Can anyone succinctly explain communism? Everything I’ve read in the past said that the state owns the means of production and in practice (in real life) that seems to be the reality. However I encountered a random idiot on the Internet that claimed in communism, there is no state and it is a stateless society. I immediately rejected this idea because it was counter to what I knew about communism irl. In searching using these keywords, I came across the ideas that in communism, it does strive to be a stateless society. So which one is it? If it’s supposed to be a stateless society, why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?
The confusion is between communism as an economic system and communism (more properly, Marxism-Leninism) as a political system.
Economically communism is a classless, stateless, society.
Most Marxist-Leninist states take the position that transitioning to that instantly is impossible, and you need to build the material conditions for it by transitioning through capitalism (be that state capitalism or some other form) to socialism to communism. The Communist Party of China for instance has a goal of achieving socialism by 2050.
That’s a very simplified version anyway, and some (Trotskyists mostly) disagree that a transition period is necessary.
I see. So there is supposed to be an authoritarian state in the transitionary period, is what you are saying?
Interesting, I was under the impression the real life forms had just failed; one group got into power and just said “naw” and then stayed in that authoritarian ‘state.’
Most attempts at communism so far have been from single party governments. Those trend quite quickly into authoritarianism regardless of the intent (you might get lucky with a long lived strong man with a deep ethical drive - aka Lenin) but chances are your single party will be coopted by an asshole.
Every time we’ve tried a communist government at a large scale we’ve really horribly failed but it has worked at smaller scales. It may be impossible beyond a limit like Dunbar’s number but I think it’s worth trying a few more times (especially if we can get the US to stop trying to constantly sabatoge it).
you might get lucky with a long lived strong man with a deep ethical drive - aka Lenin
Wouldn’t call him especially long lived
Oh yeah- that’s kind of the issue. I was more highlighting him for his deep ethical figure. Lenin was a complicated man and, if he had the time he may have turned into a pure dictator, but he really never got a chance. The October Revolution led directly into the Civil War and Lenin had a stroke midway through that. By the time the dust settled Lenin was already significantly impaired and on his last legs. It sucks because (while he wasn’t the nicest) he was a pretty cool dude and a true believer in the cause.
After his death everything immediately went to shit - with the death of Armand only Trotsky had the cloud to claim leadership and he was extremely militant. People romanticize him (understandably because the other option was a right turd) and if he had become Chairman the whole “ruler for life” thing probably wouldn’t have happened, but, Trotsky saw the only acceptable path forward as continual and total war to convert nations into soviet councils until nothing else remained. This would have meant a lot of suffering and inevitable collapse.
So instead of Trotsky some dickweed of a clerk said "Nuh, uh, with his last breath Lenin said I should be
Emperor, KingChairman? Nah, let’s call it “General Secretary” and be all humble… and that’s how we got the unpolished turd that was Stalin.
Curious, what small scale examples are you thinking of? Those might be a good model.
Just trying things and seeing what sticks puts millions of lives on the line. Seems risky. But maybe eventually we can predict mass human behavior well enough to develop a control loop that keeps an unstable system stable without succumbing to selfishness/power grabbing? But that seems dangerously close to just hoping AGI will save us all.
There have been many groups that form communes within a larger system. Sometimes its built around a religion (or cult), sometimes around various ideals, like artist communes. In my opinion, what makes these work is that they’re small (your reputation matters), people join it voluntarily, and people can be kicked out if they don’t uphold the ideals. So, you don’t need a state to enforce the rules aside from a mechanism to remove people who don’t participate fairly. And because they are within a larger entity, they don’t have to deal with things like national security or foreign affairs. I don’t think that model scales to a national level.
Yeah I agree. If people don’t have a relationship with everyone, that sort of reputation model would be hard, so it wouldn’t scale well.
Like the Amish people ?
I don’t know a lot about the Amish, but possibly. From what I know, it seems like they embody some of the core principles in terms of contributing to the community and managing a balanced, relatively equal society. I don’t know anything about their religion, so I don’t know if there is a level of control from church leaders that might be more of a centralized control structure. But they might be an example. You can also search for examples of hippie communes or artist collectives.
So the solution for trying next time is to become resistant to sabotage.
The main reason it devolves into authoritarianism is Outside interference
Your impression is basically the Trotskyist view.
Stalin himself answered your question in an interview with an American reporter some time ago.
Yes , you are right, we have not yet built communist society. It is not so easy to build such a society. You are probably aware of the difference between socialist society and communist society. In socialist society certain inequalities in property still exist. But in socialist society there is no longer unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities. In socialist society everyone is obliged to work, although he does not, in return for his labour receive according to his requirements, but according to the quantity and quality of the work he has performed. That is why wages, and, moreover, unequal, differentiated wages, still exist. Only when we have succeeded in creating a system under which, in return for their labour, people will receive from society, not according to the quantity and quality of the labour they perform, but according to their requirements, will it be possible to say that we have built communist society.
You say that in order t o build our socialist society we sacrificed personal liberty and suffered privation.
Your question suggests that socialist society denies personal liberty. That is not true. Of course, in order to build something new one must economize, accumulate resources, reduce one’s consumption for a time and borrow from others. If one wants to build a house one saves up money, cuts down consumption for a time, otherwise the house would never be built.
How much more true is this when it is a matter of building a new human society? We had to cut down consumption somewhat for a time, collect the necessary resources and exert great effort. This is exactly what we did and we built a socialist society.
But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm
Stalin talking about “no oppression” is quite ironic
Easy: purge the oppressed!
If there’s nobody left to oppress, there is no oppression!
This doesn’t really answer any of my questions, only raises more. Unless of course he is making the point that an authoritarian government is the “saving up for the house” but it’s clear with his next statements in the interview, that’s not the case.
You’ve got it, really. The difference between stalin and hitler is largely one of rhetoric. There’s definitely political differences, but gulaging that many people, in the name of “saving up for the house” of no more oppression… Both used a political system that had nothing to do with authoritarianism and perverted it to their own ends. Both called it socialism, both lied.
Basically.
Most “Communist” countries practices Vanguardism, the idea of a “Vanguard Party” that is suppose to look out for the people, and act in the interest of the people, taking absolute control of the country, destroy capitalism and implement communism, then when communism is achieved, the state would naturally “wither away”, ceasing to exist.
Yea… imagine how that works in practice. Once a party gets into power, they aint ever giving it up, thats the problem.
True even if your movement has pure intentions and is run mostly by capable idealists, which is rare in itself. Power corrupts.
The notion of “state” differs wildly across people, so that probably adds to the confusion.
The core concept is that ownership of a thing belongs to the people of the thing. This is where it clashes with feudalism and capitalism, where ownership of e.g. a farm is not held by the farm workers.
The organizational unit is “group of people cooperating”, or a “commune”. This can be small, like a hippie farm, or it can be big - a traditional state.
A democratic state can be communist if it forbids private ownership of common resources. I.e. your house is your house and your car is your car but some rich fuck can’t decide to build a fence around the local hiking trail.
An authoritarian state may technically be communist if it is strongly democratic. That is theoretical. The ones currently claiming communism are dictatorships.
The end-goal is a stateless society. But you cannot achieve it if all other people are living in states, you need something that is of similar power. Hence it’s a necessary step towards the end-goal which can only happen once everyone (or at least a significant portion of the world) is a communist. And that happens right after a unicorn rides across the sky while shooting rainbow and ice cream out of its ass.
As to why all communism is authoritarian, everyone who goes into politics is a authoritarian or an idealist. So the way it usually goes is either the authoritarian comes and explains to everyone that they’re communist, or the idealist convinces everyone of the idea and then his colleagues slowly swap them out for the authoritarian, because they’re usually the one actually capable of running a country.
In other words, to have a successful ideal communism everyone on Lemmy has a hard-on for, you need an unsevered chain of idealist leaders who are also capable of running a country. To achieve the authoritarian version of communism, you need only one authoritarian leader anywhere in the chain. I think everyone can guess which one’s easier and more likely.
In conclusion, communism can never exist on a large scale as long as people are in power. The only possibility of communism I can see is far in the future when we have true AI (not the current bullshit machines) which rules over us without any possibility of humans altering its decisions. Not sure how likely that is, but at least it’s theoretically achievable.
Does Deus Ex & Deus Ex: Invisible war come to mind ?
Pure Socialism is a society where resources are shared as equally as possible across all participants. Resources are distributed as appropriately as possible to create what is needed, excess is distributed with as little waste as possible. Communism has a centralized body to distribute these resources.
Describing economic and political systems is tough because people have different interpretations of them and they can all be correct. Denmark and the US are both capitalist but their systems are incredibly different.
The simplest description that applies to all forms of communism but not to systems that aren’t communist, is that the means of production (typically defined as land and capital) are state owned (with the intention that their use is decided democratically by the public).
Other descriptions could also apply but they’re also not required. Like how a watch is still a watch whether or not it has a hand to indicate seconds.
I think a lot of the disagreement here stems from the current circumstances vs the ideal. Or reality vs expectations, if you will.
IDEALLY there wouldn’t be a state. But in practice there must be an organizing body. Sure, the workers can own and control everything themselves, but imagine how hard it must be to organize this ad-hoc for and with everyone. So from a managerial perspective, the state still has a function.
Sidenote: IDEALLY, the society would be without money as well, at least according to Lenin, but he quickly learned that this too presented practical problems to the point where it was simply easier to keep money around.
Note, I’m not a communist, I am just roughly explaining communism as I understand it in the context of the question, as neutrally as I can.
EDIT: Also see that other persons comment about Vanguardism, as that is also an important aspect of difference between the ideal and the practical.
In short, the authoritarianism happens because it requires a large amount of power to make the societal changes happen in the first place, which would then give rise to a generation that can maintain the system without overreach.
Now the problem obviously is that humans are corruptible, and very few people in the history of our species have ever been given totalitarian powers and not abused it for their own power and benefit.
why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?
most likely due to “power syndrome”
Couple considerations: what is a nation to do when it constantly is on the verge of civil war, hasnt had breathing room to get its feet under it after a political revolution and is beset by brand new, world power level enemies doing everything they can to make sure your new nation fails?
Followup: when has this not been the case for a new communist nation? How many coups has the US backed? How many times did we try to assassinate Castro? Vietnam?
Finally: what does it look like when none of the above is true?
We tend to think of nations in a vacuum, but they exist along side each other and they have people like us inside them. Stupid, greedy, lying, shitbags that are full of empathy, love and curiousity, just like us. That makes them messy by definition, but its easy to forget.
It looks like a European welfare state, because instead of upending the system and ending up in an authoritarian nightmare, people are compromising with each other.
Popular prosperity is a function of power being reliant on the approval of the masses, and thus will not be achieved in any meaningful way under an authoritarian regime.
Im not disagreeing here. That is one way to interpret “how communism with no capitalist boot on your neck?” Note though, those states dont self identify as communist or really even socialist in most cases, which leads to muddy waters, and does no favors for socialism as a political system… As an economic system its arguable, but not relevant.
I am far from making an argument for auth; it is however important to point out the context in which the most famous example of authy socialism are taken from. I feel that being aware of the strategy of the propagandabeing consumed is important.
The self-identification of governments is possibly the least reliable way to identify which are closest to being socialist/communist.
Lol “them damn commie Scandinavians!” Nah
Just saying that there are a lot of governments who like to pretend. If it’s called Peoples Socialist Democratic Republic of Utopian Communist Happiness, odds are that you should run for the hills.
Point taken, and I dont disagree. What I’m saying is though, there ARE governments that clearly state what they are. You shouldn’t discount self description in full because of the DPRK or whatever. Of those governments that do accurately self describe, I dont think any of them explicitly call thselves socialist or communist.
No answers in this reply, only questions.
No answers in this reply, just stating that the sky is blue except when its not.
Anyone wanting a deeper dive, check out the books and videos of Professor Richard D. Wolff.
One of those is the ideal version that Marx described as the ultimate goal and that can never be made by humans anyway because humans just don’t behave like that. The other one is what you actually get if you follow the Marx Manifesto and his idea of an “intermediate state” that could bring you to the end goal. (And if you go compare it with plain OG Fascism, both look way too much alike.)
There are other things called “communism”, both the word and the concept are way older than Marx. There are even ideas that begun in that umbrella but we don’t actually group in any singular concept, and instead are “just the way things are” nowadays.
Several communes in the us have evisted which look very socialist - they all died out as the children didn’t share the parents ideals. (most died out as marx was publishing his theories - as such all had differences from what marx proposed)
The usual rhetoric is that you shouldn’t look at the dozens of examples, and their consequences (1). Rather focus on the theory, and agree that that theory is perfect. And also that anything else is bad. Unless it’s an attempt at being communist, then the bad things aren’t bad. Unless they are undeniably bad, but in that case, it isn’t real communism.
Well this was kinda my opinion going in, so I wanted a different perspective lol.
What they’re describing is a so-called tankie who claims that they’re communist but instead really they’re just authoritarians who need to feel a little less shitty about themselves so they pretend they do it for the good of all people.
