Can anyone succinctly explain communism? Everything I’ve read in the past said that the state owns the means of production and in practice (in real life) that seems to be the reality. However I encountered a random idiot on the Internet that claimed in communism, there is no state and it is a stateless society. I immediately rejected this idea because it was counter to what I knew about communism irl. In searching using these keywords, I came across the ideas that in communism, it does strive to be a stateless society. So which one is it? If it’s supposed to be a stateless society, why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?
Kind of. Marx’s theory of the State was about Class Oppression, when you eliminate Class there isn’t really a State for Marx, ergo full Public Ownership and Central Planning is considered Communist. You are more referring to Anarchism.
Are these “cental planners” robots or humans?
In all likelihood, a mixture of both! The concept of “Cybernetics”, or productive control systems being applied to a centrally planned economy, has been an aspect of Marxism for centuries. Here’s another interesting article on calculating prices in a planned economy.