ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Communism has become, in our own day, at once an ideal and a social methods. It aims at a communist society in which classes abolished as a result of the common ownership of the means of economic production and distribution. It believes that its ideal attained only with a social revolution in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is the effective instrument of change. For previous eighteen hundred years, the Stoic notion of equality of humanity deposited an uneasy belief that its consequences should manifest themselves in sphere of economic fact. The idea of equality was his passion, and it is because a system of economic equality would prevent degradation of human impulses. The benefits of economic equality were a commonplace among the advanced social theorists of France in the eighteenth century; though few had the hardihood to go so far as communism.
