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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> "Farm here or I'll decapitate you."

I think you got confused, that's communism. :P And it's not decapitation (too messy) it is a bullet to the back of the head or death in a labor camp.

Feudalism is "you can farm here but you owe me and your promise to fight in my wars".

> The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terrifying.

Really? Is it terrifying to compare a vassal's contract with the "work for me in the warehouse and I'll pay you a minimum wage, if you don't like, there is a line waiting at the door". They are not the same, it's a bit silly but is that sending shivers down our spine?

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> that's communism.

I think you're confused about communism. What you're talking about seems more about soviet russia and other countries that run/ran an authoritarian state-capitalism system (often calling it communism).

However, communism has nothing to do with enforcing people to work under a threat of death, rather the contrary.

From Communist Manifesto:

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Unsurprisingly this leads to labor camps in every communist government.

According to the communist manifesto, the point you mention should be put into effect during the transitory phase from capitalism to communism, where the State gathers the power in order to then build a class-less, state-less society.

That is just a mean to reach the final goal, and it does not mention labor camps or anything like that.

I'm curious on which communist government are you talking about, since pretty much all the "communist" revolutions so far did not actually implement communism but state capitalism (as Lenin himself said), except for some libertarian communist revolutions (e.g. revolutionary Catalogna, Ukraine) that were then defeated militarily.

On one thing I agree with you though, which is that putting all the power into the state is not a good way to achieve communism, as it is dangerous and it pretty much never worked so far.

No true communism.

I am not confused I lived in a communist country.

communism as an ideal seems impossible to implement in any way besides the authoritarian state-capitalism way that it has been implemented. that accomplishes the objectives of having a command economy with full employment (even if its monstrously inefficient), but it certainly doesn't come close to creating a just political order where the policies serve the people instead of the owners of the means of production (which is the state).

the Mondragon Corporation[1] is one of the few interesting experiments with a Communism-inspired system that does not immediately degenerate into authoritarian state-capitalism.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

>communism as an ideal seems impossible to implement in any way besides the authoritarian state-capitalism way that it has been implemented.

>the Mondragon Corporation[1] is one of the few interesting experiments with a Communism-inspired system that does not immediately degenerate into authoritarian state-capitalism.

So there is no logical inconsistency in what you believe?

Mondragon Corporation is a worker syndicate , which is not a "communism inspired system", but a system aspiring for communism. If worker ownership can work in Mondragon, then saying that "communism is impossible without authoritarianism" is flawed.

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