I've been thinking. I want everyone to have a comfortable place to live, food on their table, good healthcare and education, nice working conditions. First and foremost I want the climate catastrophe to be prevented.
A stateless moneyless post-scarcity society? Sounds great, but whatever.
Is it just a nineteenth century meme that got big? Does it have an important place in modern imagining of "scientific" socialism? Does talking about it as some sort of inevitability even make sense for a rapidly collapsing civilisation?
I mean, that someone else can be the state like in Soviet Union and arguably such a state could be set up in a way that it guarantees nice working conditions.
Marxism is the recognition that for society to move in a progressive direction it must move towards communism, although communism isn't an inevitability (after all, the saying goes "socialism or barbarism). To stop short of the total resolution of the class antagonism is to leave the door wide open for capital to begin accumulating once again and start all over. This is one of the basic theoretical mistakes of social democracy and its desire to abandon the reality of class struggle for a static ideal of an actually untenable welfare state that is inevitably eroded. What we mean by "scientific socialism" is the recognition of these basic laws of motion that underlie capitalism, so yes it is still important today because the last embers of social democracy are fading dimmer with every passing day, which can only be explained and fully contextualised through a Marxist analysis.
I was rather trying to go for a distinction between actual realised communism and something like Soviet-style "state socialism/capitalism".