# communism

Pronunciation: US say "KAH-myuh-ni-zuhm" /ˈkɑmjəˌnɪzəm/; UK say "KOM-yuu-ni-zuhm" /ˈkɒmjʊnɪzəm/; AUS say "KOM-yuh-niz-uhm" [ˈkɔm.jə.nɪ.zm̩]

## Noun

1. Any far-left ideology or philosophy that seeks collective control of how resources are produced, especially by taking that control through revolution.
   - Simple: A far-left political belief that everyone should own the making of goods together, often taking it by revolution.
   - _The pamphlet called for communism and the violent overthrow of the factory owners._
   - _The commune's founders hoped to live by a gentle sort of communism, with no private property at all._
2. Any political and social system that puts a communist political philosophy into practice.
   - Simple: A way of running a country that follows communist ideas.
   - _The collapse of communism in the region brought free elections within a year._
   - _Under communism, the state ran the farms, the factories and even the corner stores._
3. A loose, often disparaging label for any left-wing ideology, or for government regulations or policies promoting a welfare state, nationalization and the like. *(dialectal, Western)*
   - Simple: A word often used as an insult for left-wing ideas or government plans like welfare or state-owned companies.
   - _Every time the city proposes rent control, someone at the meeting shouts that it's communism._
   - _Opponents dismissed the national health plan as creeping communism._
4. The international socialist society in which classes, money, and the state have all ceased to exist.
   - Simple: A society across the world where there are no longer social classes, money, or a government.
   - _Socialism was meant to be only a stage on the road to communism, when the state itself would wither away._
   - _Party theorists kept postponing the arrival of full communism to some distant decade._

## Noun

5. The quality of being shared or held in common; communality. *(rare)*
   - Simple: The state of being shared or held together by a group.
   - _The poets in the circle drew on a communism of images, passing the same moon and harbor from book to book._
   - _The flood produced a brief communism of feeling among neighbors who had barely spoken before._
6. Readiness to share scientific findings with others, listed first among the Mertonian norms. *(rare)*
   - Simple: The idea that scientists should be willing to share their discoveries with others.
   - _Researchers who hoard their data for years strain the communism that scientific progress depends on._
   - _Sharing raw data with rival labs is Mertonian communism at its most demanding._

## Origin

Borrowed from French communisme, formed from commun (“common”, from Latin commūnis) and the suffix -isme (“-ism”). By surface analysis it is commune + -ism.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/communism (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).