In a recent talk Chomsky has publicly dispelled (go to 5:16) a common myth concerning Marx’s idea of communism:

If you read Marx for example, I discovered that he says almost nothing about a post capitalist society, a few remarks here or there. But he didn’t say anything about post capitalist society for a reason: he thought post capitalist society would have to be determined by the working class after they had assumed control over the society. I assume the background thinking is that this is too much to understand, and that answers would have to be discovered by trying to organize participatory systems, which can be done right now. You all know that it’s possible for information about production to be made available to the democratically functioning workforce in realtime, so they can make sensible decisions. That doesn’t have to be associated with control or renumeration. But what’s the answer? Nobody knows, you have to try out and see. And that’s true of other forms of social organization as well. -Chomsky March 11th 2011, Cardiff, England

My supervisor always makes this point when people try to complain about Marx’s “theory of communism”, which simply doesn’t exist.