Should the working class pursue the abolition of all classes, including their own?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should the working class pursue the abolition of all classes, including their own?". Your opponent's style: Capitalist

Communism is an immanent possibility within capitalism and the proletariat should abolish classes including their own.

You're confusing aspiration with mechanics. If the proletariat abolishes itself, who enforces the abolition of capital? Self-elimination leaves a power vacuum, not a classless society. What stops the remnant from reconstituting hierarchy?

You’re treating “abolish itself” as if the proletariat commits political suicide on day one. It means abolishing the social relations that reproduce proletarians and capitalists as classes. During the revolutionary transition, proletarian class power suppresses capitalist restoration and dismantles wage labour, private appropriation, and the bourgeois state. The proletariat disappears only to the extent that class relations disappear. So there is no mysterious “power vacuum.” The mistake is imagining class abolition as abolishing organised power before abolishing the material basis of classes.

You've smuggled in the critical assumption: that dismantling material conditions automatically dissolves the organizational structure holding power. But coordination doesn't vanish when wage relations do. The cadre managing production, distribution, and enforcement doesn't disappear because markets disappeared. You've renamed the ruling class "workers," not eliminated hierarchy. How do you prevent those managing the transition from becoming a new ruling stratum without markets to check their power?

You’re conflating administrative function with class rule. A class is not “who coordinates things”; it is a social group with a distinct material relation to production and the power to reproduce that relation. The answer is precisely to prevent administration from separating itself from the class: recallable delegates, no privileged control over social surplus, no party-state owning production, and workers’ councils retaining political power. If managers become a permanent autonomous layer controlling production and coercion, then yes—the revolution has failed and a new class society is forming. And “markets check their power” is backwards. Markets don’t abolish domination; they reproduce capital, wage labour, and the impersonal power of accumulation. You’re proposing the disease as the safeguard against relapse.

You're describing institutional safeguards against a problem you haven't solved: how recallability and councils prevent the monopoly on organized coercion from reconstituting itself. Stalin had a party too. Your mechanisms assume what needs proving—that workers retain permanent collective consciousness and willingness to recall delegates continuously. One generation of comfort, one war, one crisis, and the machinery hardens. Why does your system survive human nature better than liberalism's checks and balances, which at least have centuries of partial success?

“Stalin had a party too” is irrelevant: Left communists explicitly rejects party rule over the class. And no, communism has no magical constitutional mechanism that makes counterrevolution impossible. If workers lose control of production and coercion to a separate apparatus, counterrevolution has won. That’s a danger to be fought, not something solved by clever institutional design. Your appeal to liberalism is weaker still. Its “checks and balances” have survived because they manage capitalist class rule, not because they abolish ruling strata. You’re comparing communism’s failure condition to liberalism successfully reproducing the very class society communism aims to destroy.

You've admitted communism relies on perpetual vigilance against reconstitution—endless struggle, no structural solution. Liberalism succeeds precisely because it doesn't demand workers remain permanently mobilized; it structures incentives so passivity preserves the system. Your vision requires a revolutionary consciousness sustained forever. Mine requires only that people pursue their material interests within existing frameworks. Which is actually more realistic about human motivation, not less?

That’s the sleight of hand: you’re treating capitalism’s automatic reproduction of class domination as evidence of realism. Communism does not require permanent revolutionary mobilization forever. It requires conscious class power during the transition, while the material bases of class society are being dismantled. Once private control of production, wage labour, and accumulation are gone, there is progressively less basis for a separate ruling class to reproduce itself. Liberalism can tolerate passivity because property, wage dependence, and the state keep reproducing capitalism for you. That is not freedom from vigilance; it is domination made automatic. The communist answer is not “people will become saints.” It is: change the social relations so exploiting others ceases to be a structurally available material interest.

You're betting the transition itself—the hardest political moment—becomes easiest once power is concentrated enough to dismantle private property. History suggests the opposite: revolutionary states entrench fastest when dismantling alternatives. Your "material basis" argument dodges the core problem: during transition, whoever controls production apparatus controls survival itself. Why wouldn't they use it? You've just described conditions perfectly suited to creating a new ruling class, then claimed the absence of markets prevents it.

You’re attacking state capitalism, not the position I’m defending. The transition does not require concentrating production and coercion in a separate party-state. It requires the opposite: keeping both under the direct control of the class through councils and recallable delegates, while dismantling every institution capable of becoming an independent power over them. And yes, the transition is dangerous. Nobody claimed otherwise. But “there is a danger of counterrevolution” is not an argument for preserving markets and private property—the very mechanisms that continuously regenerate class power. If a bureaucracy monopolizes production and survival, it has ceased to be proletarian power. That is counterrevolution, not communism working as intended. Your objection proves why left communists reject party-state rule; it doesn’t prove capitalism is the solution.

You're defining failure as success: the moment councils fail to prevent bureaucratic autonomy, you declare it "not communism." That's unfalsifiable. Capitalism at least admits its own failure conditions—monopolies, market collapse, class conflict. Your system has no diagnostic for when the transition has actually failed versus when it's "just not been tried right." Without that distinction, you can't learn from collapse, only rationalize it. How would you know your revolution had failed?