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Someone correct me if I’m wrong but if you boil it all down communism is when the state acts as a central power to decide how to allocate wealth and resources to the people. Does anyone here actually think you could trust the state ever ever ever to do this right? You can’t trust a centralized power no matter how much they claim to be of the people. It’s not that the state is inherently evil, it’s that humans are incredibly biased and flawed.
Communism is when no state as central power.
Communism is a community dictating how it should behave itself and how it allocates skills and resources.
If authoritarian centralized power focused on capital is Reddit, decentralized independent federated communities that dictate how they should behave themselves and allocate skills and resources would be lemmy
Thanks for the reply and I hear what you’re saying however I think the issue with that argument is that each federated community still has centralized admins with authority. For example Ruud at lemmy world could wake up one day and impose some crazy shit. Or he could give his friends better moderating positions than others, etc.
Seems like an analogy to help you understand, not an argument. No analogy is perfect.
My point is that even in community based organizations you still have human administrators who have to make decisions for the community which ultimately leads to corruption of the system. That’s what my original argument was.
Edit: will go ahead and add that the same thing happens in capitalism however the huge difference is that there any many capital owners to distribute resources (ie companies, corporations, the state) VS in communism it is only the state that distributes the resources.
How does the state distribute resources if the state doesn’t exist under communism? I think you might be misunderstanding the basics of communism.
Maybe so. But, in reality every communist country has a state. I get that could be the “transitory” stage between capitalism and pure communism, or a tainted form of communism altogether. Cool. Let’s assume we get past that and are able to get to that idealized version of communism. Let’s have a thought experiment. Let me preface by saying I am not trying to have a gotcha moment, but honestly think this through out loud. In pure communism, who manages the water utilities? Like, who makes sure that water is delivered to the people and that it is safe to drink?
I don’t really think you need a state to have administrative powers over large things like food production, power, and other utilities. Ideally the communities would be fully self sufficient in power, food, water, housing, etc. Big power plants that supply power to a massive amount of people would be difficult to set up, but is still possible with enough community effort.
The biggest threat to communism and socialism is that capitalist countries will starve them out of international trade (or do more active things to try to prevent a successful communist movement) because they won’t play ball. It would be extremely easy for a capitalist team to destroy a few small crops and kill any chance of self sufficiency- meaning they’d have to depend on trade with those capitalist countries.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I kind of see what you’re saying, but on the other hand it seems like there is a big ? between revolution and pure communism. Like here’s a hyperbolic meme-y way to look at basically what communism is proposing: step 1- revolution with whatever means necessary, dissolve the state and all the things that people rely on 2- ????? 3- find ourselves in a pure communism society that functions and is a place that people want to live. That’s going to be a tough sell for most the worlds population.
And I agree that capitalist countries will starve out communist countries. But I think that leads to another point, communism is weak when it comes to dealing with threat actors or disasters. That’s why the risk for authoritarianism is so high.
And I would like to push back on your idea that communities that are fully self sufficient wouldn’t be in a way a form of state themselves. Sure it’s more local, but you still have power concentrating within leaders of a community. If the water stops working, who’s going to fix it? There needs to be a system of accountability and specialists. These specialists will need to have resources to survive. These resources will be provided by the community. And so. You can see how this leads to the development of a state wether you call it local government or a “community”
Yeah the revolution has to be done very carefully or else a TON of people will die of starvation in the transition. I think dissolving the state is necessary, but disrupting things like farms and power plants etc would remain and would be worked by the people who worked there under capitalism (though, no bosses). It’d essentially make all businesses a worker owned co-op, which we know to work since there’s quite a few successful co-ops around now.
I don’t think governors or mayors or bosses are the people who gets their hands dirty to help the water start flowing in a community again. And I doubt the workers need to be threatened with homelessness so they do that job. Just have average people do the job that needs being done. They are able to fix community issues similar to people who know how to build houses. Similar to people who can set up local networking. Similar to farmers. Similar to doctors. Their needs are also met by people who are able to provide to them. Specialists can still exist, but they don’t have any sway over how the community is run more so than anyone else in that community.
“The state is the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property relations from basic change and keep all other classes in subjection.”
To not have hierarchies of power means to not have a state. Thinking that a state could be just a group of people who settle issues that need to be settled is one interpretation, though that’s not what many, if any communists think when they say “state”. The structure of power currently resembles a pyramid scheme in a lot of people’s eyes. The people at the top have made the game (capitalists), maintain the game (through politics), put people in place to uphold the game (police), and the people at the bottom pay for the game (workers).
Yeah it’s not a perfect metaphor. Though, I guess even if an admin is terrible and abused their power, it has way less influence on Lemmy as a whole than if Spez abused their power on Reddit. Also, you’re free to create and host your own instance and run it however you’d like.
To make the metaphor more apt, every member of the server would own a part of the server and could vote democratically on how they want the server to run. It would involve no hierarchies of power, so there’s no mods and admins. Though, I really don’t know how this would work technically in regards to having thousands of people own a server (or if it’s even possible).
So like the Lemmy platform, communism would be easier to manage the less people are involved. That’s why people say that communism only works in tribes and small villages. I’m not under the illusion that it wouldn’t be difficult, and I think communism would lead to a bit more of an insular society as a whole, but I think that if everyone had realistic expectations and goals, it definitely seems more ideal that the current situation where we’re just being yanked around by the whims of ultra rich people trying to skim more from the top of the people doing actual work.