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?
That doesn’t answer my question unfortunately. In fact kinda muddies the water. Wikipedia says that it strives to be stateless, but how does that contend with the real life versions of communism that most certainly have a state?
what you refer to as
real life versions of communisms are in fact attempts to establish communism by communist parties within their respective nation states. communism has bever been reached - and none of these parties in power ever said that they had.
the way you use the word (associating USSR, China, Cuba, N Korea with communism) is the result of cold war propaganda. more accurate terminology for these (horrible!) dictatorships would be authoritarian regime with state-monopolized capitalist economy.
all summarized communism is an ideal economy where each gives what they can and gets what they nees, where necessity is at the core and not the accumulation of wealth.
This isn’t actually true. AES states are Socialist, the concept of “State Capitalism” refered more to the NEP period. Communism is always meant to be based on Public Ownership and Central Planning, because Marx observed Capitalism’s natural tendencies to centralize and develop intricate internal planning mechanisms.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Regardless of your opinions on the successes or failures of AES, they were and are very much in line with the Marxist notion of Socialism.
could you at least say what you are quoting when using citations for your argument?
that being said: collective ownership of the means of production (what socialism means) is a direct contradiction to nation-states as long as these are unable to reflect the collective will within their structures.
A stateless society is one with a power vacuum. Some one will claim the title of leader and often it’ll be someone of little virtue.
Kind of. Marx’s theory of the State was about Class Oppression, when you eliminate Class there isn’t really a State for Marx, ergo full Public Ownership and Central Planning is considered Communist. You are more referring to Anarchism.
I think the second paragraph talks a bit about this. It’s not really about the exact form of government. But about society and classes. So you’re both subject to exactly that. There is no agreement how communism can be achieved. I’d say without anyone keeping an eye out and enforcing it, it’s going to degrade into something else. But I can see how different groups oft people could do that, by different means. At least theoretically.
