Mode of production of a decommodified society where abundance is a reality, the state does not exist and social production is oriented, as its direct objective, towards the satisfaction of needs. In it labor and its products have already lost the condition of commodities, social classes have disappeared and with them the difference between leisure time and work, country and city, the division of labor and in general all the social divisions that reflect the fracture of exploitative societies.
Communism as a society of abundance
In communism, consumption is determined by needs, and needs exclusively by each individual within the framework of a collective consciousness of the species.
When the enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labor has disappeared, and with it the opposition between intellectual and manual labor; when labor is no longer merely a means of life but life's first need; when, with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces have also grown and the springs of collective wealth flow in full stream, only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!
Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
The progressive reduction of the working day during socialism has eliminated wage labor. Labor, instead, fuses the expression and development of one's own personality with the conscious and collective activity, as a species, of transforming our environment. The socialization of production thus reaches its culmination, not in the crude manner of state capitalism but in an organic form, like that social worker which can be glimpsed today, in the midst of capitalist contradictions, beneath big data or free software development communities.
In short, it goes without saying that immediate labor time cannot always stand opposed to free time, as is the case in the bourgeois economic system. (...) Free time -which is both leisure and higher activity- will naturally transform its possessor into a different subject, and it is as this new subject that he will enter the process of immediate production.
Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 1857-1858
In communism, with the disappearance of wage labor, the division of labor and alienation also disappear.
The division of labor offers us the first example of how, as long as men live in primitive society, as long as, therefore, there is a separation between the particular interest and the common interest, as long as activities, consequently, are not divided voluntarily but naturally, man's own deeds become an alien and hostile power that stands opposed to him and subjugates him, instead of being controlled by him.
For as soon as labor begins to be divided, each person moves within a particular, exclusive sphere of activity which is imposed on him and from which he cannot escape; he is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood;
In communism, by contrast, each individual does not have an exclusive sphere of activity marked out for him, but can develop his aptitudes in whatever branch he wishes; society regulates general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and, after dinner, if I so please, devote myself to criticism, without ever becoming exclusively a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic, as the case may be.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1846
And with the division of labor, the artificial fracture between manual and intellectual labor.
The overpowering subjection of individuals to the division of labor will have disappeared, and with it also the opposition between intellectual and manual labor; labor will no longer be only a means of life, but will even have become the first vital need; (and) with the many-sided development of individuals their productive capacities will also have grown and all the springs of collective wealth will flow in abundance.
Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
The end of the division of labor is not a mere organizational fact; it transforms people's entire experience of life, freeing their capacities and socializing them.
The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its consequent suppression in the broad mass, is a consequence of the division of labor (...) in any case, in a communist organization of society there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from the division of labor, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, so that there are exclusively painters, sculptors, etc.; the very name already expresses eloquently enough the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labor.
In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1846
With all these divisions, the alienation characteristic of exploitative societies also disappears, vanishing at its root. In communism, a decommodified society, there is no commodity fetishism. The product no longer appears mediated by money, nor even as an exchange, but as the materialization of social labor, of the common metabolism with Nature that socially organized human labor has become.
Within the collective society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.
Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
Communism as a dynamic element of the present
Communism is not only, as the only possible alternative to capitalism, a necessity for Humanity and the "true beginning of human history", as Marx pointed out, but a determining element of the present through the proletariat, whose struggles claim universal needs, making present the defining principle of the communist social metabolism to come: "to each according to his needs".
In every struggle in which the proletariat asserts itself, however modest its demands, the principle of human need is asserted over the logic of accumulation, and thus the communist program is already sketched out: the organization, on a universal scale -that of the class- of universal human needs.
This is what Marx and Engels were already referring to in 1846 when they defined Communism not as a state of affairs to be established but as a movement that already operates persistently in the present.
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 abolishes the present state of things.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1846