• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    I want to point out, that… for communism, even on paper, to be a lovely idea and/or successful, the person in charge needs to have two things:

    1. Absolute loyalty from the population by some method that doesn’t require oppression, coercion, intimidation, or the use of force. They basically need to believe that they are the right person for the job and stand behind them.
    2. Basically be absolute and exclusively altruistic. The selfish nature of humans, being the flawed creatures we are, basically makes this an impossibility.

    I would add to point 2, that anyone who is that altruistic, would not desire to have, or hold, any power over others.

    The combination of these two things will keep any rosy ideas about communism, as just ideas. In practice, it will be, or become corrupt, and the people will suffer. Pushing it into a downward spiral of violence against the people, until an inevitable revolution occurs and the communist dictator is removed by any means necessary (often involving them no longer living).

    Don’t get me wrong, there are different issues with capitalism, socialism, any monarch based society… Pretty much every system is flawed. The key differentiator is whether we have the ability to deal with the challenges of a system as it arises. So far, communism has the least methods by which to do this.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Real communism doesn’t need a single leader to maintain control or tonact altruistically. Real communism doesn’t have a single leader at all. Resources and control are shared by the citizenry, decentralized to the community, thus the name. I’m by no means an expert on the ideal workings of a national scale communist control structure, but the point would be to form a stateless nation without any bourgeoisie in control anymore, but rather everyone would be of the proletariat and the proletariat would share control.

      But you have hit the nail on the head of the problem with the transition to communism that I was alluding to. Normally it requires a populist party to overthrow or fundamentally reform a national system of governance. They take total control of the government and then total control of the nation’s resources, factories, properties… the “means of production”… from the bourgeoisie. That part has happened several times in history. It is the rest of the transition that has failed to occur every time. What is meant to happen next is that they then relinquish those means of production back to the proletariat, set up the means of self-governance, and then dissolve themselves and the central government. That has never happened.

      The problem is that, once the nation falls under the control of one party, it does require the leader(s) of that party to act, as you said, with pure altruism and willingly give up absolute power. And typically people that become party leaders are the kind of people that seek power and that do not like others having control. The problem is that the process as described requires people that are driven and insentivized to lead a major national reform. And then it needs those same people to act against their own nature and self-interest for ideology and the greater good. This is why that power had never been decentralized in any real world example of a transition to communism. That is what is meant when we say that there has never been a real communist country. There has never been one without a single party/dictator is control. There has never been a decentralized control of resources and power on a national scale. Those things have only ever been achieved on a community level to this date, and those communities struggle as they still must function under and within a capitalist system.