HardNut
Communism is a bit more nebulous, so I’ll explain it with socialism if that’s okay. I’m also going to do so from the ground up, because it’s pretty clear if you go step by step, so apologies in advance if it comes off as condescending for that reason.
Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. The means of production refers to whatever creates goods and provides services.
If you think about what falls under the umbrella of goods and services, it’s pretty much everything. Food, water, shelter, health care, all of it should be held in common. You can see totalitarianism emerging already, but I’ll expand a bit further.
What does held in common mean? Well in theory it means that a collective takes ownership and control over something. If a state turns socialist in the purest sense, then that state and the people in it are the collective. The “common” would mean the ruling socialist party, of which everybody is a member.
So how do people get things done? Well, if someone owns a restaurant, they probably hire managers to keep order and give tasks to the workers. If a collective owns a restaurant, someone still has to decide who manages (you find out immediately that you need them if you try without). Since the state is the collective, then the state decides who the managers are. The workers may not like the managers, but instead of having a single owner to deal with, you now have the entire state to deal with.
You might think a union would be the answer to this problem, but unions are both a collective and a service, so if it’s truly socialism it would be of the state as well. The state would have little incentive to act against itself. In socialist countries, it’s common for unions to become agents of the state very quickly, this enacting state level control over how people protest their work conditions
Rinse and repeat with every good and service you can think of, and you have total state control over basically everything.
Communism is self-contradictory, which makes it easy to think anything is diametrically opposed to it. I’ll explain:
Starting with socialism, it’s a system in which the means of production are held in common. To handle the means of production in common, systems have to be set in place to decide who controls what, and who answers to who, and what rules and regulations they need to follow. This system is the state. You might not have called it a state, and it may not have even been a state, but the process I just described is a form of state governance. Socialism is a call for state control of the means of production.
Communism is a stateless, moneyless, and classless society, with the means of production held in common. Meaning, it’s a stateless state with the means of production handled by the state.
This is why it seems diametrically opposed to you: Communism claims to call for both anarchy and socialism, but THOSE two things are diametrically opposed. Stalin wasn’t a communist because he was totalitarian, and anarchist England wasn’t communist because it was the opposite of totalitarian. Despite naming two extremes, I don’t see anywhere in between that communism would fit. Nothing is communist, because nothing can be communist by virtue of what it is
For a moment, assume a complete stateless world. Anarchy in the genuine sense - literally no state, just people and the product of what they do. Let’s say someone invents a thing and they want to sell it. There’s no state to regulate what he does, so selling it isn’t out of the question by default. Let’s say he buys wood to construct storage facilities, and a store front. That was wood he bought, and he owns the product of it. Again, there’s no state, just things to buy/sell and stuff to do. no state to claim the land he built it on, it’s just his shop, his wood, his materials, his ideas. Those are privately owned by him, because he collected or bought it himself. Is this the result of enforcement, or is this just a guy who wanted to sell something?
Now consider again an anarchist state, at what point does the collective come into play? It’s not his wood, it’s everyone’s wood! According to who, who decided that? This guy didn’t, so it’s his. Okay well let’s say people have agreed that the means of production are collectively owned. Well, what if this guy doesn’t agree? Actually, fuck it, it’s my hypothetical, he doesn’t agree. I sure wouldn’t. I built it, so it’s mine. Okay well now we have a group of people that agree they collective own the things I made. How are they gonna make it theirs? Are they gonna take it by force, thereby enforcing the rule?
Private ownership is not enforced, it’s achieved. Collective ownership is enforced.
To invoke Bill Burr: why don’t Stalin’s kills count? He’d be sitting up at the top of the scoreboard with Mao if you counted them.
Political murder isn’t inherently better than ethnic murder. Stalin and Hitler both murdered out of malice, the fact that you’re clearly more comfortable with political murder shows a dangerous bias
Yes they do, though just answering the question at face value would give you an incorrect impression of the merit of publicly held utilities. Having the government run health care gives the government control over health care. As a Canadian, I have been both grateful for the care I’ve been given and frustrated by the control they have over how I take care of myself.
It can simply mean the workers of a company are the shareholders of a company.
But this doesn’t just happen right? Consider the game of soccer, there are rules in place that say we have nets, and the nets sit opposite side of the fields, and we have a ball, and we kick the ball, and we don’t use our hands, etc… those are the rules of soccer. Get rid of the rules, we get rid of soccer. The same is true for any system that requires cooperation. Rules are required or it doesn’t exist. So yes, people have to follow rules for socialism to exist, and rules have to be enforced or they aren’t rules. People have to enforce the rules, or the rules don’t exist. You may not call it a state, but the more we go through the process of describing how to achieve socialism, the more we’re simply describing statehood with socialist rules.
One of the ways capitalists try to scare people away from socialism is by making seem like it would change every aspect of society and make everything different (which works because people are scared of change) but it would actually be a pretty small change.
Well, this certainly isn’t what I’m doing. I think we’re already more socialist than capitalist where I live, and it’s already damn near impossible for an individual to start a small business. Private businesses are disappearing and being replaced by cut-and-paste corporate stores given tax breaks by our shady government for political support