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I am wondering now if true communism has ever been tried. I am thinking of the top of my head it might be a Kibbutz you find in Israel?
by prox 3y ago
I am wondering now if true communism has ever been tried. I am thinking of the top of my head it might be a Kibbutz you find in Israel?
- Gud 3y agoI mean, I’ve also never seen a real unicorn. The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
- hnben 3y ago> The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland Most swiss people would probably disagree with this statement.
- Gud 3y agoProbably yes. Still, I always thought communists focused too much on capturing the means of production and not enough on direct democracy. Isn't the whole point of communism to give power to the people?
- andrepd 3y ago"Communism" is a loaded term which means different things to different people, but if you mean the word as Soviet Marxism or Marxism-Leninism then it is an orthodoxy of political and economic thought with some very specific precepts, some of which do not really emphasise democracy.
- hnbad 3y agoI agree that "capturing the means of production" is a red herring. The idea is to abolish private property, i.e. private ownership of "the means of production". Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society. I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism. Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
- googlryas 3y agoThat's just direct democracy.
- hnbad 3y agoI named some examples that might fit the bill in another comment: "Makhnovia" (wiped out by the Soviet Union), revolutionary Catalonia (wiped out by the Soviet Union and the Spanish fascists), Shinmin (wiped out by the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan), the Paris Commune (at least partially), Rojava and the Zapatistas (tho they would eschew any Western attempt at labelling them). Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.
- WalterBright 3y agoIt didn't work for the Black Panthers, either.
- andrepd 3y agoYes, funny what assassinating a young, charismatic, well-spoken leader of a movement does to said movement.
- WalterBright 3y agoIt's always something with communes.
- andrepd 3y agoYep, these whiny mfs always complain about something. One second it's workers rights, then it's extrajudicial assassinations by the government... Complain, complain, complain! Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?
- 3y ago
- mcpackieh 3y agoReal communism is nothing more the state of being ruled by those who ostensibly pursue and aspire to achieving the state of communism (which is never and will never be real.) He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.
- hnbad 3y agoWell, that's what vanguardism gets you. It's why e.g. anarchists are fundamentally opposed to vanguardism. The problem with vanguard parties is that once the vanguard party is in power it's now in its own interest to continue being in power and any step towards communism would be counter to that interest. Unless you happen to luck into having a benevolent dictator who somehow against all odds actually is a true believer in communism, isn't corrupted by having absolute power, doesn't fall victim to the bureaucracy and systems of power he commands (e.g. Sankara) and lives long enough to both get into power and use that power to deconstruct the entire system that enabled him, you just end up with a new political class replacing the owning class without also abolishing the working class. If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.
- WalterBright 3y agoThe Kibbutzes are indeed communes, but they cannot sustain themselves. They exist on subsidy from the state, funded by taxing the capitalist part of the economy. America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.
- RoyalHenOil 3y agoThe Hutterites have been extremely successful.
- everybodyknows 3y agoChomsky once described Kibbutz, paraphrasing, as something like the nearest approximation in the real world of an ideal society.