According to Marxist theory, higher-phase communism is a specific stage of historical development that inevitably emerges from the development of the productive forces that leads to access abundance to final goods, allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals.[5][6] Marxist theory holds that socialism, or lower-phase communism, being the new society established after the overthrow of capitalism, is a transitional stage in human social evolution and will give rise to a fully communist society, in which classes and the state are no longer present. Leninism adds to Marxism the notion of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian revolution and to secure all political power after the revolution for the working class, for the development of universal class consciousness and worker participation, in the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.
Council communists and non-Marxist libertarian communists and anarcho-communists oppose the ideas of a vanguard party and a transition stage, and advocate for the construction of full communism to begin immediately upon the abolition of capitalism. There is a very wide range of theories amongst those particular communists in regards to how to build the types of institutions that would replace the various economic engines (such as food distribution, education, and