ireland has existed in various forms since 1933. It has never been electorally significant in the South. Its more substantial historical influence has been in Northern trade-union and Republican-left politics. Betty Sinclair, Andy Barr, and Madge Davison are key figures. The party has been politically marginal for decades but has remained organisationally continuous. Its current activity is largely solidarity organising and ideological-formation work.

The Workers' Party, formed from the Official Sinn Féin movement after 1969, was Marxist-Leninist in its theoretical orientation through the 1970s and 1980s. The party split in 1992, with most of its parliamentary representation forming Democratic Left and merging with Labour in 1999. The remaining Workers' Party rump has continued in much-reduced form. The intellectual influence of the party's Marxist-Leninist period on subsequent Irish leftist organising has been substantial, particularly in trade-union and adult-education circles.

Trotskyist organisations are the most active Irish communist current today, principally the Socialist Workers Network (the political force behind PBP) and the Socialist Party (the political force behind Solidarity). Both are small but electorally and politically active. They are the only Dáil presence with a genuinely communist ideological foundation, although neither uses "communism" as their primary political identifier.

The historical Catholic-anti-communist mobilisation of the 1930s through the 1960s shaped the political and cultural environment of 20th-century Ireland in ways that suppressed not only communism but most forms of left-wing politics. The 1933 Saint Patrick's Day pastoral letter from the Irish bishops, condemning communism in terms that effectively criminalised Marxist analysis in respectable society, is a representative document. The slow weakening of clerical political power since the 1990s has reopened space for this material that was previously closed.

Connolly's relationship to the communist tradition is contested and worth flagging. Connolly was a Marxist. He was active in the international socialist movement before 1914 and would, on most readings, have aligned with the Bolsheviks had he lived past 1916. The subsequent Irish Catholic-nationalist appropriation of Connolly as a kind of patriotic Catholic socialist with Marxist accents is, in my view, a substantial misreading. The point matters because Connolly is the only Irish revolutionary leader of the period whose theoretical work is genuinely worth reading, and the standard Irish presentation of him sometimes obscures what he actually thought.

Why this matters for the citizen

Communism is the political tradition that the modern centre most wants to keep in the past tense. The reasons are partly historical, the catastrophic record is real, and partly strategic, the analytical apparatus that produced communism also produces a critique of capitalism that the modern centre is uncomfortable with. Both reasons are operating when the word is used.

A citizen who wants to understand modern political economy seriously has to engage with the Marxist analytical tradition, even while being critical of the political programme it has historically generated. The analytical work that has continued in academic Marxism since 1989 is, in some areas, more rigorous than the mainstream alternatives, and the structural critique of capitalism it offers is increasingly difficult to dismiss as the empirical evidence on wealth concentration and economic instability accumulates.

The lesson of the 20th century is not that the analytical tradition was wrong about everything. It is that the political programme of using a vanguard party to seize state power and impose central planning produced specific catastrophic outcomes that the tradition has not adequately reckoned with. A serious 21st-century left has to retain the analytical apparatus while abandoning the political programme that produced the catastrophes. Most of the 21st-century left has, in practice, done exactly this. Whether the resulting position is communism in any meaningful sense is contested.

For Irish politics specifically, the legacy of communism is mostly indirect. The historical anti-communist mobilisation that shaped 20th-century Ireland has weakened. The few openly communist organisations are small and have limited electoral reach. The analytical tradition's influence runs through PBP, through some academic and trade-union currents, and through the broader leftward shift of younger voters who are increasingly comfortable with structural critique even when they do not adopt the formal label.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). The same recommendation as the socialism piece. It remains the canonical short statement and is the first thing anyone serious about the tradition has to read.

If you have a week: Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (2007). The standard scholarly history, covering the whole 20th-century arc. Service is a critical historian, not a sympathetic one, but the book is fair and comprehensive.

For the philosophical core: G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978, second edition 2000). The most rigorous analytical reconstruction of historical materialism by a major 20th-century political philosopher. Demanding but essential for anyone wanting to take the tradition seriously.

For the historical record of the regimes: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (1968, revised 1990) on the Soviet Union. Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine (2010) and The Cultural Revolution (2016) on China. These are critical accounts and they should be read with awareness that the field has continued developing, but they remain standard.

For the post-Soviet revaluation: Sheila Fitzpatrick's revisionist work on Stalinism, particularly Everyday Stalinism (1999), is essential for understanding how the Soviet system actually operated at the level of ordinary life. Stephen Kotkin's three-volume Stalin biography (2014, 2017, in progress) is the major recent academic work.

For the Irish-specific story: Kevin McCorry's Two Decades of Irish Republicanism and Brian Hanley and Scott Millar's The Lost Revolution (2009) are the standard accounts of the Workers' Party / Official Republican period. The Communist Party of Ireland's own Outlook journal is the closest current Irish material from inside the tradition.

The thing communism asks, that the modern centre most wants to forget is being asked, is whether the structural arrangement of modern capitalism is acceptable. The 20th-century answers to that question were catastrophic. The question itself remains live. Anyone trying to think seriously about modern political economy has to engage with both, the catastrophic record and the live question, without using one to silence the other.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • What Is Socialism? — the broader tradition communism is one part of
  • What Is Anarchism? — the libertarian-socialist alternative whose Bakunin-vs-Marx prediction was vindicated by the 20th century
  • What Is Social Democracy? — the parliamentary-reform branch that took the other path
  • What Is Fascism? — the 20th-century totalitarian alternative communism was simultaneously fighting and being conflated with

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.