That's right. Communism was something considerably untenable. A stateless society, without socioeconomic classes and the need for money is impossible without the advanced technology and a people who are socially, psychologically, and ideologically prepared for that system of production. The only way to have a high-tech communist society is with a population that is technically and socially evolved enough to naturally desire it and create it.
The only other time in our history when we didn't have a state, socioeconomic classes, and money, was under primitive tribal communism, over 7 thousand years ago, before agriculture. We organized labor around meeting our needs and surviving, without markets or the profit-motive
(the pursuit of private capital accumulation).
Hunter-gatherer societies today, have no markets, and they rarely barter with each other within the tribe or with other tribes, lest they facilitate and empower those competing with them for resources. Tribes are often at war over the control of hunting grounds and prey stock. Tribes share almost everything with their own members, even their spouses. In primitive communism, there is scarcity. Not much technology. It was the default, first system of production and labor.
You make the wooden shaft of the spears
(because you're good at making wooden spear shafts), I make the spear tips
(I'm good at that), and we go on the hunt together. My wife and your wife take care of our children and do other important tasks in the village, and a few men stay behind with the elderly, guarding and protecting the tribe. We organized labor like this for tens of thousands of years. There was no "state" apparatus, to protect the haves from the have-nots. Masters from their slaves, property owners from those who didn't own property. That came later with agriculture. Landlords, fief lords, slave masters, slave-labor, serfs..etc. A state is required for that.
So that is "primitive communism". What is high-communism (i.e. high-tech communism)? It's when production technology becomes so advanced and efficient, that human labor is hardly needed, if at all.
Capitalism is based upon human wage labor and the private ownership of the means of production
(the facilities, and machinery of production) in the pursuit of profits
(private capital accumulation). Without human wage labor, there are no paying consumers or markets. Advanced automation and artificial intelligence technology significantly reduce or completely eliminate wage labor, hence the need to adopt a non-profit, centrally planned, rational, democratic system of production. This system is called socialism, which in the beginning still has a state and maybe a monetary currency or credit system but it never has a legitimate socioeconomic class other than the working class. In socialism, the state no longer serves the masters at the expense of the slaves or employees/exploitees.
The state is always a dictatorship. It's either dictating for the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class or it's dictating on behalf of the working class. That is the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or worker's democracy. Rule of the majority as opposed to the rule of a small, wealthy elite class of masters. That stage of socialism, where there is still a state and the factories and all of the robots are in the hands of the people
(collectively owned by the public) and working 24/7, in the service of consumers, is the stage before high-communism.
High-communism no longer needs the state apparatus, or money. It's "Star Trek":
We're not going to have that for at least another 100 years.
"Withering away of the state is a Marxist concept coined by Friedrich Engels referring to the idea that, with the realization of socialism, the state will eventually become obsolete and cease to exist as society will be able to govern itself without the state and its coercive enforcement of the law."
en.wikipedia.org
