• GoodEye8
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    1 year ago

    I feel like you’re misrepresenting or misunderstanding what communism is. You might base your opinion on the soviet union but they never actually achieved communism, and some would even say it was state capitalism and not even socialism. In fact it’s unlikely we’ll ever see what an actual communist society would be because it’s very much a vague utopia, and just a goal to strive towards.

    Communism by definition actually isn’t very clear because Marx never actually got into the details of how a communist society day to day life would look like. But he did postulate the primary idea of communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” One idea of communism is that it’s stateless and classless, meaning there literally couldn’t be a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth. Marx himself actually said that future communist institutions should be designed to be decided democratically by the people.

    • TWeaK
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      1 year ago

      I’m going to copy my other comment as it covers my thoughts on this:

      I think a lot of the issue comes down to terminology. Communism has been bastardised and turned into a dirty word, it has very negative connotations for a lot of people. Most implementations of communism in the world don’t really fit the ideology, and now people think of the countries for the definition.

      I would first define socialist policy: that which is made for the greater good of society as a whole, rather than for the benefit of select groups at the expense of society.

      I think true communism is what you would get if you consistently implemented socialist policy again and again over a long period. If we develop robust policies that create a net benefit for the people as a group, we will end up having a communist society.

      But trying to jump and change to communism straight away is fraught with issues, because during the change sociopathic people will take the opportunity and steer things in their favour by implementing policy that benefits themselves over others.

      I absolutely agree with democratically deciding everything. I think technology has reached the point where we could give people that opportunity. We all have devices in our pockets that have the capability to communicate with everyone else, so we don’t need representatives to do it on our behalf (particularly when all too often they don’t actually represent us when they vote on policy). There are potential problems with this, of course, however these problems are primarily technical in nature and could be overcome.