Stateless communism

Stateless communism, also known as pure communism, is the post-capitalist stage of society which Karl Marx predicted would inevitably result from the development of the productive forces. Stateless communism is closely related and connected to world communism.

Strictly speaking, pure communism is a stage of social development where material and productive forces are advanced to a degree where actual freedom (freedom from necessity, and thus from wage labor and alienation from work) for every person is possible. The state apparatus becomes redundant because classes cease to exist.^[1]

• Anarchists and Marxists both agree on the long-term desirability of a stateless society, but disagree on how such a society will emerge and on what strategy, if any, is to be used for achieving stateless communism.

• For Lenin, a classless society would be a society controlled by the direct producers, organised to produce according to socially managed goals. Such a society, Lenin suggested, would develop habits that would gradually make political representation unnecessary, as the radically democratic nature of the Soviets would lead citizens to come to agree with the representatives' style of management. Only in this environment, Lenin suggested, could the state wither away, ushering in a period of stateless communism.

• The concentration of production in state hands is a direct function of the state in its struggle to overcome class oppositions. So here we have a difference in principle in the relation between "society" and the "state", between "politics" and "economics", between the "administration of people" and the "administration of things". In such conditions the development of productive forces and the victorious course of the class struggle systematically prepare the transition to the swallowing up of the political functions of the state in administrative and economic functions, i.e. the transition to classless and stateless communist society.^[2]

See also

• Anarchist Communism
• Free association of producers
• Proletarian internationalism
• Socialism (Marxism)
• Workers of the world, unite!
• World revolution

References

1. ^ Frederick Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. 1880 Full Text. From "Historical Materialism": "State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out...Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free."
2. ^ Marxists.org