"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51.
Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.)
Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.
That's a classic observation. It may no longer still be true. Scaling works better now that we have enough computer power. Amazon doesn't have a problem with coordination. Nor does WalMart. Alibaba and Tencent don't seem to. All those companies are above the quarter-trillion dollar level. They approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy.
There's no longer a limit on the size of a monopoly. It used to be that big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. The successful giant companies now seem to be past that problem. In a capitalist world, this leads to one big monopoly in each category.
An economy with a gigantic computer-controlled execution apparatus controlled by a single individual or small group of individuals starts looking a lot like the totalitarian strongman model of Mao or Stalin. Would you want to live in a world where Jeff Bezos controls the whole economy? Mark Zuckerburg? Regardless of how efficiently they run their companies, it's a problem when they're the only arbiter of what should be available to society.
Put more succinctly, the genius of capitalism is that we can have Amazon and Walmart and Alibaba and Tencent and Google and Apple and dozens of other companies that approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy. In Soviet Russia they just had Soviet Russia.
* You can have a caste system, where everyone does what his father did. Which is more fun if your dad was a priest than if he had to shovel shit.
* You can have someone with a gun tell you what to do. This was Stalin's preferred system. It doesn't mix well with democracy, because threatening to shoot yourself doesn't get coal dug out of the mine.
* You can use money, and let people trade their time for the fruits of their labour. This can exist with or without democracy. It can exist with varying levels of redistribution, too, but people still call it capitalism.
What is this alternative system?
Planned economy and lack of personal liberties cannot coexist in what we would call a democracy unless your definition of democracy is a slightly less violent conflict resolution method.
Overall democracy works because it respects the wishes of the individual essentially it gives everyone the right to express their wants communism has no room for any form of individualism.
But sure show me how you transition from the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase to this stateless paradise and I'll concede my argument.
By Marks himself the dictatorship is a critical phase in the process.
But it is not the same as the common defition of a dicatorship, with oppression and selfish tyranny, which seems to be the association you want to make.
I loathe linking to Wikipedia, but the page in question does sum it up quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...
The stateless version of your so called communism is essentially pure libertarianism the problem is that both are just as impossible and unlike the latter the former cannot coexist with the free market of ideas which is the natural state of a nationless/stateless society.
Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes.
Again, it is not a dictatorship in the commonly understood terminology, but rather a term that is used for a political system where one part has political power over the other under the existence of a state, because we don't really have a proper and precise term for it.
>"Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes."
Can you have a system that does not conserve energy? No, there such things as absolutes.
Communism besides being the mother of all bad ideas and the most vile ideology humanity has created is also deeply internally flawed and essentially ensures that it's final outcome can never be reached.
And even if we take that final outcome as our starting point it has no mechanism to sustain itself once there is no government and now laws that dictate social behaviour anyone can do whatever they want and no one can stop them.
So if at T+0 we have the withering of the state and perfect communism at T+1 nothing would stop me from taking control over whatever resource I want and saying well fuck you now you gotta pay.
They didn't all call themselves communists. The germans also don't call themselves german. We do.
It was invented long before, as a label for some imaginary perfect system which did not need to run gulags to keep the lights on. This perfect place played an important theological and rhetorical role in these kingdoms. If discussing such issues we use the word for this too. Words can have several meanings.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is essentially the phase that all communist governments get stuck on because there is no way for it to evolve into anything but another dictatorship, free market democracy or pure anarchy.
The idealistic state which is supposed to come after the dictatorship in which 7 billion people somehow live in harmony and prosperity with no laws to enforce how to live or to protect them isn't possible.
And a dictatorship by definition does not have the mechanism to yield power or to evolve in a non-violent manner and a natural instinct to preserve it at all cost even if that state was achievable it could never get there.
They simply aren't relevant for talking about the brutal 20th century system of organising human affairs called communism. (Or rather, perhaps, no more relevant than the details of the Imam are to understanding the Iranian regime. If you want to go deep and read between the lines in speeches etc, then of course you have to know the relevant theology.)
Regardless, it's just a word. My point is people commenting don't know the difference anyway, it's best to just read their comment as referring to "those authoritarian states that called themselves communist."
Trotsky would've been just as bad as Stalin in the end not because he was evil but because an authoritative regime has no other means of asserting power other than force and violence.
Which is why under any autocracy even the most "benevolent" ones any challenge to the authority, ideology and core philosophy of the rule must be squashed.
This imaginary utopia which some 19th writer dreamed up, to which said evil empire payed lip service, is a topic for those with special interests in 19th century utopian dreaming.
This historical revision of "The US and capitalism did nothing wrong" needs to die.
On propaganda, you may notice that one side's propaganda needed to be backed up at home with a gulag system, while vocal dissent on the other side was not a bar to ivy league tenure.
And yes you hit the point I was trying to make, no one forces you to live under capitalism even in a capitalist country it's perfectly legal for you to go and live in a commune it is not however true the other way around.
I had a grandparent die to Stalin's purges in the Gulag and I grew up in a Kibbutz I can say that my family experienced at least 4 different flavors of authoritarianism in the past 80 years and I've learned to be very weary of the very early signs of any authoritarianism.
Polish/German (mainly due to the fact that they lived in a region that went back and forth between Poland and Germany since the unification of the Prussian states) Jewish family my parents were born in 1942 after their parents have already escaped eastwards because of some guy that couldn't get into art school.
(When tired of mass starvation, the strategy is to export oil & buy wheat from the prairies, if you have enough oil.)
What labels marxist theology applied to its imaginary systems is besides the point. This was all just words which the guys with guns made a certain class of intellectuals spout for their bread, to make sure everyone knew who was the boss.
Unsurprisingly there's so much disagreement and ignorance around the topic.