I found the question come up on both communist and anarchist subs, and the difference in responses was quite striking.
As a longtime PTSD sufferer who self-medicates to the hilt just to do simple things like fall asleep or leave the house, the idea that I would either lose access to, be forced underground, or prosecuted for my recreational habits terrifies me.
I understand the rationale is in a functioning communist state, I would no longer feel the need for those drugs. Does it follow the science of recreational marijuana, psychedelics, ADHD, anxiety, depression, etc.? Or is the ambition to ween everyone off? And does that apply for all manner of distraction and entertainment as well?
I wanted to elaborate on the entertainment bit:
As a musician, would it require my music be evaluated by a tribunal of sorts before I could upload it to soundcloud? Would there be a restriction on topics, lyrics, styles, etc.? Like whether it's Tool, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or 100 gecs, or Shania Twain, would there be mandates on what's allowed to be played or listened to?
I think that the sheer amount and accessibility of music and other artistic media makes pre-screening censorship a complete fool's errand. You can't just regulate a finite amount of printing presses and broad cast stations these days.
That being said, there'd probably need to be some sort of mechanism to remove/restrict certain types of content. I'm talking about overtly fascist/racist/reactionary media.
So like, book and vinyl burning? Also, would this mechanism seek to be objective or would it invariably lean more on the subjective?
Under communism, vinyls would be outlawed as wasteful bourgeois decadence, per the dictates of the Lossless Audio Gang.
Anyone who tries to sell you an "objective" system is trying to hoodwink you. As long as people are involved in any system, it is subjective to a large degree.
That being said, like in any decision, you can construct the decision making system to try to mitigate shitty decisions. For example, an elected council of people's representatives making the decision is better than an unexpected head censor making the decision.
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The part about banning vinyl was 100% a bit.
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Labor made the Internet, labor democratized information and opinions. Why the fuck is labor censoring shit? I imagined the left crushing the need to appeal to advertisers on YouTube. Freeing people from having to appeal to anyone as they upload without needing to consider if it will get monitized. The means of production are already there, it's not like you need to recreate the infrastructure.
Actually tool, gy!be, 100 gecs and Shania twain are the only allowed music in a true communist society. Marcs said so
George Lucas on artistic freedom in the USSR vs the USA.
I imagine it would just be uploading to Soundcloud as your final option, unfortunately, which is one shitty thing about communism: you see it with the above comment that implies everyone should be doing art, which ignores that 90% of people just don't possess the creativity for good art. They can be great engineers, scientists, etc., but my friend who thinks "never break my heart" is a deep line ain't never gonna write Ozymandias.
The traditional leftist argument ignores that there are already sites that you can upload to "without need of financial incentive": they're called webnovel sites, and no adults read them because 99% of them suck & there's absolutely no curation nor even external attempts to sort through it, precisely because it's so unrewarding. I doubt that would change under communism, but it doesn't matter because my economic needs outweigh my artistic ones: one doesn't actually need to make the free art argument.
Anyway, labor voucher where my mouth is, read my work Urasaria Academy, see if it's 99% or 1%.
Is not the whole damn point of eradicating capitalism to free us from the perverse commodification of every aspect of human life? Like I don't know about you folks but I thought the whole goal is to live in a world where we can create art independent about whether it is good or not (and I mean the idea of objectively good art is pretty sus), but entirely because its enjoyable to create.