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?
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.