Communism in the strictest sense is the means of production are owned by the state.
The classless doctrine was proposed by Marx and is often inferred when talking about communism.
You can absolutely have a communist society with a caste system.
communism describes an economic system that places most of the control with the government.
I know you’re simplifying things for brevity but this is misleading at best. You can’t gloss over the goal of a classless, stateless society when defining communism, and it is explicitly a left-wing philosophy. Contrast with fascism, a right-wing political philosophy that places most of the control with the government by reinforcing control over capital and creating a clear national identity.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Soggy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Communism in the strictest sense is the means of production are owned by the state.
Not off to a great start. “Common ownership” is not synonymous with “owned by the state.” There’s lots of ways to set up a government such that the means of production are owned by the state and almost none of them are communism.
The classless doctrine was proposed by Marx and is often inferred when talking about communism.
Yes, Marx was the political philosopher who described a possible outcome of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and is the de facto reference point for discussion about communism. Many subsequent people have built off those ideas or arrived at similar conclusions from another angle but it’s good practice to specify which when it’s important. Marxism-Leninism, anarchist communism, Luxemburgism, whatever. Marxist communism is indeed inferred without other context.
You can absolutely have a communist society with a caste system.
You can have a communist movement with a caste system but a communist society is classless by definition. It is post-scarcity and utopian. It might be literally impossible for humans to organize in such a way in significant numbers but moving toward that ideal is the unifying philosophy of all communist movements.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Communism in the strictest sense is the means of production are owned by the state.
Someone better tell the anarchists
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
You can gloss over that goal if you don’t consider Marxism the only form of communism.
There are other types of communism possible, some that even already exist in smaller groupings of humans than at the state level.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
The different types of Socialists disagree on how to achieve the classless society called Communism (including Anarchists, by the way), but the end goal of a classless society is the same. There is no seperate “Marxist” definition of communism, he just took an idea that was considered utopian before him and turned it into a science.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
You’re wrong.
Communism can be entirely defined as an economic system with no private ownership.
The classes concept is a symptom, not the cause. It’s true that without private ownership there wouldn’t be a working class vs upper class, but we would hardly be classless at that point. There would still be people working, and people not working under communism. Some people can’t work, they simply aren’t capable, and some will choose not to work because there will already be enough to go around from the people who choose to work just for something to do. If you don’t think that classes will form because of those difference, you don’t know human nature very well.
Marx gave a single definition of communism, there are plenty of others.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
I don’t think you understand what an economic class is. A new class does not emerge because one person is more productive for society than another. It’s a question of what your relation to the means of production is, and in a communist, classless society there would be no inequality there.
Could you provide a few alternate definitions of Communism? Sounds interesting.