A communist society, in Marx's mature account, is a classless and stateless order in which the means of production are held in common, commodity production and money have disappeared, and production is organized by a free association of producers according to a common plan. Its distributive principle is 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Marx wrote little about its institutional detail, and much of what is attributed to him is inference. The vision is therefore best read not as a blueprint but as a limiting concept that specifies what must be abolished for human emancipation to be possible.
The Negative Image: What Communism Abolishes
The classless society is defined first by negations. Marx is clearer about what communism ends than about what it builds, and the negations are not incidental. Each corresponds to a structure of domination identified in his critique of capitalism, and each is meant to be overcome together with the others.
Class, state, and the party
Class is abolished because private ownership of the means of production is abolished. With no owning class, there is no exploited class, and the state—which Marx and Engels treat as an instrument of class rule—loses its function. Engels's phrase 'withering away of the state' names this process. The withering is not a policy to be enacted; it is the consequence of the disappearance of classes. Lenin's State and Revolution elaborates the thesis, arguing that the proletarian state begins to wither immediately after the revolution, but Marx's own account places the completion of the process in the higher phase.
Commodity production, money, and wage labour
Communist society abolishes commodity production: goods are not produced for exchange but for use. Money disappears because there is nothing to buy or sell. Wage labour disappears because labour is no longer a commodity. The free association of producers replaces the market as the mechanism of coordination. This is the most radical element of the vision, and the one that generates the sharpest economic objections. It is also the element that distinguishes communism most clearly from social democracy, which retains markets and commodity production while redistributing their proceeds.
The abolition of the division of labour
In The German Ideology, Marx imagines a society in which no one has an exclusive sphere of activity, and one can hunt, fish, rear cattle, or criticize in the afternoon. The passage is often read literally, but its point is the abolition of the enforced division between mental and manual labour. The 'enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour' is a condition of the higher phase, not merely a moral ideal. This connects to the idea of all-round development, which Marx treats as both a precondition and a result of communism.
The Positive Image: Free Association and Distribution by Need
The positive content is thinner and more contested. Marx gives a principle of distribution, a conception of labour, and a distinction between two realms of life. Each is philosophically loaded, and each depends on conditions that Marx does not fully specify.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
The formula appears in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. It presupposes abundance: needs can be the criterion of distribution only if meeting them does not require rationing scarce goods. It also presupposes a transformation of needs themselves, so that they are not artificially inflated by commodity production. Marx does not specify who interprets needs or how conflicts between needs are resolved. That silence is a genuine gap, not merely a stylistic choice, and it is one source of the charge that the vision is underdetermined.
Labour as life's prime need
In the higher phase, labour is said to become 'life's prime need' rather than merely a means of life. This is not a claim that work becomes pleasant. It is a claim that the alienated character of labour is overcome: production is under the conscious control of producers, and the product confronts them no longer as an alien power. The claim depends on the abolition of exploitation, not on the abolition of effort. Whether the transformation is psychologically plausible is a separate question, and one on which Marx offers little evidence.
The realm of freedom and the realm of necessity
In Capital volume three, Marx distinguishes the realm of necessity—the sphere of material production required to sustain life—from the realm of freedom, which begins beyond it. Communism does not abolish necessity; it reorganizes it so that the associated producers control it. The realm of freedom is the development of human capacities as an end in itself. This is a more sober picture than the image of unending abundance, and it implies that even communism requires labour, organization, and the overcoming of obstacles.
The communist image is not a picture of the future but a test of the present: it asks what would have to change for labour to become a purpose rather than a price.
The Conditions of Possibility: Abundance and Transformation
Marx insists that communism is not a moral ideal to be imposed but a historical possibility that depends on material conditions. The conditions are demanding, and their demandingness is itself an argument. A vision that requires abundance, transformed human beings, and a dissolving state is not a program for the near term.
Material abundance and the development of productive forces
The higher phase requires that 'all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.' This means a level of development sufficient to meet needs without rationing. Marx inherited a nineteenth-century faith in industrial productivity that has not been borne out uniformly across the world. If abundance is the condition, and abundance is not global, then communism is at best a possibility for rich societies—and even there, ecological limits complicate the picture. The vision does not specify how abundance is to be achieved or sustained.
The transformation of human beings
Communism requires not only transformed institutions but transformed people. The 'all-round development of the individual' is a condition as well as a result. Marx seems to think that changing relations of production will produce the required transformation, but this is one of the least specified parts of his theory. The circularity—communism requires communist people, who are produced by communism—is a standard objection, and it is not clear that Marx has an answer to it.
The transitional phase and the withering away of the state
Between capitalism and communism lies socialism, the 'first phase,' in which the means of production are socialized but bourgeois right and the state persist. Lenin calls this the dictatorship of the proletariat. The withering away of the state belongs to the higher phase. The historical record of the twentieth century shows that the transitional phase can entrench itself, producing a powerful state rather than a dissolving one. This does not refute the vision, but it shifts the burden of proof onto those who claim the transition is automatic.
The Objections: Calculation, Incentives, and Power
The vision has been attacked on economic and political grounds. The economic objections target the feasibility of coordination without markets; the political objections target the feasibility of power without a state. Neither set of objections is decisive by itself, but together they define the terms of the debate.
The economic calculation problem
Mises and Hayek argued that without market prices for capital goods, planners cannot compare opportunity costs or aggregate dispersed knowledge. The economic calculation problem applies to any system that abolishes commodity production, including Marx's vision. Marx did not address it in detail, because he did not think a socialist economy would face the same coordination problem. Whether he was right remains disputed; the historical performance of command economies is not encouraging, though it does not settle the question for all possible institutional designs.
Incentives and the free-rider problem
If distribution is according to need and labour is not compelled, what prevents free riding? Marx's answer is that labour will have become life's prime need and that social solidarity will replace compulsion. Critics reply that this is a psychological prediction without evidence. The objection is not decisive—experiments in communal organization exist—but the scale required is unprecedented, and the transition from motivated individuals to a whole society is exactly what needs to be explained.
The political problem of utopianism
The vision has also been criticized for its silence on institutions. A society without a state still needs to make collective decisions, adjudicate disputes, and coordinate production. Marx says little about how. This silence is not accidental: he feared that detailed blueprints would become instruments of domination. But the absence of institutional design makes the vision vulnerable to the charge that it is a negation rather than a program. The twentieth-century outcome—party-states that claimed to be transitional—gave the charge historical force.
What the Vision Still Does
The vision's value is not predictive but critical. It specifies a standard against which existing societies can be judged: whether labour is a commodity, whether production is controlled by producers, whether need or profit determines allocation, and whether the state serves class power. These are questions, not answers, and their value does not depend on the feasibility of the society that frames them.
A regulative idea rather than a blueprint
Kant's notion of a regulative idea is useful here. A regulative idea is not a description of an achievable state but a principle that guides inquiry and action. Marx's communist society functions this way: it directs attention to the structures that would have to change, without specifying the institutions that would replace them. Read this way, the vision is neither refuted by history nor confirmed by it. It is a standard of critique, and its force depends on the accuracy of the critique rather than on the feasibility of the alternative.
The unresolved question of scarcity and power
What remains unresolved is whether the conditions Marx specified can be met, and whether the abolition of one form of power does not simply create another. The vision assumes that the state is a class instrument and that abolishing classes abolishes the state. If the state has other sources—administration, expertise, coercion—then the withering away of the state is not automatic. This is the most serious open question, and it is the one on which the plausibility of the vision depends. The evidence of actually existing communism suggests that the question is not merely theoretical.