What the hell is communism?

I think you are getting confused over what state means. Class and scarcity have been eliminated so there is no need to have hierarchical institutions because the need for them would no longer exist. We would manage our affairs voluntarily democratically and horizontally. The state is an instrument of one class dominating the other. If classes are eliminated the need for a state ceases to exist.

A social contract and common agreed upon rules does not make a state.

Words aren't given meaning by individual authorities society collectively decide the definitions of words.

What do you want for us to point you to Webster's?

Which is why that's not what state means

Ummm ECONMICISK!

That is what we as leftist mean when we talk about the state.

Alternative interpretations can be found on /liberty/ but we are here and they are there.

"Society collectively decides the definitions of words, except the word state. Society is wrong about the word state."

society doesn't collectively decide, neither does the dictionary, when people do real philosophy they define their terms before talking, since Holla Forums follows the theories of radical leftist philosophers of the 19th and 20th century we try to use their terms rather than whatever shitty meanings the media has created this decade.

That's not an argument you want to have with me it's an argument you want to have with your own side. I was just following the premise in

You're retarded. There's literally only one definition of Communism. And it doesn't include a state. Socialism on the other hand, is a completely different story.

If you're asking this many questions you should at this point try to read a book or at least Wikipedia article. Nobody will explain Capital here to you.

Communists

Communism is a completely classless, stateless, moneyless society without private ownership of the means of production and waged labor, and where the mode of production for value has has been replaced by the mode of production for use. This is how Marx and Engles defined it, this is what the Bolsheviks believed, it's what the German Revolutionaries of 1918 believed, and it's literally what the entire proletarian Left of the 19th and 20th Century both believed in and fought for, including the Paris Commune, Catalonia Spain, the Ukranian anarchists, it's what literally everyone believed at all three Internationalism. It's literally what all Socialists hold as the endgoal to all of our political projects, regardless of whether it's Marxist, Anarchist, or Communalist. But I'm a Marxist, so I can only speak to that tradition. For Marxists the State is literally a form of class warfare, it exists only for the purpose of imposing the will of an oppressor class over an oppressed class. This has been true of all States, and all class based societies throughout history. Masters and Slaves, Lords and Serfs, Proletarians and the Bourgeoisie. Socialism is a State that partakes in the one-sided class warfare of the Proletariat against the Bourgeoise in the same way that Capitalism takes part in the one-sided class warfare of the Bourgeoise against the Proletariat. This is what Marxists mean by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Eventually, through the process of this class warfare and a revolution in the economic base Capitalism is negated and we are left with Communism, what the contradictions and antagonisms of this society will be, no one can know yet, but that's basically Communism for ya, feel free to ask further questions if I was not clear enough.

According to Marx:
>Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
>We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

That's a good way to put it, did you read that somewhere?

Literally Marx, my friend. Capital vol. 1, that's where it all goes down famalam

Communist theory says though.

That said, I should point out that Marx isn't entirely unique in this regards, literally most Leftists would view production for use as preferable to production for value, especially considering our current imminent ecological crisis, everyday we continue the mode of production for use is another day towards total ecological holocaust.

So we will have no way of knowing what communism is.

Tell us more about that spooky species-essence, uncle marx!

Communism is a meme.

Glad you asked user! Marx's theory of species-being is only mentioned in one of Marx's texts, The Manuscripts of 1844, a text he wrote when he was literally 26, and fresh out of college, where he had been an orthodox Hegelian, and four years before he would write the Manifesto, still a text that would be considered "Young Marx", but that's how young we're talking here. Anyway, the reason some people are obsessed with it is because Marxist Humanists took it as their project to rehabilitate this idea and this text as the works of Mature Marx are pretty decidedly anti-humanist. Particularly, Marx, and most Marxists, understand human consciousness as something largely controlled by both economic base as well as the State and repressive and ideological State Apparatuses that manifest the cultural logic of this said economic base. So in a sense, it's actually a mode of critique far less "spooked" then what counts of Egoism on this board, which usually amounts of a lot of idealist crypto-nietzschean affirmation of human will masked in a "dark edgy" aesthetic. Also, daily reminder that "spooks" are a meme, the idea that someone's consciousness can exist completely outside of the material conditions and social relations of society is just as naive and embarrassing as any other religion dogma.

This is all you need to know about communism:

The ideas laid down by Marx on the Manuscripts are repeated all over in the german ideology, in which he puts the idea over the corporeal

Yes, that's my whole point. Marxist's make a distinction between the Young Marx who was a Hegelian, and the Mature Marx who had thoroughly developed a theory of Dialectical Materialism devoid of any Hegelian residues, the Marx of Das Kapital

But older Marx isnt free of humanists and moralist spooks user

Elaborate gomrade

Right, and our society has given the work the meaning we are describing to you.

Also, it's worth pointing something out. Marx's theory of ideology, as first developed in the German Ideology, is almost completely discarded by the Mature Marx in favor of Commodity Fetishism. In all of Capital, as well as all of his mature works, he not only never mentions species-essence again, he even ceases to mention ideology as he finds it's come to be too idealist and abstract. Now I personally use the term ideology, and even made reference to it in my earlier post, because most people on this board are familiar with Zizik and Althusser, and because Ideology to post-Althusserians like Zizek and many others is something a lot more fleshed out and comprehensive the what Marx talked about, but one comes to a lot of the same problems with Althusser's theory of ideology as you come to with Stirner's theory of spooks, particularly that it's just too fucking broad, it ends up meaning everything and nothing, it's a rhetorically inconsistent category, and it can be useful in conversation, as well as in debate, and I don't think either theory should be droped by the Left, they're both pretty idealist and inadequate in serving their intended purposes of creating a mode of critique that can help us to both understand and ultimately break free from the state of human bondage we find ourselves in Capitalist society. Which is why Marx ended up ditching ideology in the end and wished to find a more purely materialist explanation for Capitalist social relations. As opposed to ideology, Commodity Fetishism is when material relations between people become social relations between objects. A commodity is an object that stands in for an abstraction which then stands in for a relation between people. Now what are the implications of this? Well, almost no Marxists have put any real energy into fully understanding this shift in Marx's theory, but if they did it would probably look a little something like a Marxian object-oriented-ontology I think, and it's something I actually think current century Marxists should consider.

why do you keep posting this image? it only makes you and stirner look even more retarded.

This is nonsense, there will always be an imbalance of coercive force between people, and those with a monopoly on that force will always replicate a state so as to serve their own interests. The coercive class is a class that can never be abolished.

well it probably just evolved to become so standardized over time. I mean those words predate Marx so I don't think it makes sense to say that it's Marx's word which he defined as he wished, but I guess over time that vision of society became a popular one and people who sympathized with it just increasingly called themselves communist.

trips up a lot of people before they get into theory. If you're a commie and you don't know this, you shouldn't be looking for the answers on leftypol because you're probably just gonna get a heavily oversimplified version of the "state and revolution." To give a very sort of rough definition, Marxist generally view the state as a structure designed to defend and maintain a certain society given its class contradictions, crises, etc.

Read a fucking book

thats not a argument or a rebuttal

The State is a vehicle for class warfare, it literally only exists for the purposes of maintaining a specific class's interests. Classes exist out of a specific relation to means of production and material reality, not because they're a "coercive class" of sociopaths who decide to oppress people because they have bad psychology, this is some of the most ridiculously ideological shit I've ever seen on this board. Read Marx, please, you brainlet. Leftist politics is not a morilism that believes society is bad because very mean bad men get it in their heads to start extracting surplus labor, privatize the means of production, or to force everyone into wage labor, and in a DotP why would you assume these random sociopaths would all lump together into mobs that would have the power to overthrow society? That's never happened even once in all of human history, and you certainly don't see that try of behavior in any hunter-gatherer societies, which were by and large communal and based around cooperation and reciprocity, not people banging eachother over the head with clubs like in pop culture, if that was the case human civilization would have collapsed before it even began. You enormous mongoloid.

Neither was OP, it was a question

Shut the fuck up and read if you're curious about a topic.

What the fuck you want us to do, hold your hand?

Things don't go away just because they are no longer needed. Power hungry bureaucrats can still be a thing after the abolition of class and scarcity.

But they can't when there's no money, complete worker's self management, when people's militias are self armed, when all means of production are held in common, and there exists no highly centralized State that can monopolize violence. That's literally the whole reason Communism needs to be stateless, are you even reading people's responses to you?

What does this mean, exactly?

Is it fair to say

If we follow Marx socialism and communism are synonymous, with socialism also being used as substitutable term to lower phase communism and communism as the whole thing.

Help me understand the lower phase of communism

Does it jibe with Lenin's early admission that socialism is just state capitalism bent toward communism?

Where does Lenin say this?

libcom.org/forums/theory/lenin-acknowledging-intentional-implementation-state-capitalism-ussr-23032011

marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/lenin-socialism.htm

No. Lenin called state capitalism state capitalism for a reason. In State and Revolution we see that he upheld the same conceptions of socialism and communism as marx.

The reason he fought for state capitalist policy in Russia was because he recognized the international revolution had failed after his predictions in LWC and What is to be done? had not come about, and thus the best course of action was to use the power he had to modernize Russia industrially and cultivate a modern proletariat with it.

Should Lenin have not pushed for state capitalism?

What would have been Lenin's best course of action after realizing he led an isolated socialist state?

Fucking five star post.

I think it was the "best" course, because I tend to agree with the view that in '21 the revolution was already dead:: endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die.

Marx isn't the boss of leftism, just because it's the most popular form. All you're saying is that Marx excludes those possibilities, which isn't very enlightening.

I'm a Marxist, so I'm going to tell people to read Marx because it's my perspective and the position I'm arguing from, I don't speak for other Leftists.

Why?

This is a good video on Commodity Fetishism:

youtube.com/watch?v=D4MbUx-il6c&t=6s

No it hasn't. Only a chunk of a chunk of society uses that meaning of state.

This is interesting. Could you give some examples?

Example of where you can find this? Das Kapital. Not too many Marxists write about this though, as it's easier to write about "Ideology" especially in contemporary academia, where everything is about muh cultural critique. I think this an aspect of Marx that has yet to be fully explored by Marxists, but I think theoryfags who like Speculative Realism and OOO should find Commodity Fetishism interesting. Also, weird fact, Lenin was obsessed with Hegel's Logic of Science and literally purged anyone who preffered Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (not violently, but kicked them out of the party). What this lead to was the Soviet Union always focusing on Dialectical Materialism as a naturalist philosophy, whereas Western Marxists, who've always been more partial to Phenomenology of Spirit tended to focus on cultural critique.

A spook

How are the USSR and Mao liberal?

youtube.com/watch?v=dBZxth7SMmM

According to the champagne socialists who invented it.
These people dont live in the real world.

Like how Leftypol always goes on about the working class but nobody here works they are all supported by rich parents.

nervous_man_deciding_between_two_buttons.jpg

Yes and no.

You can't say what the particulars of communism are, but you can deduce what kind of society communism must be by examining the flaws of class society.

Communism is a way of referring to an end-state classless society, so naturally it should be free of the things which define class society. The state is the primary instrument of class dominance, so a classless society should be stateless. Property is the primary method by which modern capitalist class society has established itself, so private property will need to be abolished under communism. So on and so forth.