Millennial empire, the future state of ancient Christianity: the whole set of desires visions and expectations connected to the emergence of this new society in the early Christian sects was called chiliastic. Many Christian masters, Ireneus, Lactantius and others depicted the upcoming bright paradise. However Christianity gradually changed. As more and more mighty and wealthy people adopted Christianity, it ceased to be the faith of impoverished, oppressed proletarians and slaves, and chiliasmus fell into disgrace in the eyes of the official Church, since it had some revolutionary taste as it predicted the collapse of existing social order. (…)

The most important feature of ancient Christian thinking was chiliasmus. However the practical aspects of early communism were not less important. (…)

Mass-impoverishment was the greatest social problem in the Roman empire and no remedy was offered. The wide-spread chiliastic expectations proposed a way out. The social basis of early Christianity was primarily the ancient proletariat which had already got unused to work. If they claimed the common distribution of property, they rather meant the common distribution of goods and not the common use of the means of production. What the ancient proletariat had in mind was the communism of consumption. Communist ideas emerged on this basis, and soon communist communities came to birth for realizing these ideas. The first communist communities appeared in the economically more developed East, especially among Jews, where apocalyptic expectations had emerged even before the Christians. The first communist sect, the essenians was established there in 100 BC. (…)

In the beginning the Christian communities aimed to introduce total communism. This type of communism primarily meant the transformation of all means of production directly to consumption goods. Had this idea become realized, this would have resulted the total elimination of production itself. (…)

 
(…) The proletariat in the Middle Ages could not be satisfied either by Roman law, or by classical literature. They found the manifestation of their claims in an other source, in the New Testament. The communism of ancient Christians, the egalitarian communism of sharing the surplus of the richer with the poor, completely satisfied their needs. Thus the communist ambitions remained within the framework of Christian, religious tradition while at the same time those clashed with the richest of the richer, the official Church which condemned the claim for general communism as satanic heresy and tried to blur the original communist elements of ancient Christian thinking. While on the one hand the attempts of establishing a society on communist principles inevitably led to heresy and to clashes with the Papal Church, on the other hand heresy, the struggle against the Church facilitated and accelerated the spread of communist ideas within the society (…) .

 
Burning Jan Hus became the declaration of war against Czechs. After the confiscation of Church-assets and mere plundering it finally led to the total collapse of the traditional social order. The time for communist sects, which were pushed underground before, has arrived. (…)

In Prague the communists were too weak to take power, and their enemies were too strong. However the situation was different in the smaller cities. `The millennial empire of Christ has arrived` -- the communist preachers proclaimed -- `and Prague will be burned and destroyed like Sodom`. (…)

Communist congregations appeared in various cities. We do not know about similar organisations in the villages. All sources indicate that communist ideas were only realised in cities, especially in Pisek, Vodnany and Tabor. In Tabor communists seized exclusive power.

Yet the communism in Tabor was limited to the needs of the poor, and did not change the mode of production. Contemporary social democracy is certain in its` final  victory exactly because the needs of the proletariat and the requirements of production tend to the same direction: the proletariat now is the conveyer of the historical development. The case was different in the 15th century. The needs of the poor reinforced the ambitions towards communist development, while the demands of production required private property. Therefore communism could not become the general organising force of society at that time, and the claim for communism among poor disappeared at the moment they attained it, and poverty has been eliminated. Yet once the claim for communism ceased to exist, communism itself had to collapse sooner or later, especially because these communities renounced the only tool that could have saved communism in such, small-scale, traditional communities: they did not obliterate monogamy, and the traditional form of family life. The Taboritans exterminated the Adamit sect, which led to the resurrection of private property, and revived greed and envy, killed the spirit of fraternity. After egalitarianism was abandoned, a division between rich and poor people re-emerged in Tabor (…).