What is communism?
In Marxist theory, communism is the final stage of historical development: a classless, stateless society in which the means of production are held in common and goods are distributed according to need rather than contribution or ownership.
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Core tenets
- Common ownership
- All means of production are held in common by society as a whole, with no private owners and, in the final stage, no state administering them either.
- Classlessness
- The division between those who own productive property and those who sell their labor disappears entirely, along with the social classes built on that division.
- Distribution by need
- Output is distributed according to each person's need, the higher-phase principle Marx contrasted with socialism's distribution by contribution.
- Withering away of the state
- Since Marxist theory holds the state exists to manage class conflict, a classless society has no function left for the state to perform, so it dissolves rather than being abolished by force.
How it works in practice
Communism, in the sense Marx defined it, describes an endpoint Marxist theory holds has not yet been reached anywhere; what exists in practice under that name are transitional, socialist-stage economies led by communist parties.
- Vanguard party
- A disciplined political party organized to lead the working class through the revolutionary and transitional socialist period, a structure Lenin developed rather than Marx himself.
- Central planning, transitional
- State planning bodies set production and allocate goods during the socialist stage that Marxist theory treats as preceding communism proper.
- Collectivized agriculture and industry
- Land and major industry are brought under state or collective ownership as an early step in the transition Marxist parties pursued.
Common variants
- Marxism-Leninism
- The specific interpretation, developed by Lenin and later Stalin, that guided the Soviet Union and most twentieth-century communist states, emphasizing a vanguard party and centralized planning.
- Maoism
- Adapts Marxist theory to a largely agrarian society, emphasizing the peasantry rather than an industrial working class as the primary revolutionary force.
- Council communism
- A minority current within Marxist thought that rejected the vanguard party model, favoring direct control of production by workers' councils instead.
What it is often confused with
Communism, in Marx's own definition, refers to a stateless final stage. In everyday usage, it usually means something else entirely: an existing one-party state governed by a communist party.
Criticisms and debates
Criticism of communism, as Marx defined the term, is complicated by the fact that no state has ever claimed to have reached it; most criticism in practice targets the socialist-stage, party-led states built in its name.
Austrian economics
Applies the same calculation problem raised against socialism with additional force: a fully stateless, priceless system of common ownership would have no mechanism at all, not even a state planner, for signaling what to produce.
Response: Marxist theorists respond that Marx described communism as arising only after productive abundance made scarcity-driven calculation unnecessary, a precondition critics argue has never existed, making the objection more about feasibility than about the internal logic of the goal.
Historical critique
Points out that every government that has called itself communist has instead built a centralized, one-party state with substantial political repression, arguing this is a predictable result of vesting a vanguard party with total control over the economy during the transition.
Response: Some Marxist and socialist thinkers, particularly council communists and democratic socialists, agree the Leninist vanguard-party model produced authoritarian outcomes, and argue this reflects a specific implementation choice rather than a necessary feature of Marx's original theory.
Incentive critique
Argues that distribution according to need, detached entirely from individual contribution, removes any incentive to work, a problem distinct from the ordinary planning-calculation critique.
Response: Marxist theory responds that this objection assumes scarcity-era psychology persists after the material abundance Marx held was a precondition for communism, at which point work would no longer need to be incentivized by material reward.
Historical examples
- Soviet Union's own self-description
- The USSR's constitution described the country as a socialist state, still building toward communism, never as having achieved it, consistent with Marxist theory's own staging.
- The Paris Commune, 1871
- A short-lived, worker-led government Marx and Engels cited approvingly as an early practical example of working-class political power, though it predates and does not itself constitute the stateless final stage they described.
Sources
- 1.Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
- 2.Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. 1875.
- 3.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Karl Marx. Section on historical materialism and the stages of communist society.
- 4.Encyclopaedia Britannica. Communism.