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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

We have real Communists everywhere, they are called corporations, most people work for such government where once inside they are a number and a cog in a machine that tells them to cooperate and not compete. It was a stupid idea to take this corporate model and try to implement it on the scale of national governance and there is no fitness function to terminate it if it's not working as expected, i.e. everyone is not being a good Communist. You want real Communism simply install unions into any existing corporation and make all employees into shareholders, instant Communism.

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I don't understand what you mean. Corporations as a legal structure are built to compete & live or die, governments are not. The point of having political power is to control it for the sake of prosperity. Having a 'death clause' in your government worker's performance would mean you've failed as a political actor to get enough control to guarantee prosperity. That's a bigger threat to the gov than having useless employees. Controlled incompetence, plausible deniability, ect are all useful political tools. Not always needed, but they are still useful tools.

If you want a 'communist corporation', just give every employee shares. You don't need unions or whatever else. You could start a company right now that does that. Some big UK firms do a performance sharing scheme with everybody in the company, even cashiers. Granted it's not much money in real terms, but it's proof how flexible the corporate legal structure can be.

> If you want a 'communist corporation', just give every employee shares

Co-operatives in this form aren’t communist. They compete for members, vendors and customers. They don’t have a monopoly on violence. They can be held accountable by the rule of law.

None of the above apply to communist governments. They have a monopoly on violence and the factors of production. That precludes an independent check on state power which, in turn, precludes the rule of law.

Yeah true. I was hoping the only thing of value people would see in communism is the egalitarian attitude towards the distribution of wealth. Communism is a political ideology, applying it to a corporation or business is going to lose it's political edge.

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