Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism?

• the_abecedarian@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Well, why does it have to be the size of China? “China” refers to a state, a centralized government made of a small number of people who command and control a huge territory and its peoples. It doesn’t make sense to define a future communist society by the criteria of a state. Instead, take all the land and people that are currently within the state of China. If we tried to set up a communist society there, how can we do that? People can have different answers (especially when it comes to details), and I’m certainly open to ideas.

  Disclaimer: the following is not “the answer”, it’s a set of ideas that I believe are compatible with a communist society and can be one example of how such a society could look.

  I’d imagine that power that the state usually has would need to be dispersed among directly democratic assemblies and unions:

  • Geographical Organization : Since government is something everyone participates in and since everyone affected by a decision gets a say in it, we can have federated layers of assemblies of the people. So, at the most local level, a single neighborhood in a city or a single village or a single other municipal unit (e.g., “the people who live along this 2km stretch of river") can have an assembly. Neighboring assemblies can talk to/cooperate with each other to solve issues that affect all of them. Local assemblies can regularly send delegates (who can be instantly recalled, don’t serve timed terms, have no power of their own, they just communicate their assembly’s position) to meetings and create citywide, regional, etc medium-level assemblies to handle bigger projects. That could include rail lines, ecological issues like forest management, anything that needs to be produced at a larger scale, etc. Then, for those few questions that really and truly affect a territory and people the size of China (e.g., coordinating defense vs a large national army; dealing with climate change; coordinating specialized, high-tech production of medicines, and so on), there can be “national” assemblies. Again, the power would need to be held at the lowest level, or else you risk forming a state when a few greedy people use their position to accumulate power.

  • Membership Organization: Parallel to the geographic assemblies I mentioned above, you can also have unions and associations of workers who are in the same workplace and industry. Everyone who works in a local cafe has a say in how that cafe is run. Then the Cafe Workers Union can make presentations/have an additional say (beyond what the members already have in the geographic assembly) in any local or regional decisions involving, say, food service and safety, disposal of food scraps and cooking oils, and whatever else is relevant. This would go for any union: an agricultural workers union, a research physicists’ union, a students’ union, and so on. Also, since people can split their time how they like, maybe some minimum amount of commitment to a job would be needed for union membership? Not sure.

  Where do these ideas come from? The Next Revolution by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (discussing the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others). Also check out council communism and, more broadly. Libertarian Socialism as a tendency. Communism is really interesting! There are many different ideas about how we can get there. Whatever you believe, even if you think we need to capture the state, we are at a point in history in which we need to work together to build the power of workers and ordinary people vs. capitalists and the state.

  source