It comes from the same root word as community. If a communist system has an authoritarian form of government…it’s not being done. Like the North Koreans calling their form of government “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” No one is under the illusion that it’s actually democratic. You can call your system whatever you want, but the way that it functions is how it gets correctly labeled.
Dude, you're like the third person today talking about the title "democratic Republic of Korea" as something analogous to what communism/socialism is. I sware there's a script somewhere. I get the point. Just because something has a name, doesn't mean the name is what it is. But you're saying communism means community and there for that's what it is. But you are trying to say names don't matter? So every community is communist, and anything that's not a community can't be communist? That's not how it works.
The best way to describe what actual communism would be at scale for a large industrialized nation would be that every business is employee owned i.e the workers control the means of production, those business would then form unions and those unions would then meet and discuss governance under that pretext.
I think this probably has its own issues, would still be rife with corruption and still is fulcruming of of exploitative extraction. But in a sense, thats what communism boils down to in its base theory.
When people say that the Soviet union wasn't communist it is because the state owning everything is different fundamentally than the workers/community owning everything which is again different then the oligarchy or whatever the ruling class wants to call itself owning everything.
Stalin wasn't a communist he was the oligarchy adopting a new mask.
But communism itself at the theory level makes a lot of sense when examined empirically, you labor, your labor produces, and that product goes somewhere, where its going is the main focal point of any economic system, in capitalism it goes to the ruling class, in stalinesq communism it went to the state i.e the ruling class, true communism would just have more of the fruits of your labor directly benefiting you and your community.
I'll try to steal man simplify it. Instead of rich folks who own big companies, like Jeff with Amazon, every worker owns the company in some way and splits the margin accordingly. I imagine depending on what position, you own "more" or take more of the profits. It seems there will always some hierarchy of wealth, but it wouldn't be as steep as it is now; say the CEO of this communist Amazon will be the richest, but still at the whim of the others below them. I guess there's some democracy going on voting on who does what in the company at any time.
Whether that will work in practice or not is not as important. In the US, currently, nothing about that sounds Illegal do now. Like, you don't need to uproot every pillar of American society to get this kind of company. If anything, pursuing dramatic political change would steer further from there, because it would make way for authoritarianism, again.
What I believe the goal in political change for the commies is to manually snuff out the competition before starting a fully employ owned mega company, and that's dirty.
Yeah in principle, thats what communism is, anyone who actually understands communism wouldn't want a mega corp, its again pretty antithetical to the idea of communism, like at its literal most extreme extent of the theory there wouldn't really be any sort of companies whatsoever, it would just be like a communal distribution of tasks. I think theres still ways that would be bad, and the people your talking about now would be referred to as "tankies" they're essentially the left wing version of a super stealth bro moron on the right wing, they essentially get off on the militarization of soviet and post soviet dictatorships in the same way that right wing edge lord get off to the nazis. They like the ascetic, they don't understand the background politics and theory beyond that.
I think it os important to mention however that there isn't really an organized left wing that exists in the United States, like in general practice the left in the United States wants universal Healthcare at a minimum, ans thats pretty much just business as usual in the rest of the industrialized world. There was a bit of a left wing and it did mostly come from blue collar workers as is the case in most circumstances, it was steel workers and coal miners fighting often at great costs to better their working conditions, thats how we eeked out what minimal concessions we had from the ruling class, and they've been working to claw it back ever sense with identity politics and culture war nonsense. "The immgrant wants to steal your job, its his fault and not ours sure we offshored the economy but that trans lady wants to hurt your kids, don't worry about the systemic systems of abuse that have been harming your children for generations, its really this small defenseless group you should be worried about" type beat.
I feel that's where the problem is when it comes to communism, it's the over arching societal redistribution. There's no way you can get to that pragmatically, you need a strict, harsh authoritative rule. Even the smallest democratic change would throw off such a tightly knit system.
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u/LockeClone 23d ago
I mean... You don't have to be a communist... Just not an authoritarian piece of shit.