(Reposted in this community cuz I didn’t get any responses in the original community that I posted this under)
This is how I understand the communist utopia: Workers seize means of production. Means of production thus, start working for the proletariat masses rather than the bourgeoisie class. Thus, technological progress stops being stifled and flourishes. Humanity achieves a post scarcity-like environment for most goods and services. Thus, money becomes irrelevant at a personal level.
In all this, I can’t see how we stop needing a state. How can we build bridges without a body capable of large scale organisation? How would we have a space program without a state for example? I clearly have gotten many things wrong here. However, I’m unable to find what I’ve gotten wrong on my own. Plz help <3
Edit: Okay, got a very clear and sensible answer from @Aidinthel@reddthat.com. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to link their comment. Hence, here is what they said:
Depends on how you define “state”. IIRC, Marx drew a distinction between “state” and “government”, where the former is all the coercive institutions (cops, prisons, courts, etc). In this framework, you need a “government” to do the things you refer to, but participation in that government’s activities should be voluntary, without the threat of armed government agents showing up at your door if you don’t comply.
Statelessness is held to be necessary because, in the simplest terms, power corrupts.
If we institutionalize authority - if we create a structure in which authority is vested and positions within that structure that are held by specific individuals - then sooner or later (and history has shown that with communism it’s generally sooner) self-serving fuckwads will capture those positions, then bend them to serve their own interests and the interests of their cronies and patrons, to the detriment of everyone else.
And yes - there are practical problems with not having institutionalized authority.
But the thinking of those who advocate for statelessness is that those problems can be, and would be, solved if people had the opportunity. But first we have to get the self-serving fuckwads out of the way, and the only way to do that is to not have institutionalized authority in the first place.
The biggest issue I see is self serving fuckwads don’t go away. They’ll import themselves a la Putin if they think they can get away with it. They’ll create their own institutions a la the Mafia if there’s nothing else.
The second problem is there are large groups of people who want to be under some Authority to the extent they get populist / fascist stuff going or invent ones like in Religion.
I just don’t think people “freed from institutional authority” are inherently going to not just recreate it, probably worse…
Over the short term (in an historical sense), that’s certainly the case.
I just mentioned on another post that I liken it to individual growth. Just as individuals can and often do mature to the point that they no longer need or desire a mommy and daddy, so too can our species as a whole mature. And I believe that, if we don’t destroy ourselves along the way, we not only can but will.
But even if we don’t destroy ourselves along the way, yes - that’s still many, many, MANY generations away.
All of that is the fruit of people living for generations under oppressive hierarchical power structures.
Just like we can’t say humans “naturally are greedy” we also can’t say they “naturally will give themselves over a ‘populist leader’”.
In less hierarchical societies, people naturally are more skeptic of authority and populism.
Like when the North American native peoples of the North East first encountered Europeans, and couldn’t possibly understand how the sailors had “bosses” who “told them what to do”. The idea of following a leader like that didn’t make much sense to them at all.
Jumping in with a curiosity question. Can you give an example of an effective, non-hierarchical, society. Particularly one able to remain stable above Dunbar number for humans (around 150-200 members). I’ve not heard of any groups that have remained stable beyond that, which don’t lean on the “super-tribe” mentality (with it’s inherant us vs them). That tends to collapse towards authoritarianism of some sort, at least when something of value can be extracted from it.
The Zapatistas in Chiapas. The Hill peoples in eastern India. Rojava in Kurdistan. The vast majority of native peoples in Asia and the Americas before colonisation. The pirate societies, and related to that the Zana-Malata of Madagascar.
I suggest you to also read some of the articles and books by David Graeber. Like any. Egalitarian societies were his specialisation.
I’m not a fan of the current capitalism, but your explanation has some internal contradictions.
So to not have an institutionalized authority that coerces people to follow the rules, you first coerce (or even kill) the self-serving fuckwads.
Say you managed this during a revolution where generally everything goes. Revolution is done and now how do you guard your system from self-serving fuckwads using that power vacuum to gain even more power than before?
Do you just hold lynchings whenever some envious randos thing that someone holds too much power?
How does one get a fair trial if there is no judge or jury? War tribunals?
So to not have an institutionalized authority that coerces people to follow the rules, you first coerce (or even kill) the self-serving fuckwads.
No - you explicitly do not. It’s impossible to get out of the trap of some claiming the power to nominally rightfully force the submission of others through some claiming the power to nominally rightfully force the submission of others.
The only way it can come about is if humanity evolves into it - grows the fuck up, collectively as well as individually.
That’s the thing though: you can’t get out of the system without overthrowing it.
The people who are currently in charge of institutionalized authority have a lot of power and they got it, because they wanted it and used the current system to gain the power. They are not going to let go voluntarily.
And there is no opt-out of the system either. If a bunch of people act as if the authority doesn’t apply to them, they’ll get into trouble real quick. So doing this as a grassroots effort will also not work.
That’s why the Communists that actually managed to communize a country all did so with a revolution and a state afterward. And yes, in the USSR they originally claimed they will only do the state-thing until the population is ready to go stateless, but who’d actually do that if you are Lenin or Stalin and that sweet sweet totalitarian power tastes so good?
It all depends on your definition of communism and state etc., but the Zapatistas seem to be quite successful with a grassroots approach.
Well, it started with a violent uprising in which 300 people where killed and the Wiki article you linked has a section called “government” which reads as follows:
At a local level, people attend a popular assembly of around 300 families in which anyone over the age of twelve can participate in decision-making. These assemblies strive to reach a consensus, but are willing to fall back to a majority vote. The communities form a federation with other communities to create an autonomous municipality, which form further federations with other municipalities to create a region.
Each community has three main administrative structures: (1) the commissariat, in charge of day-to-day administration; (2) the council for land control, which deals with forestry and disputes with neighboring communities; and (3) the agencia, a community police agency.
That’s direct democracy on a community level and representative democracy on a higher level. Pretty similar to what is practiced in many democratic countries.
And if they have a police agency and an army it’s hard to call them anarchist.
And they themselves don’t do that either. Only outside anarchists project themselves onto them and say they are anarchists.
As I said, it depends on a lot of definitions of rather complex concepts.
The point I was trying to make, was that you don’t have to end up with a state, especially not a soviet style state, after a revolution. And in my opinion a violent uprising or an having an organized militant group does not mean you have a state. If I understand it correctly, the Zapatistas don’t have a principle of using violence to force others into their system - which is something central to states.
It’s kinda weird though that some people call for violent revolutions over what amounts to semantics.
Sadly, history has taught us, that there are only very few revolutions that end up with a more liberal political system. The Zaparistas are the first instance where I heard of something like that, and I am not nearly informed enough on the specifics of their system and how it works out in real-life to comment on them.
All other revolutions that I know about usually ended with a Robespierre, a Lenin/Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao Zedong or any of the hundreds of military dictatorships that came into power over the last century.
Not many people are able to first amass enough power to be stronger than the regular government and then idealistic enough to let go of all that power again.
Ok, so then would be correct to say that the communist utopia is a sort of singularity (consider y=1/x, where x=0). It can never be achieved, but the goal should be to get as close to it as possible. We will never achieve total post scarcity. However, we can achieve post scarcity for things like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, then probably internet access, smartphones, video games and so on.
We can never eliminate institutions of authority, but we can reduce their presence as much as possible. For example, we can never eliminate the police force, as there still would be some sociopaths who we would need protection from. However, as society would progress, crime would drop such that we would require smaller and smaller police forces.
So in conclusion, am I right in considering the communist utopia as a singularity?
It can never be achieved
Why not?
If an individual can outgrow a need for a mommy and daddy to watch over them and tell them what to do, then so can a species.
But yes - for the relatively short term (in the anthropological sense), such a system is effectively impossible, so yes - “the goal should be to get as close to it as possible.”
And in fact, the only way that it can be achieved is incrementally, as ever more individuals reject the whole concept of institutionalized authority. Eventually, a point should be reached at which the view that it’s illegitimate is so widespread that those who claim it will no longer be able to exercise their claim.
Or to put it in simplistic and not-really-accurate terms, the claim “I’m the President of the United States” will be as ludicrous as the claim “I’m the Emperor of the Universe,” and will be treated with the same disdain.
We will never achieve total post scarcity.
I agree.
The extent of the universe as a whole might well be infinite, but the extent of the resources to which humans can have access most assuredly is not.
We can never eliminate institutions of authority
I disagree.
I not only think we can - I think that unless we destroy ourselves first, we inevitably will.
Again, it’s akin to an individual outgrowing the need for a mommy and daddy, just on a broader scale.
For example, we can never eliminate the police force, as there still would be some sociopaths who we would need protection from.
Except that the police are ever more likely to BE sociopaths than to protect us from them.
That’s the exact problem I mentioned in the last post - hierarchical authority effectively rewards and thus selects for sociopathy.
People with morals, principles, integrity and/or empathy will have things that they’ll refuse to do.
Psychopaths don’t have those constraints - if so inclined, they’re willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want.
So all other things more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchical systems.
Which is exactly how and why “power corrupts.”
So in conclusion, am I right in considering the communist utopia as a singularity?
Roughly, though it would be more accurate, if less appropriate to this STEM-obsessed era, to call it an “ideal.”
The analogy with mommy and daddy doesn’t really make sense.
Unless your parents are filthy rich or very powerful, they usually can’t provide you anything you can’t do yourself once you reach a certain age.
The same is very much not true with a stateless society vs the mafia.
If you are part of the mafia, even just as a lowest level thug, you will have an advantage over being the person who gets blackmailed by the mafia.
I know, many Americans and also people from other countries have very traumatic experiences with the local police and thus a very bad opinion about them. That’s understandable, especially if you have never seen what good policework looks like. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
In most Central European countries, for example, the policework is really positive. Sure, there are negative examples there too, nothing is perfect, but most of these countries are in the very top of the safest countries (discounting micronations that are too small for statistically relevant data).
Of course, power corrupts. And because of that, modern democracies have a lot of safety nets that stop hostile legislation. And since these safety nets are staffed by people voted in by very different groups of people than the legislators, these are actual checks and balances compared to the farce that happens in the USA.
That’s another issue: The political system in the USA is not a democracy, but a presidential two-party-system in which the votes of most people don’t count. They basically vote in a dictator (ok, not fully, but if the party holds senate, house and surpreme court, it is a dictatorship, and in a two-party-system that happens pretty easily) every few years and Government just does whatever they want, because nobody can hold them accountable, and in the worst case they’ll get voted back into office two legislatory periods later.
And if you don’t live in a swing state, your vote just doesn’t count.
The USA has had their system for far too long and never had a chance to overhaul the whole system. So politicians are using centuries old loopholes, wide enough to drive a cargo ship through them, and nothing is stopping them, because the people in power got to power in this system and changing anything is just a risk for them to lose that power.
Your opening point about advantage reminded me of a story I read years ago. It was in some dense Russian tome - I want to say Brothers Karamazov, but I don’t know and don’t remember. Anyway, it’s not mine.
Once there was a farming village in a valley, Their lives were generally peaceful, except for every few years, a band of ruthless bandits would ride down out of the mountains, sweep through the village, kill a bunch of men, rape a bunch of women, steal everything they could, and ride back into the mountains.
Then the village would rebuild, and after some hardship, replenish their crops and livestock and supplies… then the horsemen would ride back down, kill, rape and steal, then ride away.
This went on for many years, until the time that a different band of horsemen rode down from a different part of the mountains, and they killed, raped and stole, then rode away.
Then, shortly thereafter, the customary band of horsemen rode down, only to find the village devastated and everything they intended to steal already gone.
When they found out what had happened, they realized that that could not be allowed. They lived lives of ease through killing and raping and stealing, and they weren’t going to give that up, but they couldn’t do it if things continued that way.
So they struck a deal with the villagers. The villagers would provide them with everything they would’ve stolen if they could’ve, and in exchange, they’d not only stop killing and raping them, but make sure these other horsemen didn’t kill or rape or steal from them either.
And the villagers, wanting only to live their lives as unmolested as possible, reluctantly agreed.
And thus was government born.
Government is born instantly whenever multiple people have to interact and it’s about actually important stuff.
Take for example the story of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This area was a large military base in the city of Copenhagen, that the military abandoned. Before this area could be redeveloped, anarchist squatters moved in. Somehow the government didn’t step in and let them form their own society.
From the start the people living there noticed that they had common areas and infrastructure that they had to manage, so they formed local councils and each local council sent representatives to the one big council that was responsible for the whole Freetown. Of course, these people wheren’t elected politicians, but only people selected by the majority of the smaller councils and sent to the big one to speak for them. No representative democracy at all, only anarchism.
Then they noticed that keeping up the common areas and infrastructure costs money, so they instituted mandatory contributions of all inhabitants. That of course weren’t taxes, just mandatory contributions.
When people had troubles with their neighbors or other people, they could bring that conflict in front of a council for the council to decide who was right and what should happen. Totally not a court trial, just a council trying to settle disputes that could set mandatory consequences.
In the 80s then the Bullshit Motorcycle Club and the Hell’s Angels fought over Christiania (I mean, who doesn’t want to control an area with no real law enforcement?), and the Bullshitters won and took over the Freetown. After a particularly gruesome murder by the Bullshitters, the inhabitants of Christiania asked Copenhagen’s police and the Hells Angels for help and they all together where able to break up the Bullshitters and drive them out.
To make sure that this wouldn’t happen again, the big council decided to make some more solid rules (e.g. banning biker jackets, no hard drugs) and hired some strong men to make sure the rules where kept. These guys totally wheren’t a police force. But if someone was breaking these rules, the strong men would drag that person out of Freetown and call Copenhagen’s real police to deal with the offender.
So these anarchists reinvented representative democracy, taxes, laws and a police force. They just called all of that differently.
Idk I’ve never had a cop save me from anything, much less a sociopath. But maybe that’s just because the sociopaths know the cops are out there.
Oh and most cops I’ve spoken to outside brightly lit offices where one of us works struck me as sociopaths.
Yea, cops do tend to be grumpy little assholes. I was talking about the police force from a theoretical standpoint. If someone was breaking into my house, I would need to call for help, right?
Well, you could also be your own help, but even then you’ll need to call them after because you’re compelled to under threat of imprisonment or death.
I wanna see you helping yourself if five armed home invaders silently broke into your house and shoot you before you wake up.
Just because some rare situations are a kobayashi maru, does that mean you shouldn’t prepare for the situations you can handle?
Since you can’t put out a fire with an extinguisher if it starts in your sleep before it grows too big, should you not have a fire extinguisher just in case one starts while you are awake?
Does your alarm system not make loud “wake the fuck up” noises?
Did you not put good locks and 3" door screws on your door?
No dog?
Live in feudal Japan?
Sleep with earplugs?
Nope. I live in an actually developed country where the police generally does a very good job (nothing is perfect) and there is maybe one home invasion in the whole country every 10 years.
No need to have an alarm system, a dog or a fortificated bunker as a home. Also very few people (even very few criminals) have guns, hence gun violence even in criminal settings is close to non-existent.
The murder rate here is 1/10 of the murder rate in the USA, with almost all of the murders are people killing their spouses. Other kinds of murder are very rare.
We never had a single school shooting ever.
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Technically, no - there has never been a truly communist society. They’ve all really been communist in name only.
In order for the society to be truly communist, property must be communal - that’s the fundamental requirement.
And in order for property to be truly communal, all must have an exactly equal right to it, or more precisely, an exactly equal right to share in control of it.
The moment that hierarchical authority is introduced, control over the society and its property is tied to that authority. The right to exercise control over property is vested not in the people communally, but in the system by which authority is designated and exercised - the state. And that means that for all intents and purposes, regardless of any claims to the contrary, all property is actually owned not by the people, but by the state. And that is not and cannot be communism.
Ding ding ding! Someone around here gets it.
Main problem, you’ll be steam rolled by your enemies without institutionalized authority and regiment.
Depends on how you define “state”. IIRC, Marx drew a distinction between “state” and “government”, where the former is all the coercive institutions (cops, prisons, courts, etc). In this framework, you need a “government” to do the things you refer to, but participation in that government’s activities should be voluntary, without the threat of armed government agents showing up at your door if you don’t comply.
But what if someone doesn’t comply?
When someone who owns the path to your house decides they won’t let you use that path anymore.
Or when the guy who owns the water works doesn’t like you and decides that your house won’t get any water any more?
Or even more simple: what if you and your neighbour have a conflict that escalates further and further? Should you just duel? Or maybe shoot the neighbour in their sleep before they do it with you?
And lastly: To get to this state, you need to coerce the current coercive institutions out of said power. Is that not being coercive yourself?
When someone who owns the path to your house decides they won’t let you use that path anymore. Or when the guy who owns the water works doesn’t like you and decides that your house won’t get any water any more?
This would be public property. No private ownership.
Or even more simple: what if you and your neighbour have a conflict that escalates further and further? Should you just duel? Or maybe shoot the neighbour in their sleep before they do it with you?
So this is how I understand it. Achieving the communist utopia in its purest form would be impossible. However, the goal should be to go as close to it as possible. In your scenario, your neighbor would just be “nice”, thus stopping any escalation of your conflict. Again, as it’s impossible for this to happen completely, we would still require the presence of SOME coercive entity. However, the scale of this entity would reduce over time, as people would tend to be less asshole-ey over time (consider how wars have reduced over time).
And lastly: To get to this state, you need to coerce the current coercive institutions out of said power. Is that not being coercive yourself?
It is. However, this isn’t necessarily contradictory. Say you have an institution with 121 coercion points. You thus overthrow this institution, thus becoming worth say 70 coercion points. After the overthrowing is complete, you dissolve your own institution that did the coercion on the other coercive institution. Thus, 0 coercion achieved.
Another way to explain this: The Nazis started a war. The goal was to end this war. However, to end this war, the allies entered the war, thus expanding its scale. In the end however, the war ended.
Public property doesn’t make the situation easier, because now you have lots more people who have to be involved in decision making.
Maybe some people want the road paved but others think it’s a waste of their money. Now what do you do? Force the people to pay up or deny them usage of the road? Or would you let them free-load and use the nice paved road without paying for it?
All three options are unfair. If you force them to pay for something they don’t want to, that’s clearly unfair. If you deny them the usage of the road, they lose access to what they had access too before (the road). If you let them free-load, that’s unfair to the people who now had to pay more, and chances are that next time more people will say they are against it, even though they want to have the change, but that way they get the stuff for free.
The communist utopia would be a post scarcity society, where money would be irrelevant at individual level. Hence, “paving the road” wouldn’t be a scarce service. Therefore, noone would oppose it. But let’s assume that some still oppose. In this case, it would just be democracy at work. That’s why the communist utopia is something that we can get extremely close to, instead of actually reaching it.
For instance, “banning murder” is coercive for murderers. Now, they are coerced into not murdering people. This however doesn’t mean that shall be allowed to go on murdering people, right?
That’s the question. At what point is a society with democracy, laws and a police still an anarchistic, stateless society?
To me this quickly overlaps with a libertarian democracy with direct democracy on the local levels, just with a different name. It’s kinda scary to me how quickly the left and the right converge here.
Post-scarcity is a nice concept, but that will never happen. Many countries in Europe are effectively post-scarcity if you only consider basic needs.
Here in Austria, for example, we have a thing called “Mindestsicherung” which anyone is eligeable for if they are an Austrian citizen or have lived here for >5 years if they earn less than €1050 a month (median income is €2240). What happens then is the state pays them extra money so that together with their income they earn €1050 (even if you have no income at all). Then you get a flat in public housing and they pay for that too. Also you get free public transport passes, don’t have to pay a TV license and get a free basic phone and internet contract. You even get a vouchers for clothing if you need new clothing.
Living, food, clothing, mobility, communication and internet are all taken care of. That’s post-scarcity on the basic level.
I have a good friend who suffers from severe depression. He’s been living off Mindestsicherung for the last 10 years. He doesn’t have a lot of money but enough to go around and still have some money left for hobbies.
Still capitalism is alive and well here with only a low rate of long-term unemployed people. Because people don’t only work to save themselves from starving, but because they want a higher living standard and more cool gadgets. So for money to not be important, everyone would have to have everything that they can think of.
Okay now this is the answer that I was looking for! This makes perfect sense! For me, “state” and “government” were synonyms prior to reading your comment. So basically, the communist utpoia is a world devoid of institutionalized coercion.
To answer my question, a space program could definitely work. The only thing is, all scientists would be working voluntarily there. No scientist would become homeless if they decided to stay home for the day.
Wrong answers only:
You’re only allowed to program in pure functional languages. Hence the name “Standard ML”.
Haskell is a secret communist spy…
Many would say that stateless socialism is the premise of Anarchism. Stateless largely refers to organizing hierarchies horizontally over vertically, and this is due to the overarching critique that vertical hierarchies result in corruption and rank inequality. Check out Communalism and the works of Murray Bookchin if you’d like to know more. There’s also a fair amount of talk about “pure democracy/direct democracy” in these circles and personally I think that Digital Direct Democracy could be the cure for the cancer in all the worlds modern democracies, if it ever takes off somewhere.
YESSS!!! I HAVE AN ENTIRE MANIFESTO ON DIGITAL DIRECT DEMOCRACY!!! The only part that stumped me was how it could be stateless (I was confusing “state” with “government”).
There are different ideas how (and if) this could work. E.g. worker’s councils that form at a factory level (or similar - people who are working closely together), and then you might have higher levels of cooperation where e.g. all roadworking collectives in a region send delegates to coordinate who builds which road, what roads are even necessary etc. You’d probably want cooperation in another dimension as well: delegates of road working collectives coordinating with teamsters, urban planners, manufactureres of building materials, … But it would be networks of networks, not a top-down structure responsible for everything from kindergartens to space exploration and equipped with military and police power.
You might want to check out The Disposessed by Ursula K. LeGuin or bolo’bolo by P.M. for some more ideas.
The problem I have always seen is how do you deal with bad actors in general? It always eventually comes down to force.
No police or military just means that eventually some one will come in and take over.
People will have to be vigilant. But they have to be now as well - having a state does not provide safety against the rise of fascism or global corporations trashing our planet, as we can see.
That is of course something people must (re-)learn through practice. We can’t just “abolish the state” and expect people to suddenly have all the skills needed for self-organizing.
The question here is just is a self organized posse better than the state police? I guess there’s a reason that kind of went away in the west as it became less “wild”. And we see what self protection or self enforcement leads to in many reports in the US. It’s differently crappy / violent but not obviously better.
Pardon my limited knowledge, but not all communists believe in stateless societies. You’re probably talking about anarchists, but they’re not just limited to communists. There’s also anarcho-capitalist. At least from what I think, people want to strive for governance at the local-most levels. Could be something similar to the panchayat system that we have in India.
Anarcho-capitalism is just a can of worms. Capital represents power hence an uneven allocation of them, i.e. capitalism, is incompatible with anarchism.
From what they’re trying to attempt, it looks like either they’re striving for “good old days of slavery” or trying to create their own cult, like just like they do it in the movie The Other Lamb.
movie spoiler (you might want to not read this for your own sanity)
It’s about a “shepherd”, the leader of the polygamous, incest-sexual cult, impregnating a bunch of woman, culling the boy children, and in turn, impregnating their daughters, and killing the woman when they turn old, something like that.
Yes. Incoherent ideologies like this are often just covering up some really bad ideas.
I can’t imagine wanting to be ruled by corporations.
Well, the communist utopia is stateless, no?
Actually, I can’t answer that, as I’m not well-educated on politics. But states don’t necessarily have to be large, do they? Like for example, let’s take a small village, governed by some local head. It has to complete some transactions with a nearby municipality for transporting fruits and stuff, in exchange for some service. What becomes of the village? Is it now a micro-state conducting deal with another micro-state? Maybe I’m mixing the barter system here too, I guess.
Check out Revolution in Rojava: Democracy Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Northern Syria. It outlines how the MGRK system works as a stateless structure of governance.
It’s almost like communism could never work.
Unlike unfettered capitalism, which has worked so well! /s
It’s propagated itself across the entire world and overtaken opposition repeatedly so I’d say in every way that matters, yes but unironically.
And this isn’t praising capitalism, this is stating that your alternative had better be more robust than the current most robust system in existence.
“You don’t agree with one extreme, so you must agree with the opposite extreme!”
Where did I say it had?
No I get the communist utopia. As I said, I believe it is supposed to be a society that has achieved post scarcity. I can easily see humanity reaching that stage soon enough (relatively). I just can’t understand how statelessness is involved here.
