Communism means all things held in common. Theft wouldn’t be a thing because everyone owns all property together. Ownership is meaningless.
Every one of those societies only paid lip service to communism - partly because it only works when everyone in the commune knows everyone else and holds each other responsible. It doesn’t work at scale. What those societies really were was “The state owns everything and if you complain about it you get disappeared.”
I agree with this, I don’t think Lenin for example was somehow inauthentic in their socialism / communism even if their implementation often fell short of their espoused ideals; I just think the attempts to make it work failed for various reasons.
(Maybe some of those reasons have to do with the ideology, e.g. vanguardism might pose a greater risk of the revolution being hijacked by a corrupt insider group - maybe Stalin was more inevitable given Lenin’s commitments to the vanguard; maybe commitments to viewing the revolution as a “totalitarianism of the proletariat” and insisting on centralizing power makes it easier for the state apparatus to be hijacked and used against the interests of the average person, and so on).
yeah, I find Lenin’s attack of “left-communism” uncompelling. I understand the need to be pragmatic and to secure the revolution, etc. - we can’t always have sunshine and rainbows, but if your goal is to create an egalitarian society like communism, I think it makes more sense to start working those egalitarian muscles earlier rather than later. I also think this plays into natural human instincts to be pro-social with one another and to cooperate, especially when the context is authentically mutual and clearly so.
Plenty of projects manage to operate in egalitarian ways, that doesn’t guarantee their doom and organizing in an authoritarian fashion is not a foregone conclusion as the most efficient way to operate, let alone even a good one.
To be fair, Cowbee didn’t specify that they successfully tried it!
Blablabla but that wasn’t actually communism but authoritative democrapublic federalopol!
I mean… it wasn’t.
Communism means all things held in common. Theft wouldn’t be a thing because everyone owns all property together. Ownership is meaningless.
Every one of those societies only paid lip service to communism - partly because it only works when everyone in the commune knows everyone else and holds each other responsible. It doesn’t work at scale. What those societies really were was “The state owns everything and if you complain about it you get disappeared.”
Technically it could be argued that they attempted to implement it, even if they failed 🤷
I agree with this, I don’t think Lenin for example was somehow inauthentic in their socialism / communism even if their implementation often fell short of their espoused ideals; I just think the attempts to make it work failed for various reasons.
(Maybe some of those reasons have to do with the ideology, e.g. vanguardism might pose a greater risk of the revolution being hijacked by a corrupt insider group - maybe Stalin was more inevitable given Lenin’s commitments to the vanguard; maybe commitments to viewing the revolution as a “totalitarianism of the proletariat” and insisting on centralizing power makes it easier for the state apparatus to be hijacked and used against the interests of the average person, and so on).
Anarchism welcomes you
yeah, I find Lenin’s attack of “left-communism” uncompelling. I understand the need to be pragmatic and to secure the revolution, etc. - we can’t always have sunshine and rainbows, but if your goal is to create an egalitarian society like communism, I think it makes more sense to start working those egalitarian muscles earlier rather than later. I also think this plays into natural human instincts to be pro-social with one another and to cooperate, especially when the context is authentically mutual and clearly so.
Plenty of projects manage to operate in egalitarian ways, that doesn’t guarantee their doom and organizing in an authoritarian fashion is not a foregone conclusion as the most efficient way to operate, let alone even a good one.