I assume modern day young ppl who think communism is cool have some explanation for the soviet union where it's "not really communism", but I don't know what they say is actually the concrete difference. What are the ways lethal communism is diff from trendy communism?
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They have an explanation but it’s made up for the sake of making their position unfalsifiable.
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Look at Star Trek. It is literally communism, but not authoritarian.
I think the same could be said for capitalism in that the one you like is not murderous, but the one we get often is extremely so (see history between 1600 and present).
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I always say: most every American grows up in a communist household with gender neutral bathrooms.
I suspect they view the authoritarianism of Russia to be arbitrary, but imo communism requires so much top down management that it mandates authoritarianism.
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This is correct. A small "commune" involving close, usually genetically related kin, is what we call a family. This kind of communal ideal does not scale well. We need social technologies like political systems w/ checks and balances, and religions in order to scale this up.
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My take is that communism was only tried in states where life was bad enough to engender revolution and those don’t have a great track record of leading to benign governments, not least because of the volume of grudges involved. Capitalism just kinda happens unless states stop it
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Almost like the free exchange of value conforms with human nature
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David Graeber says that the Soviet and Chinese states described themselves as "socialist" not communist, precisely because their version of Marxism described communism as a future stateless utopia. A socialist state was supposed to be a stepping stone on the way to communism.
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This has always struck me as so circular. Like I had a theory called Cyanidism, saying that if you take a lot of cyanide you’ll live forever. And then you take cyanide and die, and I say “that wasn’t true cyanidism, or by definition he wouldn’t have died!”
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I think mostly state power. Contemporary marxists tend to disagree with the Soviet decision not to have the state wither away, in an attempt to force rapid industrialization. But among communists there are still those who agree with that too, so shrug.
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Bc people have unequal talents & unequal luck, the only way to equalize outcomes is coercion.
So the idea that the state could wither away under communism is ludicrous on its face.
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