AHC: 19th Century communist state

Your challenge is relatively straightforward: with a POD after the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto, have a communist state be founded before the year 1900. It doesn't necessarily have to last long, just exist for a time.
 
Paraguay is perhaps a good choice for the possibility. They had a history of their post-independence Caudillos taking a loose stance on property rights and isolating the country while they ran a relatively communal economy. Then, you have the disaster that is the Paraguayan War that killed off such a huge proportion of the country, which already had a weak upper class and no real middle class to speak off. It was by far the most statist and insular of the Latin American New Republics.

Afterwards, you had fights between liberal exiles who sided with the Allies in the war, and the Colorado faction loyal to the memory of Lopez. But there is no reason why either side had to turn out the way that it did. The Legionnaire Liberal faction would have been aware of Marxist ideas from its time in Buenos Aires, and the Colorado faction, with its worship of the memory of Lopez and Francia, might have tried to continue it had it not been so cash poor that it had to resort to selling off land and dismantling the project.

Perhaps it would be prone to takeover by a Stalin type figure who comes up with Socialism in One Country early on. Marxist Internationalism was out of the question, but a Communist state? The ground work was already done for that.
 
Not really a communist state in the typical sense, the commune held elections and protected private property for example.
This brings up a question then: when one says "communist state" what are you looking for exactly. Since especially during this period Marxism, Socialism, Anarchism, and so on were very much being founded and not yet developed fully. So things could change. But then again it goes back to what you or the OP is looking for exactly.
 
This brings up a question then: when one says "communist state" what are you looking for exactly. Since especially during this period Marxism, Socialism, Anarchism, and so on were very much being founded and not yet developed fully. So things could change. But then again it goes back to what you or the OP is looking for exactly.
This raises the question if leninism and stalinism could came to be without WWI.
 
Well it wouldn’t be called Leninism or Stalinism since the USSR wouldn’t exist
I mean similar ideologies, not simple name changes. I think that without WWI ideologies like leninism and stalinism wouldnt take power and marxism would probable continue to be a western phenomena and keep developing in the reformist path it was before the war. At least in europe. The third world is another story.
 
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