almost definitely a repost but eh
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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"A stateless utopia birthed from the continual consolidation of power in a proletariat dictatorship" gives the same vibes as trickle down economics.
As production and distribution are collectivized, class fades, and along with it the institutions needed to uphold the working class as the ruling class over capitalists, as there would be no capitalists. It doesn't mean the total erasure of administration and management.
Wake me up when they stop the endless tilting at imaginary counter-revolutionary windmills and actually do that. Somehow there's always some pesky boogeyman that requires benevolent repression. Absolute fantasy that class could ever fade when guns and politicians exist.
"Administrators" are your trickle down "Job Creators"
Class is not administration, and there has never been global socialism to begin with so there hasn't been a point free from capitalism's antagonization.
If a group of people calls the shots they have inherent power and form their own class. You write this problem off via a bedrock axiom starting that a vanguard party is and always will be representative of the proletariat masses. That's fundamentally impossible, humans don't organize or behave like that on historical time scales.
If a new political force cannot supercede their control and externally correct value drift then your system cannot evolve. If you can't correct for that other than by saying "better representation will emerge" then you're flat out anti-revolutionary; a reformist in wolf's clothing.
Administration in socialist countries is not as simple as "a group of people that call the shots and form their own class." Administration is economically compelled by large-scale production, and is to be made accountable via robust systems of democracy. Further, in collectivized production, there isn't the same mechanism built-in for profits and creating whole industries for luxury for the few like there is in capitalism.
To the contrary of your point, systems must evolve, there isn't a way to stop it. Everything is in motion, and history builds up. There are no static systems, you don't enter the same river twice, yada yada. It's not about "better representation emerging," it's about deliberately understanding how the structure of the mode of production impacts how society is run.
What comes after this fabled stateless society? If it isn't a stable system with no possible need for correction then what prevents the re-emergence of states?
The benefits of states are self evident: your immediate group benefits from the use of force to leverage and exploit others. The benefits of remaining stateless are entirely intangible and abstracted.
When a catastrophic event forces your hand, subjugation of your neighbors may be the only way for your populace to survive. One solar flare or meteor or mega volcano and your carefully plotted administration is in the shitter. It's survival of the ruthless and we're off to the races again.
This archaic attempt at dissecting the complexity of human existence into a mathematical and controllable roadmap is absurd. Wake up, it's not the 19th century; we've known better for a while now. Let's fix the world we have instead of having you spending 12.7k comments naval gazing about ideology and which tin pot dictators need our "critical support". I pray to God you're at least cashing a paycheck for that drivel.
The basis of the state is class society. The state did not exist in communalism, nor would it exist in communism. Society will continue to evolve and change in communism, yes, but production will not see the re-emergence of classes just as we are not going to see the re-emergence of creating fire with hand-drills.
The state is not an independent force, it is thoroughly enmeshed in the relations of production. In a collectivized economy, there is no economic basis for the state. Your comment is just a mischaracterization of me and Marxism in general. I never said there was a clear roadmap, but I do agree, it is the 21st century. We have learned better than liberalism, and know that socialism works better than capitalism. I don't get paid to be a communist, I pay dues.
That's a lot of words to abstract and obfuscate the reality that HUMAN HISTORY BEGAN STATELESS. These power structures weren't schemed up in prehistory by some mustache twirling villains, they are emergent when humans embark on the task of organizing larger and larger groups to fulfill the needs of a sedentary civilization. You can't eliminate one and keep the other.
Just waving a socialist wand to reset the class hierarchy doesn't change anything. We still have the same naked apes extracting the same finite resources on the same planet.
[Here's where you respond by citing dead philosophers and social theorists or the inbred revisions of their theory]
None of this is based in any actual hard science. Hell, the ink wasn't even dry on Darwin's work while Marx and Engels were writing the magnum opus of their foundational theory. They had no idea what the human animal really is or how it functions. Lenin wrote and died long before the seeds of game theory were planted or any mathematical modeling was explored. Mao et. al wrote and died before massive leaps in biology, ecology, physics, information theory, etc...
At every step along the way the theory becomes more divorced from reality and clings to pedigree for authority. We have an incredible amount of knowledge to build on but you're stuck clinging to a twisted knot of circular logic because of who wrote the first draft. It is, as the post says, political theology fermenting in real time.
Declaring that humans must behave differently by slightly reorganizing them or putting different labels on who owns what is pitiful. You'd laugh at someone citing the old testament for social theory but uncritically do the same with a work so far removed from the modern politics that it may as well be from 0 C.E. Saying "X wouldn't happen because [I'm declaring] there's no incentive for X" is as ludicrous as "Breaking X commandment degrades society because [I'm declaring] it's against human nature".
The fact that you pay dues only makes every comment more pitiful. You are truly a lost soul grasping for higher meaning, wandering into each post to peddle your pamphlets on the Good Word. Go touch some grass and develop your own thoughts.
I outright stated that human history began stateless, I said communalism was stateless, ie tribal society. I didn't abstract or obfuscate anything. As production grows it centralizes, and over time this will result in democratization and collectivization as the workers and owners conflict with each other until production is collectively run and planned. This isn't some absurd idea, it's based on the trends we observe in capitalism and what we know of socialism.
The rest of your comment is an incoherent rant against a strawman you invented, I suggest you take your own advice you gave at the end.
There is absolutely zero, zilch, nada proof that this is an accurate projection. But here you are just stating it as fact and declaring you've won. This entire political theory was couched in the industrial revolution, where growing masses of workers were the only way to extract and process what was thought of as a functionally limitless bounty of resources.
Well it's now the 21st century. A technological explosion has fundamentally fractured all assumptions a political theorist might have made 200 years ago.
What about this shows a likely march to a socialist utopia? How is that more likely than a quiet, gradual culling as we slip into technocratic neo-feudalism? And when that collapses with the relentless grind of entropy, why would our atrophied class consciousness not slide is back to tribalism?
How can a theory built on the broad rational collective goals of entire classes be distilled to predict the self-serving (and often irrational) behavior of the few hundred who will control the future? The answer is irrational faith in ideology, revising the sacred texts to ensure we must be on track to ~~Rapture~~ communist utopia. You have absolutely no footing to make these projections.
As for my last part being a strawman, it emphatically is not. We've literally had this conversation several times and I've seen you argue a dozen more. Every response you have is a regurgitation of some link to a blog or official party-sanctioned rhetoric. Pointing out any hypocrisy or an official "AES" policy that explicitly runs counter to your stated socialist messaging gets shut down with genetic fallacies or shifting blame to capitalism. You have never provided any outright criticism or even questioning of any party policy or messaging, there's not an original thought in your post history.
Nothing you've said contradicts Marxism-Leninism, though. You hopped up on a soapbox, railing against people that don't exist. We know it's the 21st century, socialism works, and is guiding the most rapidly developing economies like the PRC right now. Marxism has grown and evolved, and the basic critiques and tools laid out in Marx's time have proven their usefulness when tested to practice.
As far as I know, this is the first time we've spoken. I don't remember you, but I do know that this is a misrepresentation of me. It's an incoherent rant against a strawman, just like your comment here as well.
Holy fucking hell, the material conditions described RADICALLY ALTER THE FUNDAMENTAL FOUNDATION OF YOUR THEORIES. You can't just say "they don't contradict anything" when the basic interaction of humans and the control they exert has radically fucking changed. It's not possible to present any worldview integrating all these facts because you're trying to apply broad-brush classical political physics to the unknowable future decisions of a shrinking handful of rulers and drained resources. Don't worry though, ~~God~~ Lenin works in mysterious ways.
"Socialism works". Sure does when you can slap the label on any old country without critically examining how they operate or how much they deviate from the stated core goals and road map of a socialist project. If the CCP determines that the only way to maintain control in a shrinking geopolitical landscape is to sedate 1/3 of the population and violently repress 1/3, how does that functionally differ from their post-capitalist neighbors doing the same? Is there any social progress to be made in such a state? But utopia soon ™️, just have to sink to new lows to match our neighbors.
And again, not a strawman when you can go to your history and read our convo to see yourself posting the same links and toeing the same party line verbatim. But if you don't want to that's fine. Just say I'm incoherent and confirm that you don't have a sound response to the basic facts of life in 2025.
Time has moved on from the industrial revolution, yes. At the same time, the basic analytical tools of Marxism, such as historical materialism, have not become outdated. Analysis of capitalism along the law of value, analysis of circulation, reporduction on an expanded scale, the centralization of production, all have become increasingly relevant. The differences between then and now do not invalidate Marxism, because Marxism was not soley applicable to a snapshot in history.
Lenin isn't god, either. Lenin analyzed imperialism, for example, which is extremely relevant today and is the driving force of western economies. He isn't a god, he was just a man that accurately described existing processes that fundamentally describe the driving forces of existing economies in the west.
No idea what fanfiction you're referencing with regards to China. It's supported by over 90% of the population even when western polling organizations are gathering the data. It's socialist because public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, ie it governs the large firms and key industries, not because of something like "labels."
If our past conversation was you making a bunch of strawmen and getting extremely angry online, then I don't think I need to go back and see it, I think I've already seen the extent you're willing to participate in good-faith (not at all).
Except they become the new capitalists. They would develop an interest in maintaining their position as administrators and as administrators would have the means even if it conflicts with everyone else's interests. They'd become the new upper class.
Also, I'm surprised you didn't point out that the "withering of the state" was Friedrich Engels' idea technically. Not Marx.
No, they would not become the new capitalists. Collectivized production is based on allocation of labor, means of labor, and distribution of goods and services based on needs and in some cases "labor vouchers." An administrator in such a system is entitely distinct from a capitalist. Even in capitalism, managers are not capitalists and do not play the same role.
Capitalism is predicated on circulation of commodities, and constant reproduction on an expanded scale with profit as the motivator. Capitalists aren't capitalists because they manage, but because they use their money, cast it into the market like a net (buying means of labor and labor-power), and return said net with greater sums of money. Such a system is completely incompatible with collectivized production.
As for the withering of the state, Marx came up with the concept. Engels merely came up with the phrase.
I wasn't saying administrators would become capitalists in the strictest definition, but in the fact that they'd become a class distinct from the rest of the proletariat. You'd still have a state enforced hierarchical structure that has its own interests. It just wont be structured around facilitating various corporations and their profits. You can argue that's an improvement over capitalism, but to suggest the state will naturally wither away in such a system is naive at best and a manipulative lie at worst.
Where did Marx originally describe the idea?
I'm aware of what you meant. Administration isn't a class, and is not based on domination of the means of production through ownership, but is merely a necessary part of the production process. Further, the proletariat wouldn't exist either, proletarians are specifically wage laborers that sell their labor to capitalists, what we are discussing is classless society.
As for Marx and the concept of the state withering, I'm unaware of the first mentionings of it, but the idea can be found all the way back in Economic Manuscripts of 1844:
Engels was great at writing and contributed a great deal to the development of Marx's thought, but even before co-writing Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx had already had a fairly developed conception of the negation of the state, as a student of Hegel.
I'm not much of a fan of Engels, as I noticed of what I've read of him that his works or works involving him tend towards subtly implying (or even explicitly stating) top down structures and authoritarianism is initially necessary to achieve communism in the ways he frames his analysis. Something that Marx seemed generally more mixed or neutral on when he wrote independently of Engels depending on how late in his writings you look.
Regardless, having access to the controls that gives one power over economic value and the ability to exploit that power, even if its not through ownership its still under their control. For example, someone who runs a non-profit organization but uses all the grant money to build a clubhouse for them and their friends rather than something broadly socially beneficial is exploiting the people who actually generated the value for the grant money in the first place, even if the clubhouse is not the administrator's by deed.
I work for a non-profit. I know a lot of decisions above me get made because its more beneficial for leadership or even employees rather than the greater community.
Why is a class based society bad? Why is it harmful? My personal answer is that it just results in a generally worse world for people through taking away control over their own lives as they end up largely dictated by capitalists. If the system you aim to replace classes with reproduces many of those same kinds of consequences for the average person but just changes who's in charge then its not really what I would describe as a meaningfully better world. Its the same shit but with a different color palette.
I'm not convinced a state with its own self interest would ever permit its power to "wither". That doesn't mean a state can't be used for good, or that states are intrinsically evil, but a state given some ideological revolutionary foundation, monopoly on violence, and a "ends justify the means" attitude towards achieving utopia and an indifference towards individuals under its power is going to commit some atrocities and historically has.
Marx and Engels have the same view on the state and its withering. Marx dedicated his later years to Capital, of course, but the two bounced their ideas off of each other and were aligned. Engels was more a student of Marx than an equal, though, as Marx was the one that truly advanced dialectics into dialectical materialism, formed historical materialism, and of course wrote Capital. The communist society envisioned by each involves full collectivization of production, which includes administration and management, but of course also includes democracy and full control by the people.
Secondly, the idea that administration can be abused in a planned and collectivized economy the same way it can be in a non-profit in the broader context is misframed. Decisions made to benefit leadership in an independent non-profit are entirely different from how, say, the post-office is run. A communist society would be far closer to how the postal service runs than a non-profit, but of course would move beyond the concept of markets and money.
Thirdly, socialism has resulted in massive uplifting of the working classes, and reductions in disparity. Capitalism and socialism have not been equals, economies where public ownership is principle have not been utopian wonderlands, of course, but have achieved far better than capitalism has for more people. Letting perfect be the enemy of good isn't something I consider a worthwhile endeavor.
Finally, the state is interlinked with the mode of production, and serves to resolve class conflicts in favor of the ruling class. In socialism, when public ownership is principle, that is the working class. The state withers as class does, but that doesn't mean it collapses into full horizontalism. What it means is that special bodies of armed people no longer have an economic compulsion to exist, without class conflict there is no class to uphold. The state doesn't "let itself wither," it erases its foundations as a tool to reconcile class distinctions.
Why would it erase something that gives those within it power? If the reason it exists is to reconcile class distinctions, it will not bother to erase class distinctions and will in fact work to make sure the justification of its existence is maintained. People with power do not willingly permit the reasons for their power to "naturally dissolve". If they must, they will manufacture a crisis to justify their continued power.
For one, administration isn't disappearing. Some positions will wither, perhaps, but production will still be collectively planned. Further, collectivization is economically compelled in systems where public ownership is principle. Your conception of the state making up reasons for its existence isn't really accurate, it isn't distinct from the mode of production but thoroughly enmeshed in it and the class struggle.