"Thus socialism/communism implied the abolition of wage labour, classes and the State..."an administration of things", administered by a "free association of producers". That's the way Marx and Engels were thinking about the communist project."
but that would be to miss out Paris Commune, where Marx argued a new kind of state power was born, the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is very little in Lenin that isn't already in The Paris Commune.
Mike writes about " Marx and anarchist inspired activists" as if there could be any unity between the two - but the history of the first international says otherwise, since it was overwhelmed by the contest between Marx's allies on the one hand and the anarchists on the other. Marx carried on an aggressive campaign against the anarchists throughout the first international, mostly on the question that we have raised here: that Marx, like Engels, saw revolution as an 'authoritarian' affair, the forcible suppression of one class by another.
Marx wrote with real contempt of 'political indifferentism' - the anarchist refusal to put revolutionary demands into the conventional political arena. Good student of Hegel as he was, he recognised the recurrent figure of the 'beautiful soul' whose ideals are too lofty to be compromised by putting them into practise.
And Mike is right that the central issue was the one of workers' control. But it was Lenin who put that to the fore, when the reformists (and his own comrades) thought the working class was insufficiently mature to take control. Anarchists, of course, affected to think that political power was beneath them, and had relatively little to say. The exception was Makhno, who, despite his occasional forays into persecution of religious minorities, and iffy alliances, did at least understand that you had to take political power, not just moan about it.
Is Australia as prone to anarchism as the country's representatives on the LBO list seem to be? I can't believe it so.