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Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world.

If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less?

That millions of children still starve but a piece of simplistic art is worth more than the value of food a whole village consumes in a decade is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.

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>Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap.

Art was never about difficulty of reproduction. Once an artwork has been done any hack with 2-3 years of art school can create a great imitation, and with some more talent, even do a Rembrandt or whatever. There are entire cities in China who live by making copies of famous oil paintings.

>That millions of children still starve but a piece of simplistic art is worth more than the value of food a whole village consumes in a decade is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.

It's the same when a company buys some BS social app like Instagram (mainly an avenue for vanity and time-wasting) for several billion, which could just be used to save millions of lives.

Society was never about goodness or helping the most (and especially not for helping people elsewhere).

"Art was never about difficulty of reproduction."

While it's true that a skilled forger can effectively copy an old master painting, it's a pretty rare skill to have at a really high level. "Painting factory" copies from China are kitsch and definitely lack nuances that matter in the original.

But the skill of making a facsimile (a copper engraving of a painting for an edition of prints, for example) is something that used to be respected, though, to be fair, respect was pretty in proportion to how much interpretation/discretion the copier needed to bring into play. Converting colour oil painting -> black & white fine engraving is not a mechanical process, whereas turning cruder drawings into woodcuts apparently was considered merely a technical job.

What I'm getting at is the idea that the processes of reproduction are a part of the way art is made and circulated. They aren't something external that comes after the end of the creative act in a way the artist can't control. It's only in a world of immaterial digital media that it feels like art is replicated trivially and endlessly. Uniqueness seemed important when reproduction was costly (and art materials were expensive) and a lot of artworld practices, like editioning, are based on the assumption that the authentic work can't actually be copied, except by the artist. So I don't really agree with your claim.

>While it's true that a skilled forger can effectively copy an old master painting, it's a pretty rare skill to have at a really high level.

Not that rare. It also depends on the artist. More artists that are not pre-19th century masters are fairly easy to replicate, while their work still sells for millions.

>"Painting factory" copies from China are kitsch and definitely lack nuances that matter in the original.

That's just because of the speed involved. If they took their time on a single work, the quality would be much higher. And kitch is an aesthetic term, doesn't refer to the quality of the reproduction as such (a reproduction is kitch by definition, even if perfect).

>What I'm getting at is the idea that the processes of reproduction are a part of the way art is made and circulated.

That's true. That doesn't mean that a perfect replica by a master copier would ever get the same price as a coveted original.

I'm not sure I follow your thinking about kitsch, but's a very contested term.

Master art forgers represent an existential threat to art "connoisseurs", it's like what they do is an exploit aimed precisely at fooling a connoisseur's judgement. For obvious reasons they rarely try to pass off new concepts or compositions, just the superficial styles of painting etc. It's like they have a style-transfer filter but no working model of the source artist's thought processes.

Pastiche (which does often attempt to synthesize whole new works) is usually identifiable and not intended to deceive, but AGI will probably eventually blur that distinction as more and more of the characteristics of an artist's work can be captured in some kind of model.

It's not necessarily true that a derivative work is always worth less than the original, particularly if you include something like appropriation art. Elaine Sturtevant was an interesting example of imitations being taken very seriously:

'In 1964, by memorization only, she began to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original, at a point that turned the concept of originality on its head. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Warhol gave Sturtevant one of his silkscreens so she could produce her own versions of his Flowers paintings, and when asked about his technique, once said, "I don't know. Ask Elaine."' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Sturtevant

The work of making a superb pastiche is very highly respected in the art world. See this fictitious 1930s-style animation from a few years ago:

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/imitation-of-life-sneaks-...

This topic is really fascinating but OTOH the art world is a horrible phenomenon on a social level. It's not a place where deep thinking happens, at least not in public.

>If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less?

First, if it's just from climate change, it will be gradual increase in scarcity and all kinds of methods of growing food become viable as the price of bread increases. So unless climate change actually makes Banksy undesirable, it will still be worth more loaves of bread than one person could eat in a lifetime.

Second, if it's an acute wide-spread disaster, the only thing that becomes relevant is food/water/shelter /weapons/first-aid. Not only would a Banksy be worthless, but so would the world's biggest diamond as well as the cure for cancer.

So it's a meaningless comparison just based on the fact that you don't like rich people out-bidding each other over art (and subsequently supporting artists).

Once you start down the road of being dictator of spending on expensive things that aren't solving starvation, all kinds of things like space exploration, the development of the internet, etc all become "sorry effects". Guess how many villages could be fed on the budget of the Apollo program.

The difference is the number of people a product or a project will likely help times the ‘utility’ each person receive.

> Once you start down the road of being dictotoe of spending on expensive things that aren't solving starvation, all kinds of things like space exploration, the development of the internet, etc all become "sorry effects". Guess how many villages could be fed on the budget of the Apollo program.

I do not advocate dictating spending but propose designing a better incentive system for rich people to spend money on useful things. See my reply to another comment down below.

What are ‘useful’ things?

Your examples here have good probabilities of turning into ‘utility’ for the masses. Cure of cancer (obvious), Apollo program (many scientific advances), ...

Bidding up prestige and coolness is a zero sum game and only increases a small bit of satisfaction of a few rich people.

It is about valuing the needs of the rich and the masses more equitably.

You've put my thoughts about this very succinctly. Completely agree.

That money doesn't just vanish though. It's a wealth transfer from Adam to Bernice. Adam's bank balance drops from £100m to £99m, Bernice's goes from £100m to £101m.

If that transfer didn't happen, then both bank balances would remain at £100m. Nothing is lost or gained, it's irrelevant (Although in Banksy's case the original first sale often involves a transfer of wealth from Adam and Bernice to a random person)

There's nothing inherently good or bad about rich people playing money games with each others assets, it's not the same as Adam paying £10m to destroy a town and gain £20m in profit from exploiting the resources, or indeed divert tens of thousands of high-skilled effort per month into something like the Apollo program.

The transaction costs are bad, which may or may not be substantial.

Any transaction costs go to paying the auction house for things like catering, electricity, security, rent etc. No worse than a bunch of rich people spending money at a restaurant.

There's an argument that auction houses aren't paying their way for the services they use (especially in expensive areas), and other functions occupying that space could be better for society. A land value tax would solve that. I'm not aware that auction houses rely on other things like copyright or patents that can stifle economic activity.

Miles Mathis is very provocative on what 'art' is - he feels it is a massive money laundering exercise... http://mileswmathis.com/launder.pdf

  > Once you start down the road of being dictator 
  > of spending on expensive things that aren't solving
  > starvation, all kinds of things like space exploration,
  > the development of the internet, etc all become "sorry
  > effects". Guess how many villages could be fed on
  > the budget of the Apollo program.

Feels super weird to me that in its full context the point of this sentence wasn't "We should stop letting people starve to death instead of sending people into space"

> Feels super weird to me that in its full context the point of this sentence wasn't "We should stop letting people starve to death instead of sending people into space".

I think the point was that you can apply that logic to anything... However if you really wana talk about spending on space programs vs spending directy on starving people, consider where we would be technologically, scientifically etc as a society if we always chose to spend money on the needs of others (of which there is an endless supply) directly rather than invest it in lofty ideas - It's pure speculation, but I image the difference would be direct spending would only ever briefly solve short term problems, but ultimately civilisation as a whole would be in a worse place.

In other words, we can take knowledge with us into the future, not food. and in this context, banksy is politically charged knowledge striving for change - which is bought and sold by rich people for better or worse.

We could invest in lofty ideas to alleviate starving...

Isn't that exactly what happened? Banksy is an artist who feels that capitalism causes suffering (presumably including starving). This sale results in his ideas about alleviating starving by ending capitalism to be propagated and provides him with the funds to further propagate those ideas.

"Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa"

http://myscienceacademy.org/2012/08/13/why-explore-space-a-1...

NASA Associate director Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger elaborates on this topic.

That's a famously unconvincing argument.

How so?

Money is not really a scarce resource though - we can always print more of it. A million dollars spent on an artwork doesn't mean there are a million fewer $1 tins of beans made. That's not how the economy works.

An extra million dollar on the piece get spent by many organizations and people involved and increases the production of the resources they want and decreases the allocation of resources to produce things other people want.

Unless they store most of it in a bank somewhere and don’t use it, it has effects on the real economy.

Yes, it has effects on the real economy (although in the case of these high-value positional goods I'd argue they're rather smaller than you might think - as likely both buyer and sellers are simply swapping for money which otherwise will sit in a bank account so the effects are limited to those imparted by the middle-men).

My point was, the economy is not a zero-sum game.

Money is the force carrier for the value field. Humans exchange value, quantized as money, and the value field is stronger in some areas of our world.

Like any force carrier, they are fungible, and they are constantly being created and annihilated. Banks emit and absorb them strongly, other organizations less so.

You know Banksy made a film about exactly what you’re describing called “Exit Through The Gift Shop” right?

What good was that film if it made us "think", but not act?

I believe OP is putting the lessons in that film into action in his life, and those actions are present in the thoughts expressed in his words, and happily not the other way around like the people in and outside the art world giving lip service to Banksy.

There is an obvious political response to the question of "why is contemporary art what it is?" Some contemporary pieces sell for more than works by the ancient masters, sometimes at the astonishment of the public ("how can an ugly piece of burnt wood sell for more than a Goya painting?").

As art is exempted of taxes in most parts of the world, this is an obvious vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, speculation and financial crime. That's why so many things that the common man would deem "bad jokes" are supposed to be "art": because it's financially useful for the rich and the powerful. It's (mostly) a sham, not to say a swindle.

You raise a good point.

People are free to do how they like with their money, but outrageously some spend it frivolously in cheaply-made art for status or tax evasion purposes.

Bill Gates late-life philanthropy raises a counterpoint to this, in my view. The wealthy don't owe anything to anyone, but that's how a person starves to death waiting for a little mercy. Mr. Gates now invests in saving people, not in art, and that's a worthier status giver.

From a moral point of view, they should be charitable since they have so much that giving away a little bit of their fortune would have a tremendous impact on a significant amount of people while themselves being none the worse for it.

Auctioning art is now part of art, imho. Auctioneers and buyers are part time artists. It is quite meta but fits well with the postmodern world we live in. Art as aesthetic creation is finished, commodified, and soon to be produced by robots.

As for the prices, people can allocate a lot of money to a token, as long as other people still believe in it. Cryptocurrencies take this abstraction to the max. Art is more traditional than cryptos.

I am personally very cynical that there is even a shred of value to high-market art sales. It's all a game for the upper-rich. But your "children are starving" comment is off. People have different motives to spend money, a starving kid's has a motive and so does a rich person's who wants to be the buyer of a piece. Both are respectable, human needs, but we are much more likely to relate to the kid. This doesnt mean its somehow bad to have the other.

> Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world.

Not really. The level of wealth required to reasonably make a purchase like this is what? 20 million? That's not 'stratospheric'. It's richer than I am, to be sure. But it's only between 2 orders of magnitude richer than your average software engineer's annual salary. I think that's a pretty reasonable level of wealth inequality, and not really indicative of much at all.

> If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less?

Your point here proves the exact opposite of what you think it does. The fact that people can invest vast resources in things that aren't immediately useful for survival is an incredible testament to the stability and productivity of our economy. Because you're right, if people thought there was any significant chance of things going mad max, they certainly wouldn't be investing in art.

> That millions of children still starve but a piece of simplistic art is worth more than the value of food a whole village consumes in a decade is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.

Is it? Or do prices simply reflect our personal valuations of things? Which is to say, every decision each of us makes of what to do with our individual time and money sets a price. When you wrote this comment, you chose to invest your free moments in it, rather than earning money to donate to the poor. Is that a sad commentary on the state of the world? Or is it just the natural consequence of people being allowed to allocate their own resources?

Two orders of magnitude above something that’s already a ridiculous amount of money globally speaking. That’s not exactly reasonable, the fact that it’s not that much money compared to the real super-rich people is just a reminder of the unfortunate reality of long-tail economy.

You are free to spend your "ridiculous amount of money" however you please. If you don't donate most of what you earn to help starving children, maybe doing that and living just above the poverty line is a good place to start, before advocating that others give up their QoL.

I suppose I don't really understand. Why do you think it is bad to have rich people? It's often stated as if it's tautologically true, or self-evident. What do you think is the harm caused by that?

Would the rest of us be better off if we simply deleted the money of the rich?

That's obviously a wrong question to ask. Multibillionaires are a symptom, not the disease.

Symptom of what? High productivity?

I don't think two orders of magnitude is a reasonable level of wealth inequality.

What gives you the right to decide what other people do with their stuff? How would you feel if someone came along and said "I don't think two orders of magnitude is a reasonable level of wealth inequality, so I'm taking everything you own to give it to poor Africans"?

Imagine two people both making $100k/year. One saves/invests half their income, the other saves 0%. In 20 years, one has a million dollars of savings, the other has less than a thousand: three orders of magnitude of wealth inequality. The saver, by exercising restraint and not consuming everything he produces, has contributed more to the economy by allowing the fruits of his labours to be invested, increasing future productivity. If we penalise the saver and favour the wastrel, we incentivise and get less savings and investment, hence in the long term less growth and lower standards of living for everyone.

The rhetoric here implies that the poster believes there is no middle ground and also poverty is caused by individual, personal flaws (a reasonably close approximation to argue that a rich man is more moral than a poor man inherently because being wealthy is morally good).

>The rhetoric here implies that the poster believes there is no middle ground and also poverty is caused by individual, personal flaws (a reasonably close approximation to argue that a rich man is more moral than a poor man inherently because being wealthy is morally good).

It's not about morality at all; if the universe is deterministic, all behaviour was caused by the big bang, and if it's random, than all behaviour can be traced back to chance. Even in this case that all action is predetermined and nobody is at all responsible for their life (hence the concept of morality makes no sense), in terms of system design it still holds that a system that encourages economically beneficial behaviours (saving/investment) will result in better economic outcomes than a system that penalises them.

The key thing to understand about economics is it tries not to assume any morality. There is no absolute "moral good" (which is trivially provable by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument), value only exists in the minds of people. And the clearest revelation of what people value is what people are willing to spend their time, money and the fruit of their labours on.

> The saver, by exercising restraint and not consuming everything he produces, has contributed more to the economy by allowing the fruits of his labours to be invested, increasing future productivity.

Is that so? I'm not so sure. How can we know that the spender didn't contribute more to the economy by spending 50k/year more on goods and services?

Value is created by production: someone has to make something before it can be consumed. To increase productivity, to increase the ability to produce more things, investment is needed, be it in research, infrastructure or education. If everything that is produced (the $100k worth of value) is consumed, there's nothing left to invest.

More empirically, the fact that people are willing to pay the saver interest for his saving/investment demonstrates that it must be creating some value. That interest is essentially payment to the saver for refraining from consumption.

Thanks, good point.

I don't think that a rich heir contributed THAT much more to society than, say, a poor Amazon warehouse worker.

What gives people the right to own “stuff” in the first place? We live in society. If people aren’t happy with the rules, they can go live in a cave and burn their millions for warmth.

>What gives people the right to own “stuff” in the first place? We live in society. If people aren’t happy with the rules, they can go live in a cave and burn their millions for warmth.

If you're an American, then the society you live in has a constitution it's agreed to follow that stipulates people have private property, and the state doesn't have the right to arbitrarily seize it.

That aside, regardless of what society you live in, the last century demonstrated pretty clearly that taking rich people's stuff and banishing/killing/imprisoning them ends up making everyone in the society poorer, see for instance the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Because you destroy the incentive to invest, and to take the risks of starting a business. You also take money from the people who've demonstrated the best ability to invest it, and give it to people who've demonstrated minimal ability to invest or create value, resulting in a massive reduction in productive investment being made.

There's a healthy midpoint between sending the rich to gulags and letting people accrue wealth without restriction.

If you own two orders of magnitudes more than somebody else, that means you can buy the stuff that they might need so they don't get it, such as land and labour.

That's also a form of violence.

I'm not saying that the saver should be penalized and the wastrel favored, you're reading way too much into this.

What I am saying is that high wealth inequality is a sign of decay in a society and it's in the best interest of everyone to ease it.

It an effect if individual freedom. Unfortunately, that includes the freedom to assign value to things that may be objectively valueless. People spend billions on junky movies, tv shows and apps. But what are you going to do, ban entertainment? It’s been tried.

>sorry effect of the financial system

Maybe but if you think about it it's an exchange of a bit of paper with some marks on which could easily be reproduced for some 0s and 1s representing a bank balance which could be reproduced or qualitatively eased and the like too. The transaction has no direct effect on the amount of food produced or how much get to children. The worst famines in recent history have been caused by people in ok fed countries saying look at this financial system, it's wack, lets smash it, and then finding millions get hungry and possibly dead, see Russia, China and Venezuela.

> is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.

Sorry, but if you think this is a modern, western, or somehow unique situation in human history you’re lacking a lot of context. This is just how humans work.

A good percentage of people appreciate art, a small percentage of people like flaunting their wealth, and between these two groups societies have elevated artists and art since we stopped roaming the plains and start building cities.

Recently Damien Hirst has had to scale back operations because his brand of 'art business' is not selling. Fashions change and also there is a limit as to how many people will pay an absolute fortune to become part of the exclusive club of people with 'spot paintings' on their walls.

When the going was good his company hired hundreds of people. All of them slaving away making and 'retailing' his art. This was good for the local economy as lots of younger people with no local workplace opportunities were given a chance to earn a crust.

Although Damien Hirst never was the 'housewife's favourite' in the way that Banksy is, essentially it was the same game, 'art business' which is not to be confused with 'art'. 'Art business' is very much about making money, not making 'art'.

With Banksy there are a lot of hangers on that try their hardest to monetize official Banksy creations. Although Banksy's style is original it is also an easy style to fake. Banksy by being anonymous keeps some safe artistic distance from this ugly art business aspect.

More generally though it is funny how there is no money in the wider art business right now. It is a business that has gone the same way as antique collecting, there is no greater fool to sell on to.

>Global auction sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips jumped 21.6% in the first half of 2018, according to the latest report by ArtTactic.

- Salvator Mundi sold last year for $430 million.

I imagine the art business will go on a while. Even if Hirst is having a down turn.

Millions of children will starve because they are being born by women without access to contraception, without the intelligence/education to know that having multiple children without food security is a bad idea, or because they are forced to by their husbands.

Help solve those issues first if you must, and don't worry about paintings.

This is a funny comment about this particular piece of art because it is an obvious & unsubtle reading of the theme of this piece (and other Banksy pieces).

What's your reading of it?

I’m not sure honestly. I’ve been thinking about it a lot (which to me means it’s actually good art).

I think the obvious & unsubtle reading above makes a ton of sense. It is a critique of the modern art business for sure.

But also it seems likely that the auction company was in on this so I sort of read it as a statement that you cant separate the business of art from the making of art.

Joy also has value and part of being an artist is building an audience

> Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings

But you didn’t.

It is not artifact of any financial system, this would happen even if we had full communism, just illegally and with barter/favor payments. It is artifact of human nature.

With a different kind of accounting, people behaviors may change. The wealthy art consumers want status, prestige, and acceptance as one of the ‘cool’ crowd. Or when buying for investment, they expect some will buy from them for those effects.

If we make it much more prestigious and ‘cool’ for people to show off their equivalent donations to starving children, fewer will bid for the drawings and more will donate.

As someone who makes most of his money from non-profit organizations, I can say that "competitive donating" is a sport which many of the older rich people will play. The ones who play hardest are typically near the end of their rope and worried that they won't be remembered fondly or won't get into heaven (see: the catholic church).

It was so much simpler when the church could just sell indulgences...

The free market provides more efficient price discovery for indulgences

Definitely, but that has nothing to do with the financial system. Actually the current financial system is the only known system able to create fortunes big enough that someone is able to donate anything; and the system enables it, contrary to others that are designed only with citizens in mind. Another problem is that other systems are designed, the one we have now is more or less natural - people will always trade unless they can get everything for free, which is not possible at the moment and probably won't be for the next 50 years at least. A lot of value would be lost if people didn't use money; this value might seem low per transaction, but it's a lot on a country/global scale.

>the current financial system is the only known system able to create fortunes big enough that someone is able to donate anything

You mean the current financial system where concentrated wealth yields concentrated power to effect change?

And almost everyone is born into a situation where their wealth & power is insignificant compared to the rare individual who has been the beneficiary of the feature where rapidly or not there is a net flow concentrating resources disproportionately toward those already wealthy & powerful?

Nominally, the traditional result is that the few having most concentrated wealth are the ones capable of effecting the changes they desire, with most everyone else serving these masters in one way or another. With the servant class being highly restricted in their ability to develop personal wealth of their own, much less direct major resources toward independently progressive positive objectives.

I must assume that the current financial system is the same one as that of Genghis Khan.

So naturally there is a long precedent.

Anyway, back on topic not every single artist or engineer serves this type of master, just most of them.

Some create value or enhance wealth, some devalue or destroy, what else is new?

>We could invest in lofty ideas to alleviate starving...

This wise investment was fortunately made starting at just the most opportune time in human history, and has compounded itself remarkably in only a few generations. Many approaches are now well known, only requiring a properly-scalable "seed" committment for their relative degrees of success to be proven on the larger scale.

I guess we need to invest in lofty equitable distribution of resources, especially essential survival commodities.

Creating or spreading surplus value can require a lot of work, but those at the top of the food chain don't really have to do it if they don't feel like it since wealth is flowing their way already.

Plus there is just so much wealth & plenty already which is not having a fraction of the positive effect it could be making.

Sorry but right now I don't have time for full reply. Consider that many problems you listed are caused by regulation (that supports corporations and their interests), not the financial system itself. The same system is used elsewhere with better results.

Two thoughts: I don't see a viable way to change what society views as prestigious and 'cool'.

I can see the argument that the amounts spent on works of art are excessive, but it seems like we should at least keep in mind that this does benefit society by supporting the creation of great art.

that's a pretty vapid statement. aren't all crimes an "artifact of human nature"? isn't everything we do and create, for that matter?

also, how would a stateless society even have the concept of legality?

We're not talking about crimes, we're talking about desires. And yes, that's why blaming the financial system is wrong - nothing would change.

Stateless society can still have justice, courts, rules, police... It's just driven by someone else.

you're actually not making any sense. you're saying that no matter what financial system we have, nothing would change, so there's no point in changing it, and there's no point in not changing it. and if courts and police exist in the way that they exist in our society, then that wouldn't be a stateless society by definition.

I'm saying that changing the financial system will change nothing and there is no point in changing it, yes. Part of the world tried other systems and failed miserably, thus we should focus on education and other social factors instead of trying to fix something that isn't broken (what is broken is the current regulation, not the system itself).

Ad communism: That's not true. Have you read anything from the communist theory? Marx, at least? I mean, more than a part of one book?

Communism is a change in ownership and control, but that doesn't mean that a police-like body wouldn't exist (it might not, though). They just call it "people's militia". The court system would be different, but a court nonetheless. A corporation can have police and courts and it's still a corporation. Military, the same. Even today these are deliberately kept as separate as possible from the governing body (what we usually mean with "state").

Thus I think you have mixed up the definition of "state" in "stateless".

have you read marx? he didn't have any actual conception of a communist society. and anyway, that's a bit like trying to understand capitalism by only reading adam smith, which would be incoherent.

and it sounds like you're really describing the 20th century model of essentially replacing boards of directors with government officials and calling that communism. and that's the most basic and universal criticism of 20th century communism that marxists have today, which is that that model preserved the internal logic of capitalism by preserving the structures which concentrated (capital) power within a handful of people in the same way that capitalism does, or something like that. and if you're being faithful to marx, none of those are communist societies, it's more like stage zero socialism.

i'm not trying to start a flame war, i was just confused about what you were saying, but i think i understand now.

> he didn't have any actual conception of a communist society

This is my point, actually. There is no one who would forbid a group of people to appoint a few members of their community to be "police"; there is no one who would forbid a group of people to create a court. And there is nothing saying that would make it a state. Communism is about self-governed societies, not anarchy in the destructive "I can do whatever because there is no police" sense.

Even actual anarchy wouldn't be like that because if you hurt enough people, they will hurt you, and that's why you don't even do it. Later in development, they'd pay someone in advance to hurt you if you hurt them. The same thing would happen in communism, just there wouldn't be money changing hands and the organizational specifics would be different.

Saying that any form of leadership would make a stateless society not stateless is nonsense. My family is not a state and yet we have a leader. My apartment building is not a state and yet we have a leader. Etc. There will always be a leader (or a group of leaders), the difference lies in who owns what and how are the leaders appointed (e.g. on basis of what) and what rights they have. Without any leaders, the society would collapse.

A "stateless" society does not exist, as long as people live together they need tp assign certain roles, and that is a "state", however rudimentary. And if roles are not assigned by agreement, someone will create them by force.

i think what communists usually mean by a stateless society is that there's no formal document or structure that authorizes a concentration or monopoly of power within any institution.

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