[kahljorn]

totalitarianism and authoritarianism are where one person, or a group of un-elected people run every aspect of people's lives.

I disagree with you about needing that to reach a communist society, it's the total opposite I think. As for the rest.. it's 2:30 am. I'll get back to you.

That may be the case, but that isn't what Marx thought.

A "free state" is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it; and today, too, the forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the "freedom of the state."....The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically.... Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.