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Finally, a quick word about distribution. How should goods be allocated to individuals? Marx’s dictum that each would contribute according to their ability, but receive according to need obviously anticipates a world in which everyone willingly pulls their weight—they do what they can. They do not …

Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, or an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. (M. 187)

One important dispute revolved around Marx and the leading anarchist Bakunin. Marx had argued that after the revolution there must be a period of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in order to expunge from society those still existing elements of the capitalist economy. But sooner or later this revo…

The idea of the economics first model is that just as feudal economics gave way to capitalist economics long before feudal politics was overturned, capitalist economics would fall to communist economics, before the communist political revolution. Here is one way of developing this idea. At a time o…

[...] Marx suggests that social classes do not develop until there is a possibility of productive surplus; that is, not until an individual human being, on average, can produce more than he or she needs in order to survive. Once surplus is possible, this also opens up the possibility of one group, …