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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
That doesn’t answer my question unfortunately. In fact kinda muddies the water. Wikipedia says that it strives to be stateless, but how does that contend with the real life versions of communism that most certainly have a state?
what you refer to as
the way you use the word (associating USSR, China, Cuba, N Korea with communism) is the result of cold war propaganda. more accurate terminology for these (horrible!) dictatorships would be authoritarian regime with state-monopolized capitalist economy.
all summarized communism is an ideal economy where each gives what they can and gets what they nees, where necessity is at the core and not the accumulation of wealth.
I think the second paragraph talks a bit about this. It’s not really about the exact form of government. But about society and classes. So you’re both subject to exactly that. There is no agreement how communism can be achieved. I’d say without anyone keeping an eye out and enforcing it, it’s going to degrade into something else. But I can see how different groups oft people could do that, by different means. At least theoretically.
A stateless society is one with a power vacuum. Some one will claim the title of leader and often it’ll be someone of little virtue.