you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can't bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that's flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don't think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it's hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn't well rounded or something and you don't want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can't really answer by yourself
If a stateless communist society is even possible.
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My fashion sense strongly disagrees
Like you think the whole leftist idea of communism could come into fruition but be an impermanent thing or like you think there would be a different thing that people would symbolically call communism out of pattern association?
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But how can the endgoal of communism have any contradictions if it is, at least in theory, the ultimate system? That's what boggles the mind, like the very concept of it just seems so utopian that if it had any contradictions then it wouldn't be real communism, it would have to be something else.
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OK, so I will ask questions and see if I get a better understanding of it.
It seems to me that if a communist society is classless and the moving force of history is class conflict, then communism does mean the end of history.
It is my understanding that contradictions arise from class conflict and that a communist society is classless and therefore cannot have contradictions. Like in your example, the contradictions arise from the conflict between two classes of masters and slaves, sharecroppers and plantation owners, segregated whites and blacks. In communism you're not gonna have that so you're not gonna have contradictions. Is this a misunderstanding?
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But then I reckon these would not be contradictions of communism strictly speaking? Like things could still change, but the economic system would still be communism because the contradiction that led to it is forever solved. Right?
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I guess. Great talk, I really enjoyed it ;)
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I think it's probably possible. I'm completely certain we can't just replace the state with nothing. I have ideas what could replace it, but I'm very, very uncertain about those.
I'm just spitballing but a "state" in Marx's terms is explicitly a tool of class control, is it not? I think that opens up the door for, like, free associations of people in the higher stage to build institutions that were might call a government but Marx wouldn't call a state? I might be wrong here tho
A state is an entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence, which uses that monopoly to create and enforce laws.
Getting rid of the state is a good thing, but power still exists and has a tendency to concentrate, and the natural outcome of this in agrarian civilizations seems to be states. There needs to be some other method of allocating power, which is resistant to concentration, or we end up in this same mess again.
Is that Marx's definition, though? Did he work from Hobbes' definition? Seems like the kind of thing Marx would be pretty specific about. Anyone in here read theory that can tell us?
Marx considers the state to be the tool of class oppression, under capitalism the bourgeoisie uses the state to oppress us. Under socialism we will use the state to oppress them. In Marxist thought the state "withers away" as it is no longer needed as a tool of oppression. Once we are free from class, the state ceases to exist in that sense. However, it would still exist for its administrative and organizational purposes, Marx no longer considers it a "state" because it's not being used for oppression and infers no political or class advantages on its members. The person you are replying to is using the state in more of an anarchist sense.
Right so my original point - that you could have a governmental body without class oppression after the class war - is fundamentally correct?
This is more or less how Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. viewed it. Whether it's fundamentally correct is hard to know, because of the nature of our interconnected world it's impossible for the state to wither away while other countries remain capitalist so we have no frame of reference. To Marx this was very much a thing that would have to be solved once it happened, he didn't spend a great deal of time writing on what communism could or would actually look like. Preferring to focus on the now and the past for analysis. I know this sounds a bit wishy-washy sorry, but yes you're correct in that is how Marx viewed it.
Tell me about it!
My best idea is a network of narrowly defined task-specific trust/expertise hierarchies (you trust your doctor's expertise on health, your doctor trusts someone else as a bigger expert, eventually there's a panel of medical researchers that set the policy all the doctors are following). There are so many different ones of these structures that there's no room for one to start growing new responsibilities and powers for itself.