Socialism/Communism analogs in the 19th century or before

How early could a radically egalitarian ideology similar to socialism arise in history? I remember a Byzantium TL with something about a city-state (Thessalonica?) like city nominally under Constantinople's control but merely paying taxes and not much else, whose upper-class was purge and its wealth redistributed.

Were there any such movements in OTL? What form could they take?
 
What exactly do you require? Is atheism a necessary component? Industrial labor? A modern centralised state?
If so, then the earliest is really somewhere around the late 18th century; like a different course of the French Revolution.
If some or all of the above are not compulsory, then OTL provides lots of examples of radically egalitarian societies with an emphasis on communality: many societies we label as "tribal", from the Americas over Eastern Africa to Central and Northern Asia, were organised on the principles of common ownership of land and participatory decision-making, where some individuals sometimes distinguished themselves and were revered by others because of some inspiration they had (shamans...) or because of their military prowess in fights against other tribes, but neither of these led to hereditary classes or to great material differences.
A little more complex, we had various classical Indian mahajanapadas with a democratic political outlook and corporative economic structures which had collective control and quasi-religious producer ethos instead of competition and profit-drive. Much later, European guild-led towns sometimes came close to this, but not quite.
Then, there are of course countless religious communities, from Buddhist sanghas to Christian monastic orders, which adhered to radically egalitarian principles. You could count all of Early Christianity into this fold if you wanted to. Later sects like the Paulicians, the Bogumils, and the Hussites wanted to implement this nation-wide, while other groups lingered merely on the verge of heresy by practicisng communal life and ownership without seeking to include everyone, like the Beghines and the Beghards, the Fraticelli etc.
Later, England had the Diggers.
There are tons of examples I have glossed over now, question is: what exactly are you looking for?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Taking into account that it's never going to be exactly the same as socialism/communism as we know it, radical egalitarian movements did exist since time immemorial. I'm mostly familiar with ancient history. For instance, in that conext you might look at the school of Agrarianism of ancient China. Its adherents believed in utopian communalism and egalitarianism. Their ideal king would be a man who worked the fields alongside his subjects, and he is not paid: exactly like the peasants, he lives off the profits of his own manual labour. They also argued for the fixing of prices, basically saying that all goods of the same sort, regardless of quality etc., must always have the same, unchanging price determined by the state.

Ideas such as those appear and re-appear time and again.
 
A modern Centralised State, principles of common ownership of land and participatory decision-making. I'd rather the example not be a religious order or something to that effect, but I won't reject anything with a religious background or the participation of religious figures.
 
Well, Marx wrote in the mid-19th century, and some groups (Rousseau, part of the jacobins) may be considered predecessors.

In my Chaos TL, Britain becomes Socialist in the mid-19th century too. It's less centralized than OTL Communism, though.
 
OK, so if you want a modern centralised state, then by definition the modern age is the time frame. (Byzantine microstates are out of the picture then.)
My earliest bet is a stable French Revolution gaining traction in the countryside before it radicalises.
More realistic options only arise later with a larger labour movement, see @Reydan 's timeline about a successful Paris Commune.
 
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Mazdak since his movement was seen as proto-Socialist.
I love Mazdakism, but was the Sassanid Empire really a modern centralised state?
The Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381.
Lots of peasant revolt would fit a looser description, but the OP has asked for something more specific now. The Peasant Revolt of 1381, like most other peasant revolts of the European Middle Ages, lacked centralisation (which was why they failed, too).
 
A modern Centralised State, principles of common ownership of land and participatory decision-making. I'd rather the example not be a religious order or something to that effect, but I won't reject anything with a religious background or the participation of religious figures.

OK, so if you want a modern centralised state, then by definition the modern age is the time frame. (Byzantine microstates are out of the picture then.)
My earliest bet is a stable French Revolution gaining traction in the countryside before it radicalises.
More realistic options only arise later with a larger labour movement, see @Reydan 's timeline about a successful Paris Commune.

I have to agree with @Salvador79 [thanks for the shout-out]. If you want a 'modern Centralised State' then none of these earlier proto-socialist groups fit your bill. You only got a modern centralised state in the nineteenth-century, really, and up until then socialists were often agrarian, communalist, and resistant of authority. Remember, like any political persuasion its a product of its time - you can only have a socialism that espouses a modern centralised state, realistically, when such states exist more generally.
 
I have to agree with @Salvador79 [thanks for the shout-out]. If you want a 'modern Centralised State' then none of these earlier proto-socialist groups fit your bill. You only got a modern centralised state in the nineteenth-century, really, and up until then socialists were often agrarian, communalist, and resistant of authority. Remember, like any political persuasion its a product of its time - you can only have a socialism that espouses a modern centralised state, realistically, when such states exist more generally.
To be fair, the Sasanids, while clearly and emphatically running nothing like a modern centralised state ("confederacy" is a word that has been used for their polity, with reasonable ground) tried as hard as they could in their later phase to create one (which arguably led to their downfall). And Mazdakism in some form was possibly trying to adapt to be the underpinning ideology of such a state.
Now, both the ERE and some roughly contemporary versions of China were probably significantly more centralised than that (Christianity probably contributed a lot to it in the ERE, as I think Confucianism did in China though I know less about it).
Tawatinsuyu was also as highly centralized as it possibly could given structural constraints.
 
Though unsure how plausible it is an interesting TL worth exploring would be for ATL modern Socialism/Communism to be directly linked historically to much earlier proto-socialist/communist movements as far back as Mazdak in Sassanid Persia, Houji's Agriculturalism in ancient China or ancient Greece rather than as a unique phenomena that in OTL only appeared after the upheaval of the French Revolution as a political doctrine.
 
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