this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
84 points (80.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36256 readers
1150 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago

Sure, I'll take a crack at these!

For your first question, we have to question what it would mean to revert from full Public Ownership to some kind of Private Ownership. Such a method would require a revolution, to change hands from the global population to an elite few, but how would they do that? Communism is international, there's little need for an army at all at that point, and police would be replaced largely by social workers. Such an upbeaval of the status quo would require a massive upset.

If you mean from within the system, ie slowly boil the frog and peacefully remove all democracy, I would ask you to explain how that would happen given the democratic forces at play and overall economic basis being one requiring everyone in society to be able to participate to their fullest extent, as well as why, when such a system would be at relative abundance.

At earlier stages in development, ie Socialism, sort of? However, I reiterate, planning is not a class, it's a form of labor.

For your second question, I suppose I would say yes, Marxists don't believe Communism to be the "end." However, it is unlikely that such a system would move in favor of decentralization, as decentralization removes democratic input and paves the way for competition and markets to resurface into Capitalism. Engels' work Anti-Duhring is centered on such a concept, though it isn't on my reading list.

As for whether or not humanity will eventually move into a more Anarchist style, there's little to suggest so far that mass, complex industry will simplify itself to where there is a total reversion from full public Ownership and central planning to incredibly simplified individual ownership and planning. I won't say it's impossible, but new analysis within Communism would have to observe its trends and predict the next phase of society to be based on atomization and individualism, rather than mass cooperation.

Marx never "decided" that Socialism was good so it should happen, rather, Capitalism's natural tendency to centralize and teach society how to scale industry further and further and plan it meant Socialism was the next logical step. Such analysis would have to be done again, within Communism, and observe such phenomena to make it valid analysis.

Hope that helps!