Part of the Politics series on

Communism

Concepts Common ownership Egalitarianism Classless society Class struggle Proletarian internationalism World revolution

Aspects Communist state Communist party Communist revolution Communist symbolism Communism and religion History of communism

Variants Marxism Leninism Trotskyism Maoism · Juche Left communism Luxemburgism Council communism · Titoism Stalinism Castroism Guevarism Hoxhaism Anarchist communism Religious communism Eurocommunism World communism Stateless communism National communism

Internationals Communist League First International Second International Third International Fourth International

People   François-Noël Babeuf   Karl Marx   Friedrich Engels   Peter Kropotkin   Herman Gorter   Rosa Luxemburg   Antonio Gramsci   Vladimir Lenin   Leon Trotsky   Joseph Stalin   Mao Zedong   Che Guevara   Ho Chi Minh   Deng Xiaoping   Murray Bookchin   Kim Il-sung   Josip Broz Tito   Mikhail Gorbachev

Related topics Anarchism · Anti-capitalism Anti-communism Cold War Communist World Criticisms of communism Democratic centralism Dictatorship of the proletariat Left-wing politics McCarthyism New Class · New Left Post-Communism Primitive communism Scientific Communism Scientific socialism Socialism · Socialist economics Soviet Union

Communism Portal Politics portal

v • d • e

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

Marxist theory may treat world communism as utopian, but it is the transition to world communism that attracts attention. World communism is to be achieved by world revolution, according to a theory that was popular in the period 1917 to around 1933 (at least). World communism is incompatible with the existence of nation-states, so according to an older theory there will be an abolition of the state preceding world communism.

Abolition of the state is not incompatible with world revolution, but is not in itself a distinctively Marxist doctrine. It was held by various socialist and anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century. An apparent alternative is a theory going back to Karl Marx, speaking of the “withering away of the state”.

The crux here is a text of Friedrich Engels, from his Anti-Dühring. It is often cited as "The state is not 'abolished,' it withers away.” This is from the pioneer work of historical materialism, a formulation of Marx’s idea of a materialist conception of history. The withering away of the state is a graphic formulation, that has passed into cliché. The translation (Engels was writing in German) is also given as: “The state is not "abolished". It dies out.”^[1] Reference to the whole passage shows that this happens only after the proletariat has seized the means of production. There has been a revolution.

The schematic is therefore revolution, transitional period, utopian period.

For Lenin the transitional period, which for Engels was reduced to a single act, has become extended and “obviously lengthy”.^[2]. In the same place he argues strongly that Marx’s conception of communist society is not utopian, but takes into account the heritage of what came before.

This gives, at least roughly, the position on world communism as the Comintern was set up in 1919: world revolution is necessary for the setting up of world communism, but not immediately or clearly sufficient.

[edit] See also

• Proletarian internationalism
• Workers of the world, unite!
• World revolution

[edit] Notes

1. ^ [1], taken from the Emile Burns translation of the 1894 German third edition, Part III section 2. The passage was not in the first edition of 1878.
2. ^ The State and Revolution — Chapter 5