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?

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
    186·
    5 days ago

    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.