Communism

Communism is the real movement to sublate the present state of things, in other words to move history forward. It also refers to the socialist mode of production which comes after capitalism, developing as the resolution of the contradiction between social productive forces and private ownership of the means of production.

Haz gave this explanation:

Communism is simple.

Society is divided into classes, yet objectively, there is a single interdependent totality of labor.

Communism gives this totality common purpose, while eradicating those classes - capitalists, landlords, bankers - that only exist by parasitizing it.

The "totality of labor" refers to the social productive forces. They only gain common purpose when held as common property of the people.

Dialectical materialism

In general, the productive forces give rise to a set of property relations, corresponding to the character of the productive forces, and most suitable to production. For example, when the peasantry each had their own plot of land, and were mostly self-sufficient, the corresponding, most efficient property relations would be private property. But the productive forces are constantly changing, first in quantity and then in quality, while property relations can only change in quality, all at once. For example, the peasants wanted private property, but they were held under feudal relations. Hence, the classes with an interest in advancing production via new property relations will revolt and usually defeat the classes holding back production via old property relations.

Today, the productive forces are extremely social, and planned at a high level. Yet the old relations of private property persist and hold back production. Essentially, production is held back because capital requires the proletariat to be poor so that they keep working. (Capital must pay for their entire quality of life, so it is more profitable for them to work long hours than have free time.) Instead of building material wealth for the proletariat, the bourgeois invest in war, planned obsolescence, poisoning and deceiving consumers, etc. When automation arrives, instead of reducing working hours, the bourgeois lay off workers, and they have no work to do - this is unproductive. Those workers are eventually reintegrated into the economy, but as service workers, who do not produce anything except convenience, mostly for the bourgeois.

Communism as the real movement

Communism is often falsely portrayed as an ideal social system, utopia, etc, but this is contradicted by Marx himself:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which sublates the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

According to dialectical materialism, this movement must rely on the class with an interest in advancing production via new, socialist property relations, which is the proletariat. Hence, Engels said:

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

The goal of Communism is to liberate the proletariat. Any measures taken to that effect are Communist.

Sublation of the present state of things

The principal word here is sublate, a translation of aufheben, a technical philosophical term used by Hegel which basically means to cancel and preserve simultaneously. This is usually translated as "abolish", which has been interpreted incorrectly by many as the destruction of all past traditions. In fact, communism is the highest stage of all human tradition. Unlike the anti-traditionalists, communism recognizes the necessity and good elements of many past traditions, and unlike the traditionalists, communism upholds a progress towards a higher culture. This is understood in countries like the Soviet Union and China. For example, when Marx speaks of "abolition (sublation) of the family", he means "it takes a village to raise a child", and in the future, the entire community will take part in that raising.

Pseudo-Marxists claim that talking of a "return" is fascist talk, but they clearly either haven't read Marx or didn't understand him, since Marx himself talks of communism as:

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.

That is, embracing the entire history of cultural and civilizational development, i.e. tradition, not just developments material and cultural from the capitalist epoch, although these too are of course included.

Communism as a process, not a button

"Abolition" of private property etc has also been misinterpreted as an instant transformation, but rather Marx believed that abolition/sublation was a process.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Communism arising out of modernity

Modernity, particularly in its later stages, comes in the form of the mode of production that is Capitalism. The human being, the worker, was atomized as just another cog in the machine, all of the cultural, social, and traditional, aspects of human life were abstracted into nothing, and world stopped making any sense to humanity. Society was not ruled based on cultural, social, traditional characteristics of each society, which had been the case for thousands of years. Instead society as a whole began to be ruled by the dollar, the need to make profit triumphing over all others at this time. Communism began as a mass movement that would return to the traditions, cultural, and social, aspects of humanity, without compromising the material progress made by modernity. In other words, production would no longer be incompatible with the majority of people's lives. This movement would lead to some kind of mode of production in which we would work for humanity: Socialism.

The original Communist movements at this time had no social science or in-depth analysis of material conditions, but were based on idealism, "If I want something It will happen" the idealist says, despite the fact that real, material, or concrete realities would probably not be able to fit what you "want." Many of these Communist movements believed that we can somehow go from point A to point B, easily. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels disagreed. They believed that we can't simply go from point A to point B, we can't go from one mode of production to another, simply based on will. They believed that there were (and are) real material forces and contradictions within this world that allow Capitalism to exist the way it does, that leads to it's demise, and to the awakening of a new mode of productions, not ideas, or metaphysics. The science in question, used by Marx and Engels, that allowed them to make such a claim was called Dialectical Materialism. This science, combined with communist or socialist politics is called Scientific Socialism.