Communalism

Communalism is a term with three distinct meanings according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. These include (1) "a theory of government or a system of government in which independent communes participate in a federation". (2) "the principles and practice of communal ownership". There is no indication whether communalism (sense 2) would apply in the "independent" communes described in the definition of communalism (sense 1). However, in practice, many experiments in utopian socialism did implement internal rules of communalist property ownership in the context of federated communalism. It is at least theoretically possible for a federation of communes to include communes which do not practice communalist rules of property, which is to say, that the overall national government may be a federation of communes, but that private property rather than communalist property is the order within each such commune. Karl Marx, often viewed as the founder of communism, criticized other socialists of his era, and made particularly blistering criticisms of utopianism which was generally conceived along communalist principles, both federational communalism and local property communalism.