Pre-Marxist communism

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement in 1848, similar ideas had already been used as a base for one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind as primitive communism and also researched pre-existing communistic experiences such as the Paris Commune. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop, and thus only then did communism slip from being the dominant form of society.