Marx spent far more time analyzing capitalism than describing what would replace it. He thought detailed blueprints were utopian guesswork; the future would be shaped by the people who built it. Still, scattered across his writings is a recognizable picture.

Revolution

Marx expected the working class, organized and conscious of its interests, to take political power. He mostly assumed this would require revolution, since he doubted the ruling class would give up its property peacefully. But he also allowed exceptions: in an 1872 speech in Amsterdam he said workers might reach their goals by peaceful means in countries such as America, England and perhaps Holland, where democratic institutions were stronger.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

Between capitalism and communism, Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), would come a period of transition whose state could only be “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” This phrase has caused endless argument. In the nineteenth century “dictatorship” often meant the rule of a class rather than one-man rule, and Marx pointed to the Paris Commune of 1871, an elected city government run by working people, as an example. Its officials were elected, could be recalled at any time, and were paid workers' wages. Later regimes used the same phrase to justify one-party rule, which many Marxists argue betrayed Marx's meaning.

Two phases

Marx described two phases of the new society:

• The first phase, later commonly called socialism. The means of production are owned in common, but society still bears “the birthmarks of the old society.” People are rewarded according to the work they contribute.
• The higher phase, communism. Once productive forces have grown and the division between mental and physical work has faded, society could follow the principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

The withering away of the state

Because Marx saw the state as an instrument of class rule, he reasoned that once classes disappeared, the state as a separate apparatus of force would no longer be needed. Engels, in Anti-Dühring (1878), wrote that the state is not abolished but “withers away”: the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. Communism in this sense is a classless, stateless society.

What communism is not

Some common misunderstandings:

• Marx did not call for abolishing all personal property. The Manifesto targets private ownership of the means of production (factories, land, capital used to employ others), not toothbrushes or houses.
• Marx did not describe a centrally planned economy in detail. Twentieth-century planning systems were built by later leaders, drawing on his goals but filling in the specifics themselves.
• Marx expected communism to arise first in the most advanced industrial countries, not in largely agricultural ones like the Russia of 1917.

Open questions

Marx left major questions unanswered. How would a society without markets decide what to produce? How would it protect individual freedom without a state? How would it prevent a new ruling group from forming during the transition? These gaps are where much of the later debate about Marxism, and much of its tragic history, took place.

Worked example: why the Commune mattered to Marx

In March 1871, after France's defeat by Prussia, the working people of Paris took control of their city and elected a council, the Commune. It separated church and state, abolished night work in bakeries, turned abandoned workshops over to cooperatives run by their workers, and replaced the standing army with a citizens' militia. Council members could be recalled by voters at any time and were paid an ordinary worker's wage. After about two months, the French army retook the city, and thousands of Communards were killed.

In The Civil War in France (1871), Marx praised the Commune as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” What struck him was not violence but democracy: officials who were servants of the public, not a separate ruling caste.

This matters for understanding later history. When regimes in the twentieth century invoked the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to justify rule by a single party, its secret police and no recall of leaders, critics within the Marxist tradition, such as Rosa Luxemburg, protested that this was the opposite of the Commune model. Others argue that any attempt to abolish markets and private capital will require concentrated power, whatever its founders intend.