Comment on Communism

• frankenswine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • frankenswine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • tht@social.pwned.page ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The correct answer

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• FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  A stateless society is one with a power vacuum. Some one will claim the title of leader and often it’ll be someone of little virtue.

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  • Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Kind of. Marx’s theory of the State was about Class Oppression, when you eliminate Class there isn’t really a State for Marx, ergo full Public Ownership and Central Planning is considered Communist. You are more referring to Anarchism.

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    • TheOtherThyme@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Are these “cental planners” robots or humans?

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      • Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        In all likelihood, a mixture of both! The concept of “Cybernetics”, or productive control systems being applied to a centrally planned economy, has been an aspect of Marxism for centuries. Here’s another interesting article on calculating prices in a planned economy.

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• hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think the second paragraph talks a bit about this. It's not really about the exact form of government. But about society and classes. So you're both subject to exactly that. There is no agreement how communism can be achieved.

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