That might be "the goal", but history shows us that the goal is never attained, and instead you end up in a perpetual dictatorship. Marx himself wrote in the manifesto:
>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.
>Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production
You can't get communism without having a dictatorship or some other massively authoritarian government first (or at the very least, if you can, there's no precedent for it on the nation-state level), and autocracies, once installed, have a peculiar desire to continue being autocratic.
Marx amended the manifesto shortly after the Paris Commune and said that seizing the state is not a good idea, and that instead one should try to build a society with as small government as possible using principles of direct democracy.
He said this because for him the Paris Commune was proof that initiating socialism is possible without State power. Since he profoundly disliked the State, he thought that it was better to abolish the state and instead implement a government of direct democracy and freedom.
Lenin, although he had read this and agreed with this anti-statist assessment, judged that it was not possible to implement such a strategy in Russia, because Russia was too big to rule coordinately in such a way, not in size of population, but in physical size and disparity. This was not necessarily an issue, but given the war that was raging at the time he decided that it was too risky to fragment the country at that point. He was also expecting that the rest of the world would see socialist revolutions, which was not unexpected at the time, but this was very optimistic. Since that did not happen, the state of the Russian Empire was maintained. This was, obviously, a huge mistake. He realized as much later, but did not see a way to fix that issue immediately. As he was making plans to prevent Stalin from taking power however, he unexpectedly died of a stroke at a very young age. All in all, Lenin, in the founding of the USSR made a series of mistakes that were so obvious that he eventually realized them. If he would have attempted to rectify them is an open and unanswerable question.
The conclusion from all of this, that most socialists realize nowadays, is that attempting to install an autocratic Leninist state is a huge mistake. This is why most modern socialist experiments have been centered around libertarian socialism, that attempts to implement the ideas that Marx was persuaded by after the Paris Commune.
In conclusion, you should read Marx's preface to the communist manifesto, in which he makes the points I have made above and warns against following the manifesto, claiming that history has proven him wrong and that it should not be considered as anything more than a vestigial document of nothing but historical interest.
He also warns that his ideas on how to implement a socialist society are, unlike his analysis of capitalism, nothing more than suggestions and that one should let them be empirically proven or disproven.
My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? I've read both The Communist Manifesto, and Capital, and they both left me with the impression there was going to be a violent revolution with people like me as the target. I'd be happy to be wrong however.
Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.
> My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital?
You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld.
The sacralization of private property is so deeply ingrained that people actually prefer the KKK to even thinking about limiting it. It's so dogmatic that it's depressing.
> You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld.
I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system? Even anarchy, if you want it to stay anarchy requires force if you have defectors.
> I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system?
Property (and we're mostly talking in the context of "real" property - i.e. land and maybe structures/improvements - since that's what's typically most scarce/valuable in a society given the fixed supply, though some resources like water might be subject to similar discussions for similar reasons) has two states: "owned" and "not owned". Asserting ownership inherently requires force. Not asserting ownership requires no force at all.
Typically, in an implementation of absolute anarchy, there would be no ownership of property beyond, at most, two categories:
1. Property which you individually (plus perhaps your family) are actively occupying/improving/using and can prevent use by others
2. Property which you and other people interested in occupying/improving/using that property (a.k.a. a "community") can cooperatively do so
Category #1 is a difficult proposition in a stateless society, since it definitionally means that your occupation is at the exclusion of a broader community. All but the absolute smallest of "communities" (if you could call them that) would likely outnumber you. You could probably recruit other community members to your cause, but - definitionally speaking - if you're able to get enough people on your side to avoid being outnumbered, then congrats, your property is probably in Category #2 and collectively-used.
You're right that private property and community property require an equal amount of force to uphold, but the thing is that per person community property requires less force per occupant. Thus, unless you've got a force multiplier that's unavailable to the broader community, you're gonna have a pretty hard time asserting "private" ownership of anything that the broader community claims to "own".
How do you imagine absentee landlords would be able to collect rent without force? Or an even more extreme example, how would the property right of the only water source in town be upheld without force? These things are far from natural, private property in the modern sense, is a social construct upheld by force.
Without force everything is voluntary, private property doesn't cease to exist as long as people have honor and abide by their word. It seems any reasonable system of people upholding their contracts would eventually result in private property?
There is nothing natural nor reasonable about absentee ownership. It has always been upheld by force. By kings, feudal lords etc. For other cultures, like for example native americans, the entire concept was completely foreign.
European invaders stole it from Native Americans as a whole. Just because no specific individual owns it doesn't mean it's free real estate.
From a purely anarchistic point of view, European settlers were within their rights to settle upon and use that unowned land. They weren't, however, within their rights to to use that "unowned" land at the expense of other people already using that land, and thus the Native Americans were within their rights to defend against such a deprivation of access. Unfortunately, the Europeans had numbers, guns, and smallpox on their side, and as the Native Americans retreated further West the Europeans continued to spread.
And to be clear: the Native Americans were using that land. A reasonably-healthy wilderness ecosystem is crucial for hunting, as any hunter can attest even in the modern-day; kinda hard to hunt bison if there ain't any bison.
Private property implies ownership. The moment you assume ownership, you have to be ready to defend your claim against a counter claimant. How you defend this claim depends on where (and when) you live, but almost uniformly requires force - either directly (violence) or indirectly (court systems and police, aka violence by proxy).
If there is no concept of private property, the need to defend ownership ceases. If no one owns anything, there can be no claims - and counter claims. Like a happy family where your brother's meal is also yours, and vice versa - depending on how hungry you are.
For the record, I don't support the latter stance and believe Marxism is catastrophically ignorant of innate human tendencies. But as an ideology, it is worth exploring to reexamine our own relationship with and understanding of private property.
