this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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I don't think communism is a moneyless system. Pretty sure people paid money for things in the USSR. Have there been any communist countries without money?
To understand this you need to understand the theory. Marx outlined that socialism and communism each had to be transitioned to after reaching a given level of social/economic development. In particular there is the notion of "withering away of the state" which would happen after a global revolution, which is the aim of this classless/moniless society they outlined.
The communist manifesto is a short read!
In fact the USSR implemented explicit market policies, a sort of contained capitalism, which was designed to facilitate reaching the necessary preconditions for socialism and communism. Essentially all of the "communist" states we've seen so far have been some play on the notion of just "socialism in one country" in the Marxist-Leninist version of communist parties, who have/had the goal of eventually reaching communism.
What's probably most interesting is that the idea behind the USSR wasn't initially to have the state direct everything from the top, but in fact to facilitate worker councils (soviets) to direct their workplaces.
But you have to remember this all happened in the context of a state which had recently undergone a revolution, was rife with counterrevolutonary action (see revolutionary France and civil war Britain to see how this played out during the birth of liberalism) and was then plunged into WW2 where most states involved were acting fairly dictatorially for the duration of it. Followed shortly by the US making it an explicit goal to prevent world communism through e.g. CIA intervention because they feared "domino theory"
No. Socialism is an economic mode of production. Communism is a set of social relations that are theorized to appear out of material abundance. Communism uses socialism as a mode of production. There is no transition from Socialism to Communism.
Yes, which is why the USSR never once in its history claimed to have built communism. The best they claimed was "developed socialism" with promises to build Communism someday
something that I don't get about communism: how do you prevent people from redistributing their wealth unequally over time?
I don't really have any politic views because the discourse on it is so big and the issues so complex, but lean more towards socialism
By the time we reach Communism, that is, the Marxist vision of a fully publicly owned and planned world economy, distribution of wealth will likely be based on need. There is no necessity for equal wealth, as humans have very unequal needs. Equal ownership of property is certified through public ownership.
If you're asking what's preventing someone from starting a business, it would be the sheer difficulties of actually starting one that can compete with the highly developed productive forces in the rest of the economy. Communism isn't so much about outlawing private property, as developing beyond it.
Communism is a post-Socialist society, it must be global, highly developed, and have full public ownership, or close enough to those. The Soviet Union was, instead, Socialist, ie an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect. That being said, there were attempts at Cybernetics, and moving beyond money. These are actually incredibly interesting, and anyone interested in Socialism should look into those attempts.
If you want to learn more about Socialism and Communism, I recommend checking out my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list.
There is also the great Documentary by Plastic Pills Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile
Oh shit, I need to watch that! Thanks, comrade!
It's great, it goes further into how post coup the nascent proto-neolib ghouls went down to examine cybersyn and essentially stole the whole idea behind it which eventually became the model for just in time supply chains at places like amazon and walmart. Oh what could have been.
Interesting, and heartbreaking, of course. I never knew about the link to JIT from Cybersyn, I'll have to give that a watch. Thanks!
I mean that stuff wouldn't emerge for the next couple decades, but you can certainly see where the capitalist vampires saw it and went "damn that looks real efficient, bet if we made a privatized version we'd make more money than god".
Of course as we know it was only so efficient because of its socialized nature which made such supply chains less prone to disruption as the computational power could be used to centrally monitor supply chains between all sorts of different nationalized industries, that could then be allocated in an agile manor so as to minimize any one industry or population running out of materials or basic needs. It was so efficient materials could even be reallocated mid route. It was a really sophisticated system and could serve as a blueprint for large scale socialized economies.
Absolutely! It's kinda surreal seeing Marx get vindicated, he predicted markets would eventually develop these kinds of technologies in order to deal with ever-increasing complexity in production.
Marx mentioned
I do be mentioning Marx