Stateless communism, also known as pure communism, is the post-capitalist stage of society which Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 predicted would inevitably result from the development of the productive forces. Stateless communism is closely related and connected to world communism

World communism

World communism, also known as international communism or global communism, is the terminal stage of development of the history of communism in Marxist theory. It has also usually been equated to the Comintern . This is the meaning that typically and historically has been meant by opponents of...

.

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.

• Anarchists and Marxists both agree on the long-term desirability of a stateless society
  Stateless society
  A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority; most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power and are generally not permanently held positions; and social bodies that resolve disputes through...
  
  , 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.

See also

• Anarchist Communism
  Anarchist communism
  Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
  
  
• Free association of producers
  Free association (communism and anarchism)
  In the anarchist, Marxist and socialist sense, free association is a kind of relation between individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, in a society that had abolished the private property of means of production...
  
  
• Proletarian internationalism
  Proletarian internationalism
  Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is a Marxist social class concept based on the view that capitalism is now a global system, and therefore the working class must act as a global class if it is to defeat it...
  
  
• Socialism (Marxism)
  Socialism (Marxism)
  In Marxist theory, socialism, or the socialist mode of production, refers to a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that eventually supersede capitalism...
  
  
• Workers of the world, unite!
  Workers of the world, unite!
  The political slogan Workers of the world, unite! is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto , by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
  
  
• World revolution
  World revolution
  World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class...