> Same question, how could a stateless communism possibly work?
In even Marxist theory, communism-as-a-system (communism-as-an-ideology is simply the ideology which seeks communism-as-a-system as its ultimate goal) is what happens to socialism (which uses the State) when it succeeds and the State withers away.
If the State hasn't withered away, you have (in Marxist parlance) socialism-as-a-system even if you have communism-as-an-ideology that motivates the present use of socialism-as-a-system. You can't have communism with a State.
(Whether you can have communism at all in practice is still an open question.)
By the way, just for kicks, here's a quote from Marx:
The contradiction between the vocation and the good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means and powers at its disposal on the other cannot be eliminated by the state, except by abolishing itself; for the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin. Indeed, when we consider the consequences arising from the asocial nature of civil life, of private property, of trade, of industry, of the mutual plundering that goes on between the various groups in civil life, it becomes clear that the law of nature governing the administration is impotence. For, the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.
If it is not statist, what actually makes it "left"?
> anarcho-communism
Same question, how could a stateless communism possibly work?