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Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot:

And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george...

Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.

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The comment by T. S. Eliot reminds me of one of Orwell's critiques of Charles Dickens. Namely, that whilst he is very insightful about the ills of society, he offers no better solution than to hope for "good rich men".

> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

I can't help but feel like Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".

https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd

What's Orwell's own solution, though? The whole point of Animal Farm is that the existing order was overthrown, with the best of intentions, and some unscrupulous individuals, with support from naive idealists and selfish opportunists, turned the new order into something no better than before.

Sounds to me like an argument towards an argument exactly for focusing on "public-spirited pigs" and how to get them into power, rather than how to overthrow the existing order with something you don't know will work out or revert to something worse.

Vanguardism on the left has been heavily critiqued by the Left. You should read Peter Kropotkin on mutual aid. We do not need to depend on public spirited pigs.

Depend on, in the sense of hoping they just magically turn up and make everything right, no. But you cannot have a well working society without them.

The key is, then, to set up a system that improves the chances of having them in charge, rather than selfish ones.

Or don't enable institutions that attract the worst elements of society and put them in positions of power over others. The nature of hierarchies is that they distill the power hungry at their top, and lust for the subjugation of others is fundamentally at odds with effective leadership. The taller the hierarchy, the greater the distillation, because those not driven by an intrinsic desire to hierarchy-climb will be weeded out.

The problem is that the nature of non-hierarchies is that they inevitably allow the power hungry to establish hierarchies of their own design.

I would recommend reading The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It's a great analysis of the feminist movement of the 70s by one of its members. Specifically it critiques the push to avoid explicit hierarchies within that movement as inevitably enabling implicit hierarchies that favor the in-crowd

A more recent case study would be Valve: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/30/no-bos...

Guess the moral of the story is hierarchy will always exist - it can either be visible or invisible. People who want power will seek it. Inevitably people will end up following/obeying them for one reason or another … and we have a person in power.

> What's Orwell's own solution, though?

Democratic socialism. Humanism. Anti-fascism.

In his early years, anarchism. But I think not so much in his later writings (correct me if I'm wrong).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

It's important to note that Orwell was a socialist. But he was an intellectually honest one. He pointed out the potential pitfalls of his values, as a means to seek a means to overcome them.

(asserting my own beliefs now) The fact that most of a century has passed during which we've seen those pitfalls repeated many times since, and no effective mechanism for protecting against them has surfaced, I think that the project of socialism must be abandoned.

We've also known about the rampant pitfalls of Capitalism since before Adam Smith, and yet we seem absolutely chuffed to dive headfirst into those, time and time again. Stable governments seem to be a pretty rare fluke, regardless of model of governance.

Because no matter how bad the pitfalls are, in relative comparison they are still not as bad as the other tested option.

Because the people making the decisions are the people benefitting from those pitfalls

What’s the alternative?

According to Cambridge dictionary, Capitalism is,

“an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit”

So the alternative is state control and history tells us that only works with certain endeavours - e.g. military - and can be catastrophic when applied to things like agriculture (see collectivization).

That's honestly a pretty bad and misleading definition.

The key element of capitalism is not so much private vs. state ownership, it's ownership (and thus profit extraction) based on capital.

And the effect of is allowing control to be arbitrarily skewed towards wealthy individuals who don't need to work, while leaving others with no control at all, even over the work they do, while still needing to work to sustain themselves. Additionally, this skew tends to increase over time as capital accumulates profits exponentially.

The alternative is basing control on something other than capital. But that actually leaves a lot of different options, not just state ownership. What if the only legal form of corporation were the cooperative, with companies being collectively owned by, and profits distributed to, their employees, equally?

I completely disagree with your last point. Social democracy has been wildly successful. Many socialist ideas work very well. The big problem with most "communist" countries is that they forgot the most important aspect: giving the workers a voice. They're supposed to be in the dictatorship of the proletariat phase towards communism, but none of them give power to the proletariat. They're a dictatorship of an elite, and there's nothing socialist about that.

And in the past century we've also seen the harmful influence of extreme capitalism on democracy, including social democracy. Clearly the power of money on politics needs to be limited.

But tue hardest problem is how to ensure that the voters are well informed. They need reliable news media, but the two obvious ways to finance that are through capitalism and the state, both of which are suspect.

Sure. You're talking about two different things here. When you're saying "social democracy", you're talking about "capitalism with a safety net". When you're talking about "Communist" countries, you're talking about a system in which the government controls the means of production. These are related but distinct ideas.

The thing is, in the "government controls the means of production", you necessarily cede to the government sufficient control of everything - news media and everything else: that is, by definition, totalitarianism. The government can easily use this to prevent "bad views" from being aired. It doesn't even require evil intent. The gov't can think it's doing the right thing by protecting people from "misinformation" - you can see this debate today in America, and I understand there's a debate today in Germany about actually banning an overly-right-wing political party. And when a government comes to view itself as being truly good, the only legitimate defender of the people, it'll be very tempting for them to stomp on media and even voting freedom even with those good intentions.

Socialism is not necessarily about the government controlling the means of production, though. It's about the proletariat, the workers, controlling the means of production. Government is one way to accomplish that, but that only works if the workers control the government, which was not the case in Soviet countries.

There are also other ways to have workers control the means of production to varying degrees. Labour unions, workers councils, etc share control between the workers and the owners. A democracy in which workers vote for a government that controls regulations is another. Co-ops are a great one.

And of course according to the communist ideal, there isn't even a central government to control the means of production.

The big questions are whether it's possible to reach that ideal, how, and whether it's even stable. Countries calling themselves "communist" in our world certainly failed dramatically. But social democracy has been fairly effective in giving at least some degree of control to the workers. Their big problem is that in a still fundamentally capitalist system, money still rules, and powerful corporations can often either control or ignore the government and take away the power of the workers. That has definitely happened in the US, and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, over the past half century.

Social democracy is way more than "capitalism with a safety net". It normally advocates a mixed economy in which the means of production may still be owned privately, but the state may have various overriding powers such as:

- Enforcing worker regulations (min wages, max hours etc) - Provision of essential utilities (water, fuel, education, transport, healthcare etc) - Fiscal policies (corporation taxes, infrastructure spending, customs duties etc)

I think Dickens and Elliot are somewhat right and Orwell even demonstrates it in Animal Farm... there was a "public-spirited pig" bending the revolution toward fairness and decency, but it only took one other pig with a monopoly on physical force to overthrow him in an instant. Without "good people", human nature will corrupt any system.

It's the structure of the political and legal systems that really determine how well and fairly those resources are distributed. If you have a political system without checks and balances writing laws, and/or a legal system that does not apply the law equally to all its citizens, then you're going to have a bad time, no matter the economic system you use.

I think it also shows how tyranny manifests through a series of small pushes. Napoleon didn’t establish an autocracy as soon as old major died - it took him all the way until the end of the book to let the mask drop fully. There were dozens of small ways the other animals could have resisted his rise to power along the way - missed opportunities for good people, aka “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

The Dickens/Elliot argument is simply the more acceptable form of an argument that in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".

All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well. Not that "well" should ever be as well as those on top treat themselves ...

No. The argument is not that some people should be placed in a position of power, let alone an irrevocable one.

The argument is that that you cannot organize a society without having some people in positions of power of some sort. And if you explicitly try to avoid that, you'll end up with someone grabbing it anyway.

So it's better to instead think of how you can set up your society to explicitly give the greatest power only for a limited time, with transparency and accountability, and ideally find a way to give it only to competent and well-meaning people.

A process can replace a position. We don't have Judge Dredd positions of power because we have a process of separating Executive actions from Judicial actions. I believe this line of reasoning allows that we generate our democratically-governed systems in such a manner that governing "positions" of power don't have effective power over the position of the free-willed individual. An example of this effect is how a US citizen has the right to own a firearm & defend themselves with it even though homicide and firing a gun in a city are illegal. The process allows for a person to govern themselves - self-organization occurs such that militias can rightfully exist, and there exists procedural allowances for these guns/militias (positions of power) to exist without being taken away by an official. The greatest power is the individual's, and if your reference is to power that can be given or taken away after some time, this is not the greatest power and it also cannot be given away. "God-given rights" means there are authorities (including the individual) who surpass the highest which any governing authority can claim or be given. This process only works when we recognize that nobody should ever be put in this position to supplant the power of "God".

>in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".

Sure, if we're thinking in a vacuum. Even if we go religious, what's the difference between modern prison and the Garden of Eden? It's part of why we call tech environments with a lot of amenities a "walled garden".

Digression aside, we have millenia of knowledge to know that never ends well and millenia of knowledge to know that slavery is never about trying to treat people well to begin with.

>All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well

In theory, yes. And like slavery we have millenia of knowledge on how NOT to run a country.

But unlike Slavery we have seen that the alternative to no government ends worse. So it's an unfortuante compromise needed for a society in that someone needs to make widespread decisions. The more modern (but not necessarily best) methods to prevent corruption is simply to make sure a person is never in that seat of power for too long.

Now I know this sounds way OT, but...

'Intentionally they create two different for a lack of better'?

P-:

His politics are set out in some detail on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics

He also wrote quite a lot about his political views, which were sharpened after visiting anarchist Catalonia and fighting in the Spanish civil war. See e.g. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

When he was in his 30's he joined up with Trostkyists to fight in Spain, but said he would have preferred to have joined the anarchists. Despite his capabilities as a writer, I wouldn't really turn to him for political advice.

Not understand - I know a bunch of anarchists and their view of anarchy is definitely not "helter skelter". What specifically would you critique about Orwell's politics?

The most convincing depiction of anarchy I have seen is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, where they have deep social conventions that make claiming any kind of power over others taboo. But that never seemed to me a sufficient safeguard against power-hungry people finding ways around it - let along external enemies.

I loved the Dispossessed. I agree with the critique that her portrayal of anarchy is a bit utopian and glosses over what happens with unscrupulous actors. But, I appreciate that her point was about the problems that can exist even in the breast case scenario

If I understand it correctly, The Dawn of Everything argues that (many) Native American societies had those kinds of strong taboos and that was a workable model until acted upon by an outside force.

It's a argument for better system design, aka a meat grinder driven by pigs for the pigs and a stationary government part with almost no power to act on its own, except in limiting decay to the meat grinder and restoring it's full functionally once it breaks down. A good working government is a horrible device for the power fool taxing them and reasoning them on all levels.

Thank you for digging up the quote and summarizing the sentiment. I've never been able to put my finger on this aspect of Dickens.

I personally share the same philosophy that morality swings above its weight in the grand scheme of society. It's fully within our control as individuals and therefore a worthy target for literary influence.

> If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

Which in turn reminds me of Federalist No. 51:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. "

This would be a good thing to frame/teach in the context of business management

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes?

Checks and balances, electoral accountability, independent branches of government, multiple levels of governance (city, county/parish, state/province, national, global). Independent actors within and outside government.

The work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again.

-- Danielle Allen, on the Ezra Klein podcast <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...>

That's a great quote, as "powerful interests" rightly refers to either government or corporate bodies. A country where the media is lobbied by business is less democratic for it.

Late response, but: yes.

There's a reason why I chafe greatly with viewpoints which focus exclusively or even significantly, on, say, corporate vs. government power as the greater evil or risk. I'll note that within the past century, religious power was a frequently-cited risk even amongst great power states (it's largely a factor in less-powerful states, though not entirely absent from today's stage).

The true concern is actually power itself, however that is manifested. That might be political, it might be commercial, it might be religious, it might be cultural or social, it might be technological. I'm informed here by the "four estates" (church, nobility, burghers, commoners), sometimes a fifth (press), as well as Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture.

Ultimately, power devolves from some control nexus from which a lesser effort need be asserted than the benefit or result which comes from it.

Without men, there would be no wars nor skyscrapers.

-- Anonymous

it's an awesome aphorism, and continues (there are lots of versions and alleged authors):

Without men, there would be neither wars or skyscrapers; neither destruction or creation; neither hate nor love. We are not angels but we need not be devils, but without the devils as examples, how to choose right from wrong?

There is also: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/97379851-without-the-m...

The corpus of literature on designing systems to function smoothly and reliably when filled with mediocre decision makers is neither large nor well known nor inspiring. Hence, most people understandably ignore it or never even read it at all.

But these concepts are absolutely critical to ensuring the real world functions.

Good points. The New Yorker made somewhat the same points on Alger Horatio say in context of ragged dick. Horatio never dealt with racism or class hierarchies. And his villans are simplistic. There was no murder or rape. And it was implied that fraudsters (as one example) knew they were doing wrong almost as if they had internalized morals but ultimately never followed them. So again no serious engagement of human nature. Moreover dick was helped by a Christian rich person --- to the good in intent and result--- but it leaves a lot left unexplored too.

In this way lord of the flies is another take worth reading

Somewhat related, Churchill was very fond of pigs. He famously said (some variant of) "I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

Found the Civ VI player. I can hear that quote in Sean Bean's voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqX-6L80sP0

He kept quite the menagerie and the best sourced version of the quote is a bit different:

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...

In the context of things like

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/winston-churchill/11370727/...

it seems like he was more of an all-round animal lover who once delivered an amusing pig quip.

Oddly relatable since given the chance they will also definitely eat us.

So will cats: https://www.wired.com/story/will-your-cat-eat-your-corpse/.

And dogs, of course, if they're trained to.

And humans, if their survival depends on it, or they just happen to want to.

If you were a hotdog, would you eat yourself?

I feel the someone might argue suggests that's not T.E. Eliot... but...

At the time there was a sizable movement not on political lines but one of emergent sociology that people could be conditioned en masses by (it seemed largely assumed) by conditioning. Take the book Walden Two written by B.F. Skinner during WWII years, (or Living Walden Two documenting places where it was tried and failed) of conditioning altruistic and intelligent societies, the not working out due to the positivist view of social truth, rather than social 'truth' being a much more dynamic, and endogenously generated, concept, perhaps, is it really ontologically 'is'. And to circle back on learning/reflection in technology, much effort being applied in AI to assist in grasping such 'truths' as repeating mistakes of the past (especially LLMs missing verticals of specialist knowledge), however I diverge.

Book recommendation:

Walden Two, B.F.Skinner

Living Walden Two, Hilke Khulman

>Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right.

It's more specific than that. Eliot has in mind the exile of Snowball (obviously Trotsky), and the betrayal of his ideals by Napoleon. One might, or might not, expect a Snowball-led farm to ultimately disintegrate into the same totalitarianism that Napoleon's farm (and all Communist societies in history), but we don't get to see that outcome, so Snowball remains the pure, unimpugned ideal. Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!)), or sarcastically as is more often done nowadays, is up to the speaker.

> Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!))

We’ve seen capitalism done better and worse in various countries, many times dissolving into dictatorship or fascism, and usually built on the backs of a downtrodden group (a racial minority, a migrant population, outsourced indentured labour, etc.). The idea the handful of attempts at communism (all while being besieged by the capitalist nations around them) shows that communism is a bad idea, is just as laughable as the idea that capitalism always succeeds.

So, not sure that’s exactly what you’re (!)-ing about here, but the truly intellectually curious position is not to oppose communism, but to wonder if there is a way to achieve its noble goals while avoiding the pitfalls that that the ussr fell into.

I didn't know about Chomsky's support; do you have any reference?

I googled “Chomsky Orwell preface” and found this:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-...

(Search the text of the article for the word preface to directly find the reference).

You can actually highlight whatever you want to jump to, right click, and click 'Copy link to highlight':

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-....

edit: Unless you link to The Nation, I guess, which bungles the scroll for no reason if you're instantly focusing the page (i.e. not middle clicking).

Ah good tip thanks! Seems I can do that on iPhone too. At least there is a “share” option for highlighted text and I assume that’s what it’s for.

I have heard Chomsky mention it on many occasions, one example here in an interview with Andrew Marr. https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=490

It would be interesting to find where he first wrote or talked about it. I'm pretty sure it goes back even a lot further than that.

But Snowball the pig, who is presented much more positively, was clearly based on Trotsky so Eliot had a good argument that it was a Trotskyite book. It certainly wasn't a pro-capitalist book. The end was that the pigs could not be distinguished from the (capitalist) human farmers.

That's no reason not to print it, of course.

Communism' biggest enemy was always democratic socialism. It was what stopped European countries joining the Soviet camp.

That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.

Reform and revolution was an active area of debate between Western European communists. What made Western European communists lean towards revolution were the bans on socialist parties by various countries, and the subsequent repression. This convinced many communists that they would simply never be allowed to get elected and transition out of capitalism.

The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties.

And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote.

It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.

Germany != Western Europe.

Germany is just an example, the sentiments are common to many European countries pre-WWII.

The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats.

Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.

It is true that it was much more popular then than it is today. But it still as far as I know never managed to gain more than a small percentage foothold. That doesn't mean that it was insignificant, it doesn't take a whole country to subscribe to something to change the course of history. But revolutionary socialism/communism did not come even close to being able to subvert the democratic process in those countries that already had a majority or coalition rule in place. Though there definitely were recorded attempts in almost every country they all fizzled out.

The SPD, in the last elections before WW1, for 34.6% of the vote, with an explicitly Marxist and Revolutionary platform. Is that a small percentage?

I'll say it again because apparently it didn't land: Germany != Western Europe. Germany had a lot of conditions that made it ripe for a vote like that which did not apply to any of the other nations in Western Europe at that time (or any other time, really).

You claimed it never managed to gain a foothold. It did. Germany is in Western Europe. It's not the only example, either.

What were those conditions in Germany that were so different from every other Western European country?

In this case it is. Firstly, similar events transpired in other countries, and secondly, the German communist movement was by far the strongest and most influential one until the USSR happened. Secondly, prospects for a smaller country like, say, Belgium turning communist alone are very dim, and so for many smaller countries the plan for communist parties was more or less to wait until Germany or France became communist.

We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch.

This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen

The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs.

Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.

Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.

If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.

I am wondering now if true communism has ever been tried. I am thinking of the top of my head it might be a Kibbutz you find in Israel?

I mean, I’ve also never seen a real unicorn.

The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.

> The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland

Most swiss people would probably disagree with this statement.

Probably yes. Still, I always thought communists focused too much on capturing the means of production and not enough on direct democracy.

Isn't the whole point of communism to give power to the people?

"Communism" is a loaded term which means different things to different people, but if you mean the word as Soviet Marxism or Marxism-Leninism then it is an orthodoxy of political and economic thought with some very specific precepts, some of which do not really emphasise democracy.

I agree that "capturing the means of production" is a red herring. The idea is to abolish private property, i.e. private ownership of "the means of production".

Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.

I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.

Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.

That's just direct democracy.

I named some examples that might fit the bill in another comment: "Makhnovia" (wiped out by the Soviet Union), revolutionary Catalonia (wiped out by the Soviet Union and the Spanish fascists), Shinmin (wiped out by the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan), the Paris Commune (at least partially), Rojava and the Zapatistas (tho they would eschew any Western attempt at labelling them).

Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.

It didn't work for the Black Panthers, either.

Yes, funny what assassinating a young, charismatic, well-spoken leader of a movement does to said movement.

It's always something with communes.

Yep, these whiny mfs always complain about something. One second it's workers rights, then it's extrajudicial assassinations by the government... Complain, complain, complain!

Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?

The US has had 10,000 communes. They have a 100% failure rate. How many had their leaders assassinated?

The usual cause for failure is people get disenchanted with living in a commune and leave. It usually takes 1 to 2 years for their communist zeal to be ground down by reality.

How many capitalist enterprises flourish in Cuba or in war-torn Yemen, or in a state that doesn't support them or is outright hostile to them?

Capitalism is illegal in Cuba. Communes are legal in the US.

It's quite a distinction.

If you want to join a commune in the US, google for one and join it. Nobody is going to stop you or punish you for it. You can start one yourself with some like minded friends.

Real communism is nothing more the state of being ruled by those who ostensibly pursue and aspire to achieving the state of communism (which is never and will never be real.)

He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.

Well, that's what vanguardism gets you. It's why e.g. anarchists are fundamentally opposed to vanguardism. The problem with vanguard parties is that once the vanguard party is in power it's now in its own interest to continue being in power and any step towards communism would be counter to that interest. Unless you happen to luck into having a benevolent dictator who somehow against all odds actually is a true believer in communism, isn't corrupted by having absolute power, doesn't fall victim to the bureaucracy and systems of power he commands (e.g. Sankara) and lives long enough to both get into power and use that power to deconstruct the entire system that enabled him, you just end up with a new political class replacing the owning class without also abolishing the working class.

If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.

The Kibbutzes are indeed communes, but they cannot sustain themselves. They exist on subsidy from the state, funded by taxing the capitalist part of the economy.

America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.

The Hutterites have been extremely successful.

Chomsky once described Kibbutz, paraphrasing, as something like the nearest approximation in the real world of an ideal society.

Lenin disagrees: "The goal of socialism is communism."

Lenin is not talking about democratic socialism there, but rather the full blown dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalizing all means of production, etc etc kind of socialism. When it comes to democratic socialism, Lenin was not a fan, to put it mildly. He is absolutely scathing of the concept in for example _the State and Revolution_.

While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism.

Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite.

Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice.

It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.

I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.

dang, I LOVE it on these rare occasions when you emerge from behind the screen and add to the dialogue.

No one spots the 'elephant in the room' in Animal Farm.

The novel is a thinly disguised morality play about aristocracy -- "humans" who own and govern 'their farms' ! -- with various types of humanity depicted as "animals".

The moral of the story is that regardless of the intelligence and abilities of the common man ("pigs"), the natural order of things is for 'Farmers' to own and run the 'Farm' and its 'Animals'.

Pigs joining Farmers actually occurred a couple of centuries earlier in England. It was called a "Corporation".

No one? I thought that was glaringly obvious.

You cracked the case

That's a possible interpretation but a more common understanding is that it's an allegory of recent (at the time) Russian history where the old aristocrats were overthrown to be replaced by communists with lofty ideals, however those ideals quickly fell away and the society went back to something similar to what came before, just with a different set of assholes in charge.

I think if you read more of Orwell's writing besides just Animal Farm, you'd see that he didn't think this was the only possibility. He was a democratic socialist and humanist.

If he was saying it's the natural order of things under monarchy and under communism, that doesn't mean he was claiming it to be the natural order of things under all possible political systems. His political views had a wider scope than just this one short story.

Hotline to Marx, he might like to add this detail.

This would be so on point if the authorial intent wasn't revealed by the very link in this submission.

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