The Marxist progression of history can be pictured as a stairway to communism. The journey begins on humanity’s ground floor. Primitive communism is pre-civilized humanity, for example hunter-gatherers, where class division did not exist in a significant manner. Only with the dawn of civilization and the advent of class society does the staircase appear. After a long climb up the stairway, according to Marxists, we finally arrive mankind’s destination—communism and the end of history.

Meanwhile…

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.