CommunismCommunism (from the Latin communis, meaning "shared" or "common"); fundamentally, a system of social organization in which property (especially real property and the means of production) is held in common. Advocates public ownership and communal control of the major means of production, distribution, transportation, and communication. Although modern communism is associated with ideas advanced by German political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Russian Communist leader and theorist Vladimir I. Lenin, its intellectual roots are as old as Plato's republic in the fourth century BCE.