What is communism

Communism is first a movement: how workers react when faced with antagonism under the wage-labouring condition as proletariat (capitalism), and communism is then also a hypothetical society that involves the free association of individuals unmediated by objects (commodities) or State, which is the society communism as a movement moves towards.

Read this for an easy and short take: libcom.org/library/capitalism-communism-gilles-dauve.

pretty much this. it's definitely an oversimplification but even after reading so many books from so many different writers this description seems apt

Why do LeftComs keep saying this? I don't get it. It might have been what Marx originally said or something but it seems completely redundant to have two words that mean the same thing. To me Socialism has always meant to transitory system that leads society on the path to the stateless, moneyless, classless society that is Communism.

Some say it is the ideal society.
Some say it is the means to give production and profits back to the people.
Some say it is a means to achieve power utilizing the ignorance of youth and narcissism.
Some say it is organized beta behavior to level the dominance hierarchy in which they cannot complete.

Take your pick, and put upon it all your projections. And to be on the safe side, imagine what value you will be when cooperative behavior between all humans is achieved.

because if you're not 100% Marxist then you're 100% idiot according to them

A communist believes in a stateless, classless, moneyless society where resources are abundant and everyone gives what they can and takes what they need.

The transition is the dictatorship of the proletariat i thought? That's why socialists before Lenin used socialism and communism interchangeably

A lot of LeftComs don't believe in a transitory system with that whole communization thing they like and all.

Socialism became a shorthand for the lower stage of communism over a 100 years ago and leftcoms still refuse to accept it.

To most non-orthodox leftists Socialism = Dictatorship of the Proletariat or Syndicalism, while Communism is a stateless, classless, society.

Why do Anarchists keep saying this? I don't get it. It might have been what Proudhon originally said but it seems redundant to have two words that mean the same thing. To me Libertarianism has always meant free trade and property rights that leads to prosperity.

The DotP is NOT socialism.

A DotP simply means that the working class is the ruling class and there is a workers' state. It does not, however, mean that the mode of production has finished transitioning to socialism.

Because, as Marx pointed out, there can in the future not be a society that is discernable in any other way than being post-capital. Socialism and communism were interchangeable terms for him because whatever term you mean to describe a future society is just gonna be semantics: what it really is and the only thing it meaningfully can be is what matters. On top of this, Marx made a polemic by on purpose using the term "communism" and its derivatives as much as possible as opposed to "socialism", because "socialism" as a term had been hijacked by bourgeois politicians to mean just about anything, including but not limited to "when the government does stuff", "when we self-manage our wage-labour" or even "when you have infrastructure".

It is an economic system where all things which can be used to produce goods or services with value are held in common by the people as a whole and used to produce according to the really existing needs of the population, instead of producing according to what would make the most profit by exchanging it on the market.

yeah, I'm not seeing the analogy here

Marx is our prophet. You're being a heretic right now.

When a mommy and daddy love each other very much…

That seems so confusing though, so according to that any society that is in the process of attempting to achieve communism would still be called "capitalist"?
Well okay but that was 150 years ago, today both Communism and Socialism are terms that have been appropriated by boujeys to mean all sorts of things that have nothing to do with what we often mean.

what is socialism then? what difference?

There is no difference according to Marx. According to Lenin, it's a time period when the old capitalist order has been overthrown but the time is not yet right to implement full communism. According to European leftist parties, it's when the government does stuff.

Yeah. For Marx, the proletarian dictatorship is clearly still working within capitalism. It's basically the whole reason he invented the term, because he thought you couldn't effectuate an immediate abolition of the State (the State is a product and mediator of many fundamental elements like private property, wage-labour, et cetera, which are not merely legalistic realities). He is entirely differentiated in practical theory from the anarchists because of this: the working class must first lay siege to the State and slowly munch away at its foundations. As Engels put it, the state "withers away" the more the elements of the State are gone. The DotP also ceases to be a dictatorship and proletarian because it involves subject self-negation: there is no more class that is uniquely subject to alienated (wage) labour anymore, just like the flip side thereof, personified capital (bourgeoisie) is gone; they are now merely individual subjects without a class.

It was the same back in the day, too, for Marx in particular you can see this if you read the Manifesto or Poverty of Philosophy.

I mean there's still people who supposedly know about Marx's ruthless takedowns of Lassalle and Proudhon but keep defining socialism as "worker ownership of the means of production" while considering themselves Marxists, indicating that they don't understand capitalism as mode of production, but as mode of management.

It's a classless, just society. However how it will eventually work out in detail is not quite clear yet, but it will develop and adapt in order to serve all citizens equally best.

Marx himself defined communism as follows:

"Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!“.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

Read the manifesto

Socialism means basically democratic ownership of the means of production, be it by the workers themselves or by the whole population.

good god

im not good at reading

That's okay, but you won't get better without actually doing it, you know?

you are very cute. please respond to me and post more cute anime pictures and ill try to read some chapters i promise

It's an economic system that's directly controlled by the government.

What is market socialism then?

It's written in language simple enough for peasants to understand. Modern editions usually have notes explaining the more obscure things.

And by peasants I mean literal peasants not "people I think are dumber than me."

Socialized capitalism.

An oxymoron :^)

Capitalism managed by abstract capitalists.

Can any anons explain these 3.
What will replace them? You're just stating what there will be not: states, money and classes.
But what WILL there be?

is this bait?

Daily reminder that leftcoms consider themselves orthodox Marxists and yet still say nonsensical shit like this.

Cooperation, mutual aid, direct decision making by the communities, humanism instead of nationalism. These are all conjetures, of course.

There's a theory for nearly every communist current. Just like modern capitalist society, it will come about according to the needs and conditions we will experience.

The only thing we can know for sure is that just as capitalist society abolished feudal property and created a radically different world, so will abolishing capitalist property.

We don't consider ourselves orthodox Marxists at all. Left communists also rejected the Second Interntional, remember.

>Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Marx uses the same term to describe Lassalle's notion of socialism, which involved not just the equality of the wages but the equality of (private) ownership.

...

thank you so much i will read i promise i love you wish you could be my gf/bf

It's the traditional Marxist position. See 'Impossiblism' for another example.

Evidently they are not, communism is the state achieved when there is no more state or capitalism. Socialism in the method used to get there.

Yeah I keep trying to explain this to AnComs

Anyway I don't disagree with what youre saying but I just still don't see the practical use of not using the term Socialist. While a system that still has yet to abolish the modes of management and production that are inherently capitalist the fact that it is in the process of attempting to abolish them I think is still something that requires its own classification.

The "method" is the communist movement which is the proletariat wanting to abolish the present state of things.

Hey, a trot comes up with the right answer! Who would have thought?

I would not want to blur the lines of definition with things like intent.

And the immediate post-revolution society they create is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which still more or less follows the capitalist mode of production. Right?

AnComs though are generally only semantically different from Marxists in that regard. The more sophisticated anarchist theories all understood that smashie smashie isn't all there must be to it, and it's consequently a strawman against them most of the time. They know just as well as Marxists do the importance of making go extinct things that resussitate or fail to really abolish the State. Malatesta and Bakunin both understood this. As always the problem was with what means and how do we effectuate a systematic breaking down of the State?

I just told you that this classification, at least for Marxists, is "dictatorship of the proletariat"; the revolutionary transformation of society from capitalism towards socialism/communism/post-capital/free association of individuals or whatever you want to call a society that needs to meaningfully distinguish itself from capitalism to not just be capital alternatively managed.

Here like Marx I prefer "communism" because it's a term not hijacked by any bourgeoisie, merely strawmanned or mischaracterized.

It's worth noting that the correct answer for a marxist would probably be something like that "the real movement" quote. Of course for someone trying to understand what communism is, that doesn't help much. So I'll give basic explanation:
what was private property (there's no exact distinction between private and personal property but the rough rule of thumb is that personal property is held for the sake of the usefulness of the item itself whereas private property derives its usefulness socially from the ability to exclude other people from its use) is now held in common and produced/used/allocated according to the common plan of the whole of society.

The exact way in which the whole if society ought to organize and plan production, use and allocation of goods was something Marx intentionally left unanswered I think. This is what makes him kinda unique among socialists is that to a large extent he was willing to leave people to themselves to figure this sort of thing out in the course of abolishing capitalism. That said, we can also answer some basic questions about organization as well. Clearly, both local organization and global organization will be necessary. To some extent local communities will have to plan things themselves, to some extent they will have to plan things with other communities, and to some extent specialists in certain fields will have to plan things without constant oversight of the public (there's no point in having a community of people who know nothing about plumbing come together to tell plumbers exactly what to do for example though obviously there would have to be accountability in these fields as well). Anyways, gotha is probably the shortest and most directly related to this topic of marx's works so that's probably worth reading as well as certain parts of Grundrisse (I might come back with some quotes later today but I really gotta stop wasting so much time on here rn so I might not). Hope this helps

Dictatorship of the proletariat is the same thing as the revolution. The revolution isn't over until wage labour, commodity form and the state is abolished.

Got it. Thanks

OP asked for a watered down explanation that he could digest not copypasting the entire fucking communist manifesto you autists.
Basically op communism is 300 different branches of one concept.

A society with a need-based economy without a state, nor markets, nor currency.

By eliminating the material conditions that sustain its existence. AnComs attempt to directly abolish the state, as a transitional act to Communism. And as the CNT in the Spanish civil war demonstrated however that's far from a simple thing to do.

That was the Orthodox Marxist view of it yeah but one problem I have with this though is that Marx himself thought that a Vanguard party was necessary to represent the proletariat in a DotP, which is hardly the same as having the dictatorship actually being in control. The vanguard can even become a kind of class unto itself as in the Russian revolution. What I'm saying is that DotP is only one method of transitioning to Communism while other ideologies have others.

having the dictatorship actually being in control*

having the proletariat actually being in control*

Fucking hard to do this on a phone

Communism is "everyone gets everything exactly equal!"
Obviously it never has worked and never will work

Holla Forums pls no

This is intellectual whoring and I'm ok with it

And while the revolution is happening, you have socialism, where the dictatorship is in control of the means of production i.e worker control, but not abolition of the value form. The intermediary stage is fundamentally a different thing from communism, as well as fundamentally different from capitalism. It is something not quite either, it is not communism.

Communism is a political system believing in the working class and equality
That enough for you ?

so to define capitalism in those terms you would say:
"From each his own will, to each what his own skill brings"

But that encounters the same problem as anarchy. How do you enforce people from claiming property and defending it with violence? You have to have an opposing force of violence (ex: police) which requires some for of organization (state) to control.

haha doubtful

no he didn't

well in capitalism the worth of a skill is determined by the market. How much you use that skill is determined by your will. How would you phrase it? and can we get an idea of what communism in practice would look like and not these vague fanciful descriptions?

Way to reveal you haven't actually read anything by marx.