'Communism? Ah yes, like Russia used to be. The state controls the whole economy. Except for a small number of apparatchiks, who make all the decisions, everybody is paid the same low wages. People weren t free to leave the country'. No! That s not the communism of Marx, who looked to the abolition of the wages system, the disappearance of the state and of national frontiers. To a society of freely associated producers! 'Oh that communism. A wonderful utopia. A nice idea, but it would never work....... Better to do what we can to make capitalism more humane'. What doesn t work is capitalism, which has long outlived itself and is dragging humanity into a nightmare of economic collapse, war and ecological destruction. Communism is a necessity for the survival and future flowering of the human species. Furthermore, it is no utopia. It expresses the fundamental historical interests of the working class. Since 1990 and the collapse of the Communist bloc - in reality a form of state capitalism - the International Communist Current has been publishing a series of articles about communism in its theoretical journal, the International Review. Originally this project was conceived as a series of four or five articles clarifying the real meaning of communism in response to the bourgeoisie s lying equation between Stalinism and communism. But in seeking to apply the historical method as rigorously as possible, the series grew into a deeper re-examination of the history of the communist programme, its progressive enrichment through the key experiences of the class as a whole and the contributions and debates of the revolutionary minorities.