Marxist philosophers had observed in the turn of the century that because capitalism had begun to exhaust the low hanging fruit of domestic exploitation whether on a national or a continental scale, it had become
Imperialist and sought out the global exploitation of markets by
colonization and subsequent wealth extraction, and workers by the rampant
exploitation of labour. This drive for profit as the sole motivating force of the capitalist class compels class solidarity among the now international capitalist class of the world against any attempt to unify in solidarity by the now also international workers of the world, with the capitalist class' goal being to maintain profitability and thus their class' dominance as the engine and reason for the
class conflict. Recognition by people of the pain of this exploitation by capitalists inexorably unites the
proletariat of the world and necessitates international cooperation to halt the suffering of humankind. This
proletarian internationalism has as its aim the end of continuous subjugation via
divide and rule by the comparatively few capitalists who seek to stop the development of
class consciousness in their workers lest they too form
trade unions to counter the capitalists
monopolies; (thus the rallying cry of communists, "
Workers of the world, unite!"). In this view, after a transitional period of international socialism, the terminal stage of development of the (future)
history of communism would likewise be replaced by world communism, defined by
world peace. Theorists have differed on whether world communism may be achieved peacefully despite evidently ongoing class conflict. Those who believe the capitalist class would not put down their property rights to become workers again believe the transition to world communism must be more contentious. World communism as the utopian final goal of the class conflict can only be achieved by
world revolution as "
injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" in the words of noted one time socialist,
Martin Luther King Jr. As such, World communism is ultimately incompatible with the permanent existence of the
nation state formation as a means of organizing people and property. To be a socialist is to believe that people are people everywhere, even within
nations and they must unite to end their own exploitation by the would be elitists of capitalism. Whether the people unite in a
supranational unions of sovereign states or a world government to progress through the socialist phase of human development is guided by the desire to end this capitalist exploitation of humankind. This transitional period of
Socialism is considered to then continue to develop the
productive forces and alleviate drudgery until either the state becomes irrelevant to organizing human activity and the people agree to the abolition of the state, or the now useless state undergoes what Marx and Engels call the
withering away of the state. When
governance no longer requires state
institutions or
state power no one would desire it nor wield it. In other words, the people of a utopian communist society would be
self-governing via
direct democracy so direct that the state would not even exist. which depicts a
hammer and sickle spanning the globe as
proletarian internationalists believed that one focus of a
communist revolution was to ensure
another successful revolution elsewhere Abolition of the state is not in itself a distinctively
Marxist doctrine. It was sometime it was happened by any of the country held by various
socialist and
anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century as well as some present-day anarchists (
libertarians are
anti-statist typically in a subtly different sense, in that they support
small government although not absence of
government or
state). The crux here is a text of the
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". 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 as an immediate or clearly sufficient event. == Stalinist and Cold War era (1945–1992) ==