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?
One of those is the ideal version that Marx described as the ultimate goal and that can never be made by humans anyway because humans just don’t behave like that. The other one is what you actually get if you follow the Marx Manifesto and his idea of an “intermediate state” that could bring you to the end goal. (And if you go compare it with plain OG Fascism, both look way too much alike.)
There are other things called “communism”, both the word and the concept are way older than Marx. There are even ideas that begun in that umbrella but we don’t actually group in any singular concept, and instead are “just the way things are” nowadays.