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I know you're simplifying things for brevity but this is misleading at best. You can't gloss over the goal of a classless, stateless society when defining communism, and it is explicitly a left-wing philosophy. Contrast with fascism, a right-wing political philosophy that places most of the control with the government by reinforcing control over capital and creating a clear national identity.
You can gloss over that goal if you don't consider Marxism the only form of communism.
There are other types of communism possible, some that even already exist in smaller groupings of humans than at the state level.
The different types of Socialists disagree on how to achieve the classless society called Communism (including Anarchists, by the way), but the end goal of a classless society is the same. There is no seperate "Marxist" definition of communism, he just took an idea that was considered utopian before him and turned it into a science.
You're wrong.
Communism can be entirely defined as an economic system with no private ownership.
The classes concept is a symptom, not the cause. It's true that without private ownership there wouldn't be a working class vs upper class, but we would hardly be classless at that point. There would still be people working, and people not working under communism. Some people can't work, they simply aren't capable, and some will choose not to work because there will already be enough to go around from the people who choose to work just for something to do. If you don't think that classes will form because of those difference, you don't know human nature very well.
Marx gave a single definition of communism, there are plenty of others.
I don't think you understand what an economic class is. A new class does not emerge because one person is more productive for society than another. It's a question of what your relation to the means of production is, and in a communist, classless society there would be no inequality there.
Could you provide a few alternate definitions of Communism? Sounds interesting.
I mean, the current 3-tier standard for social classes directly disagrees with you. Middle class people do get a new tier just by being more productive(perceived or actual) than another.
The 3-tier system is archaic at best, and more likely intentional propaganda.
Either there should only be 2 classes of people(those who work to live, and those who profit off other people enough to not need to work) or there should be a dozen classes to encompass things like the homeless, welfare supported persons, retired people, people who make part of their income from profit and part of their income from employment, etc.
The definition of communism I've already mentioned is one of those theories, but you're arguing it isn't real. An economic system where there is no private ownership of the means of production. That's it, no discussion about social classes or anything.
Other alternatives span a range from no private ownership of anything (normally it's just the means of production) to group ownership rather than being some sort of universal system.
Look: you can either own means of production and be part of the ruling class, or you can not own any and be forced to sell your labor for the rest of your life. A social welfare state is something that purposely built by the ruling class to further their interests, with some concessions to past union efforts.
That's not what socialism is, trust me, I live in a country with one of the oldest and strongest Social Democratic impact in the world, and while the effects of that are still nice today they do not change anything about the fact that a huge majority works to enrich a tiny minority, and Social Democrats like you have never seriously put an effort into changing that, historically.
Communism in the strictest sense is the means of production are owned by the state.
The classless doctrine was proposed by Marx and is often inferred when talking about communism.
You can absolutely have a communist society with a caste system.
Someone better tell the anarcho-communists
Not off to a great start. "Common ownership" is not synonymous with "owned by the state." There's lots of ways to set up a government such that the means of production are owned by the state and almost none of them are communism.
Yes, Marx was the political philosopher who described a possible outcome of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and is the de facto reference point for discussion about communism. Many subsequent people have built off those ideas or arrived at similar conclusions from another angle but it's good practice to specify which when it's important. Marxism-Leninism, anarchist communism, Luxemburgism, whatever. Marxist communism is indeed inferred without other context.
You can have a communist movement with a caste system but a communist society is classless by definition. It is post-scarcity and utopian. It might be literally impossible for humans to organize in such a way in significant numbers but moving toward that ideal is the unifying philosophy of all communist movements.