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?

  • frankenswine@lemmy.world
    84·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      33·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • frankenswine@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          32·
          3 days ago

          Ah, fair enough! This is Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, one of the best introductions to the philosophical aspects of Marxism in my opinion.

          As for your point, public ownership and central planning requires infrastructure to direct production and people/algorithms to fulfil those roles (not getting into Cybernetics at this point as that’s another can of worms). All Communists espouse democratic values, usually in the form of “units” that elect representatives from within themselves to a higher unit, in a ladder approach, with instant recall elections available as a countermeasure. Furthermore, the concepts of Democratic Centralism and the Mass Line are critical for Marxist organizational theory.