What does Alexander Finnegan think of the assumed correlation between communism and anarchism, since both require the abolishment of a state (which withers away)?

"Marxism is not similar to anarchism at all. It’s entirely different in philosophy, methods, end goals. Yes, end goals. The whole “stateless” thing is incredibly misleading because Marxists and anarchists do not define the state the same at all. This means anarchists might build something which Marxists will say has a state and anarchists will say is stateless. It’s also misleading because the lack of a state is not the only feature of a theoretical communist society. There are tons of things theorized about a communist society, and statelessness is just one of many. The most crucial one is the actual economics, how things are produced. Marxists see every economic system as laying the foundations for the next one, while anarchists don’t think the development of prior society has any bearing on the next society. This is a crucial difference because it means for anarchists, socioeconomics is a purely subjective study. Whatever your morals are, you use that as the basis to argue for what the next society should be, based on what you think would be the most moral society possible. For Marxists, socioeconomics is an objective science, because you can only argue what the next society will be, and to do this you must study, rigorously, the current society, how it is developing, and thus, where it is going. This gets us to the biggest difference between Marxists and anarchists which make their “end goal” almost polar opposites of one another: Marxists see capitalism as laying the foundations for socialist society. In simple terms, communism can be said to be an economic system based on socialized labor + socialized appropriation, in other words, everyone works together, and then everyone plays a role in what is done with that which is produced. Capitalist society is private labor + private appropriation, workers work in isolation from one another in various different enterprises, and then capitalists of those various different enterprises decide how to appropriate what is produced. Capitalism lays the foundations for socialism because capitalism gradually abolishes private labor and replaces it with socialized labor. Competition is inherently a temporary thing, over time, competition always, consistently, reduces. The proportion of small businesses to big is always declining. More and more workers are brought out of isolation from one another and into cooperation under larger and larger firms. The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. — Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party Hence, Marxists view the socialization of labor, or in other words, the gradual replacement of competition by complete monopolization, as laying the foundations of a post-capitalist society. Post-capitalist society will be based on socialized labor, i.e. large monopolistic enterprises, but this is just the foundations. It is not yet socialism. For it to be socialism, you also need to change the political superstructure such that workers will own these monopolies in common. That is to say, for Marxists, post-capitalist society will effectively be public ownership of monopolies, where competition is replaced by cooperation, and everyone participates, directly or indirectly, in a common plan on the appropriation of the fruits of society’s whole labor. What will this new social order have to be like? Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. — Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism For anarchists, though, are not concerned with how capitalism is developing. If you point out that in capitalist society, they tend to become more monopolistic the more they progress, they will shrug their shoulders and say, “sure, but who cares? Post-capitalist society will be different, so we can make it whatever we want it to be!” And what do anarchists want it to be? Anarchists see this monopolization tendency of capitalism and view it as inherently bad. It’s not bad just because it’s owned privately, but even if it was owned publicly, for anarchists, any sort of large-scale enterprise is inherently a negative thing, because it always entails large structures of hierarchies. So they want to tear these down and break society up into the smallest units possible, where nobody has say over anybody else, where production is carried out personally rather than as a public endeavor. This means the anarchist vision of post-capitalist society is almost the polar opposite of the Marxist. It is not based in public ownership, where the whole people own production, work together in common, plan in common, etc, but instead they see post-capitalist society as one where nobody has to work with anybody, where everyone works for themselves personally, where everyone owns their own means of production personally and can use it as they see fit. This is, again, basically the polar opposite of how Marxists envision post-capitalist society. wide gulf separates socialism from anarchism, and it is in vain that the agents-provocateurs of the secret police and the news paper lackeys of reactionary governments pretend that this gulf does not exist. The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small, producer. — Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism What’s frustrating about this annoying misconception—that Marxists and anarchists have the same “end goals” because they both want a “stateless society”—is that this is over a century old, and yet people still repeat it incessantly. Everything I wrote here was already explained by Bukharin back in 1918, in pretty much the exact same terms I just explained it. Communist society is, as such, a STATELESS society. If this is the case - and there is no doubt that it is - then what, in reality, does the distinction between anarchists and marxist communists consist of? Does the distinction, as such, vanish at least when it comes to examining the problem of the society to come and the "ultimate goal"? No, the distinction does exist; but it is to be found elsewhere; and can be defined as a distinction between production centralised under large trusts and small, decentralised production. We communists believe not only that the society of the future must free itself of the exploitation of man, but also that it will have to ensure for man the greatest possible independence of the nature that surrounds him, that it will reduce to a minimum "the time spent of socially necessary labour", developing the social forces of production to a maximum and likewise the productivity itself of social labour. Our ideal solution to this is centralised production, methodically organised in large units and, in the final analysis, the organisation of the world economy as a whole. Anarchists, on the other hand, prefer a completely different type of relations of production; their ideal consists of tiny communes which by their very structure are disqualified from managing any large enterprises, but reach "agreements" with one another and link up through a network of free contracts. From an economic point of view, that sort of system of production is clearly closer to the medieval communes, rather than the mode of production destined to supplant the capitalist system. But this system is not merely a retrograde step: it is also utterly utopian. The society of the future will not be conjured out of a void, nor will it be brought by a heavenly angel. It will arise out of the old society, out of the relations created by the gigantic apparatus of finance capital. Any new order is possible and useful only insofar as it leads to the further development of the productive forces of the order which is to disappear. Naturally, further development of the productive forces is only conceivable as the continuation of the tendency of the productive process of centralisation, as an intensified degree of organisation in the "administration of things" that replaces the bygone "government of men". — Nikolai Bukharin, Anarchy and Scientific Communism