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?
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).
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.
I recommend reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber for more details on societal structures of the past
But which ones? Were they religious communities? Hunter gatherers such that centralization was less advantageous?
Some examples in the book include the Wendat people and Teotihuacan. You can also check out the book’s wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything.
One of the core conclusions of the book that you may find interesting (quote from the wiki):
The main reason it devolves into authoritarianism is Outside interference
So the solution for trying next time is to become resistant to sabotage.