“communist class structure exists if and when the people who collectively produce a surplus are likewise and identically the people who collectively receive and distribute it. As we shall argue, this is the relevant concept of communism for assessing efforts over the last century to establish communist societies. This concept of communism likewise serves well to demarcate it from the other major social organizations of surplus (capitalist, feudal, slave, and individual self-employment). Finally, this concept of communism is especially well suited to craft a systematic differentiation of socialism from communism and to organize the economic history of the USSR as the interaction of different, coexisting class structures presented in part 3 below. Our theorization of specifically communist class structures (in terms of surplus labor) will show that they can coexist with a vast range of different political, cultural, and economic arrangements—a vast range of nonclass processes. That is, communist class structures interact with the other nonclass aspects of the societies in which they exist. They cannot and do not alone determine them. Hence societies with communist class structures may exhibit varying political forms ranging from those that are fully democratic in nature to those that are clearly despotic. They may display property ownerships that range from the fully collective to the very private. They also may exhibit radically different ways of distributing resources and wealth, from full scale central planning to private markets, including markets in labor power and means of production. Chapter 2 explores these forms in some detail. We refer to property, markets, planning, power, politics, and culture in general as processes that together comprise a communist society’s nonclass structure. The term communism thus refers to a communist class structure interacting with the non-class structure that comprises its social context. The interaction between the class and nonclass structures changes both in a continual process of development. It thus follows that there are countless forms of communism corresponding to all the possible ways in which nonclass structures can affect a communist class structure with which they interact. Indeed, it is also possible that the interaction will go further and produce a transition from a communist to a different”