Communism and the 19th century workers' movement

As the 19th century opened, the reflection of a nascent working class on its own perspective was dominated by the magnificent but still naive ideas of the Utopian socialists: Fourier, Robert Owen, and others. But the workers' movement won to its cause one of the century's greatest thinkers: Karl Marx. And in terms of thinking about the communist project, the rest of the century was largely dominated by the development of marxism, and by two great revolutionary efforts by the proletariat: the 1848 revolutions, and above all, the Paris Commune.