Communism as the end of human history

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Last updated: 2026-08-26

This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism

For Karl Marx, the expression "the end of human prehistory" designates the historical moment in which society passes from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. In his famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx held that all history known up to capitalism —marked by scarcity, private property, division into social classes, and exploitation— constitutes merely the prehistory of humanity.

True human history will begin, according to this view, when communism suppresses class contradictions and allows society to control its own collective destiny in a conscious way.

The dimensions of the "End of Prehistory" in Marxism

Overcoming of class antagonism: With the socialization of the means of production, the material basis of the class struggle is eliminated. With neither exploiters nor exploited, the motor of conflict that drove previous social changes ceases.
The end of the realm of necessity: Humanity ceases to be dominated by blind and hostile economic laws. Thanks to the technological development attained by capitalism, production is planned rationally to satisfy universal human needs.
The withering away of the State: When class divisions disappear, the State —conceived as an instrument of domination of one class over another— loses its reason for being and “withers away,” giving way to a mere technical administration of things.

Communism would be the threshold of history properly so called:

Class antagonism dies out (no class remains that lives off the labor of another).
Production ceases to dominate the producers as a blind power.
The “associated producers” regulate the metabolism with nature in a conscious way.
There begins, in Engels’s formula, the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

That turns communism into eschatology: not an afterlife, but the moment when the species ceases to suffer its own sociality as if it were nature.

The Realm of abundance

Marx distinguishes two layers in Capital, Book III. The realm of necessity does not disappear: there will always be a need to work in order to live, and needs grow with civilization. Freedom within that realm consists in the associates controlling that interchange with nature, with the least expenditure of force and under dignified conditions.

The true realm of freedom begins beyond material production: the development of human capacities as an end in itself. Condition: reduce the working day. Communism does not promise the end of work; it promises the end of work as an alien power.

In the Manuscripts of 1844 the same gesture is even more theological: communism is “the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”

In The German Ideology, communism is not an ideal to be implanted, but “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the higher phase inscribes:

from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
when “the enslaving subordination” to the division of labor has ceased and the springs of collective wealth flow “in full abundance.”

General critiques from the Austrian School and Libertarianism

From the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics and liberal philosophy, this eschatological and utopian conception of communism is strongly refuted in its premises and in its practical consequences:

Constructivist rationalism and the destruction of spontaneous order (Friedrich Hayek):

Friedrich Hayek argues that the claim that humanity should control “consciously” and in a centralized way the whole of the economy and of society is a fatal error of reason.

Complex and prosperous social orders cannot be designed by social engineering; they emerge as Spontaneous Orders through the decentralized cooperation of the market.

Attempting to suppress this order destroys the capacity to process dispersed information.

Point-by-point critiques from the Austrian School and Libertarianism

The logical impossibility of economic calculation (Ludwig von Mises):

For Austrian economists, the idea of an advanced communist society without prices, money, or private property is a technical and economic impossibility.

Without the market price mechanism, central planners have no way of calculating the opportunity costs or the relative scarcity of resources, which leads inevitably to productive chaos, to mass impoverishment, and not to universal abundance.

The dangerous utopia and inevitable totalitarianism (Karl Popper):

Popper strongly criticizes Marxist historicism for promising a closed, harmonious society free of definitive conflicts.

He holds that seeking the “perfection” and total reconciliation of society through utopian social engineering requires absolute political control, which leads inexorably to totalitarianism and to the destruction of basic individual liberties.

The fallacy of the withering away of the State:

Liberal theorists point to a deep internal contradiction in the Marxist prophecy: to abolish private property, dissolve markets, and re-educate the human being, a hypertrophied, violent, and totalitarian apparatus of state coercion is required.

Historically, this coercive power has never “withered away”; it has been consolidated in bureaucratic tyrannies.

In Theory and History Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) attacks the assumption that formations succeed one another by an inner logic of the productive forces until a terminus.

What acts is not “the mode of production”; it is individuals.

If techniques are invented, adopted, or rejected by persons, nothing guarantees that capitalism is the last antagonistic form or that it “must” be resolved into socialism. The Asiatic–ancient–feudal–bourgeois–communist series is a Hegelian scheme in material disguise, not a law.

Worse: if the criterion of “development of the productive forces” were taken seriously, the candidate for a superior form would not be socialism. Mises inverts the argument: the only system that can continue developing those forces in a rational way is the one that calculates with factor prices.

Communism, by abolishing property in the means of production, closes calculation. To declare it “the end of prehistory” is to declare superior an order that cannot know what costs are.

“Conscious history” is a constructivist illusion (Hayek)

Engels describes the leap: the anarchy of production ends; there is planned organization; social causes produce the desired effects.

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) calls that constructivist rationalism: believing that a complex order can be the intentional result of a plan.

The market is not “unconscious prehistory” that must be awakened. It is a procedure for using knowledge that no one possesses in full.

To claim that “the associated producers” regulate the social metabolism “with full consciousness” demands a collective subject that does not exist. What appears in its place is an apparatus.

Thus, the Marxian “beginning of history” would be, for Hayek, the attempt to replace an order that no one designed with a design that no one can complete. What is gained in a pretension of transparency is lost in the use of information.

Scarcity is not prehistory; it is the condition of the economic

The Marxian threshold assumes that, in the higher phase, the springs of wealth “flow in full abundance” and the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” can be abandoned (distribution according to labor).

Praxeology (human action) denies that scarcity is a stage.

So long as there are multiple ends and limited means —time, attention, land, specific capital— there will be opportunity costs.

A world without Private property and without a price mechanism is not post-scarcity; it is scarcity without a compass.

To call that situation “true history” is to invert the names: freedom is the name given to the loss of the criterion by which one chooses.

Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) adds that abolishing the division of labor (the “enslaving subordination” of Gotha) is not to humanize; it is to destroy the productivity that made abundance thinkable.

The State does not wither away when prehistory closes

Marx leaves a hiatus: dictatorship of the proletariat → lower phase → higher phase and withering away of the State.

Mises and Rothbard: whoever allocates the common means is a State, whether it is called commune, soviet, or plan.

Prehistory does not end; antagonism is concentrated in the relation between the apparatus and the administered.

The twentieth century did not “deform” the scheme: it occupied the only institutional place the scheme left empty.

Eschatology with a pretension of science (Rothbard)

Rothbard reads the “closing of prehistory” as secular millenarianism: history of suffering → kingdom.

Christianity at least situates the Kingdom in a divine act.

Marx requires that historical matter have an end of prehistory, so as not to leave communism to “imperfect free will.”

Hence the need for immanent laws. When the predictions fail, the ending is not abandoned; it is postponed. That is not historiography; it is theodicy.