(Reposted in this community cuz I didn’t get any responses in the original community that I posted this under)
This is how I understand the communist utopia: Workers seize means of production. Means of production thus, start working for the proletariat masses rather than the bourgeoisie class. Thus, technological progress stops being stifled and flourishes. Humanity achieves a post scarcity-like environment for most goods and services. Thus, money becomes irrelevant at a personal level.
In all this, I can’t see how we stop needing a state. How can we build bridges without a body capable of large scale organisation? How would we have a space program without a state for example? I clearly have gotten many things wrong here. However, I’m unable to find what I’ve gotten wrong on my own. Plz help <3
Edit: Okay, got a very clear and sensible answer from @Aidinthel@reddthat.com. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to link their comment. Hence, here is what they said:
Depends on how you define “state”. IIRC, Marx drew a distinction between “state” and “government”, where the former is all the coercive institutions (cops, prisons, courts, etc). In this framework, you need a “government” to do the things you refer to, but participation in that government’s activities should be voluntary, without the threat of armed government agents showing up at your door if you don’t comply.
Ok, so then would be correct to say that the communist utopia is a sort of singularity (consider y=1/x, where x=0). It can never be achieved, but the goal should be to get as close to it as possible. We will never achieve total post scarcity. However, we can achieve post scarcity for things like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, then probably internet access, smartphones, video games and so on.
We can never eliminate institutions of authority, but we can reduce their presence as much as possible. For example, we can never eliminate the police force, as there still would be some sociopaths who we would need protection from. However, as society would progress, crime would drop such that we would require smaller and smaller police forces.
So in conclusion, am I right in considering the communist utopia as a singularity?
Why not?
If an individual can outgrow a need for a mommy and daddy to watch over them and tell them what to do, then so can a species.
But yes - for the relatively short term (in the anthropological sense), such a system is effectively impossible, so yes - “the goal should be to get as close to it as possible.”
And in fact, the only way that it can be achieved is incrementally, as ever more individuals reject the whole concept of institutionalized authority. Eventually, a point should be reached at which the view that it’s illegitimate is so widespread that those who claim it will no longer be able to exercise their claim.
Or to put it in simplistic and not-really-accurate terms, the claim “I’m the President of the United States” will be as ludicrous as the claim “I’m the Emperor of the Universe,” and will be treated with the same disdain.
I agree.
The extent of the universe as a whole might well be infinite, but the extent of the resources to which humans can have access most assuredly is not.
I disagree.
I not only think we can - I think that unless we destroy ourselves first, we inevitably will.
Again, it’s akin to an individual outgrowing the need for a mommy and daddy, just on a broader scale.
Except that the police are ever more likely to BE sociopaths than to protect us from them.
That’s the exact problem I mentioned in the last post - hierarchical authority effectively rewards and thus selects for sociopathy.
People with morals, principles, integrity and/or empathy will have things that they’ll refuse to do.
Psychopaths don’t have those constraints - if so inclined, they’re willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want.
So all other things more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchical systems.
Which is exactly how and why “power corrupts.”
Roughly, though it would be more accurate, if less appropriate to this STEM-obsessed era, to call it an “ideal.”
The analogy with mommy and daddy doesn’t really make sense.
Unless your parents are filthy rich or very powerful, they usually can’t provide you anything you can’t do yourself once you reach a certain age.
The same is very much not true with a stateless society vs the mafia.
If you are part of the mafia, even just as a lowest level thug, you will have an advantage over being the person who gets blackmailed by the mafia.
I know, many Americans and also people from other countries have very traumatic experiences with the local police and thus a very bad opinion about them. That’s understandable, especially if you have never seen what good policework looks like. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
In most Central European countries, for example, the policework is really positive. Sure, there are negative examples there too, nothing is perfect, but most of these countries are in the very top of the safest countries (discounting micronations that are too small for statistically relevant data).
Of course, power corrupts. And because of that, modern democracies have a lot of safety nets that stop hostile legislation. And since these safety nets are staffed by people voted in by very different groups of people than the legislators, these are actual checks and balances compared to the farce that happens in the USA.
That’s another issue: The political system in the USA is not a democracy, but a presidential two-party-system in which the votes of most people don’t count. They basically vote in a dictator (ok, not fully, but if the party holds senate, house and surpreme court, it is a dictatorship, and in a two-party-system that happens pretty easily) every few years and Government just does whatever they want, because nobody can hold them accountable, and in the worst case they’ll get voted back into office two legislatory periods later.
And if you don’t live in a swing state, your vote just doesn’t count.
The USA has had their system for far too long and never had a chance to overhaul the whole system. So politicians are using centuries old loopholes, wide enough to drive a cargo ship through them, and nothing is stopping them, because the people in power got to power in this system and changing anything is just a risk for them to lose that power.
Your opening point about advantage reminded me of a story I read years ago. It was in some dense Russian tome - I want to say Brothers Karamazov, but I don’t know and don’t remember. Anyway, it’s not mine.
Once there was a farming village in a valley, Their lives were generally peaceful, except for every few years, a band of ruthless bandits would ride down out of the mountains, sweep through the village, kill a bunch of men, rape a bunch of women, steal everything they could, and ride back into the mountains.
Then the village would rebuild, and after some hardship, replenish their crops and livestock and supplies… then the horsemen would ride back down, kill, rape and steal, then ride away.
This went on for many years, until the time that a different band of horsemen rode down from a different part of the mountains, and they killed, raped and stole, then rode away.
Then, shortly thereafter, the customary band of horsemen rode down, only to find the village devastated and everything they intended to steal already gone.
When they found out what had happened, they realized that that could not be allowed. They lived lives of ease through killing and raping and stealing, and they weren’t going to give that up, but they couldn’t do it if things continued that way.
So they struck a deal with the villagers. The villagers would provide them with everything they would’ve stolen if they could’ve, and in exchange, they’d not only stop killing and raping them, but make sure these other horsemen didn’t kill or rape or steal from them either.
And the villagers, wanting only to live their lives as unmolested as possible, reluctantly agreed.
And thus was government born.
Government is born instantly whenever multiple people have to interact and it’s about actually important stuff.
Take for example the story of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This area was a large military base in the city of Copenhagen, that the military abandoned. Before this area could be redeveloped, anarchist squatters moved in. Somehow the government didn’t step in and let them form their own society.
From the start the people living there noticed that they had common areas and infrastructure that they had to manage, so they formed local councils and each local council sent representatives to the one big council that was responsible for the whole Freetown. Of course, these people wheren’t elected politicians, but only people selected by the majority of the smaller councils and sent to the big one to speak for them. No representative democracy at all, only anarchism.
Then they noticed that keeping up the common areas and infrastructure costs money, so they instituted mandatory contributions of all inhabitants. That of course weren’t taxes, just mandatory contributions.
When people had troubles with their neighbors or other people, they could bring that conflict in front of a council for the council to decide who was right and what should happen. Totally not a court trial, just a council trying to settle disputes that could set mandatory consequences.
In the 80s then the Bullshit Motorcycle Club and the Hell’s Angels fought over Christiania (I mean, who doesn’t want to control an area with no real law enforcement?), and the Bullshitters won and took over the Freetown. After a particularly gruesome murder by the Bullshitters, the inhabitants of Christiania asked Copenhagen’s police and the Hells Angels for help and they all together where able to break up the Bullshitters and drive them out.
To make sure that this wouldn’t happen again, the big council decided to make some more solid rules (e.g. banning biker jackets, no hard drugs) and hired some strong men to make sure the rules where kept. These guys totally wheren’t a police force. But if someone was breaking these rules, the strong men would drag that person out of Freetown and call Copenhagen’s real police to deal with the offender.
So these anarchists reinvented representative democracy, taxes, laws and a police force. They just called all of that differently.
Idk I’ve never had a cop save me from anything, much less a sociopath. But maybe that’s just because the sociopaths know the cops are out there.
Oh and most cops I’ve spoken to outside brightly lit offices where one of us works struck me as sociopaths.
Yea, cops do tend to be grumpy little assholes. I was talking about the police force from a theoretical standpoint. If someone was breaking into my house, I would need to call for help, right?
Well, you could also be your own help, but even then you’ll need to call them after because you’re compelled to under threat of imprisonment or death.
I wanna see you helping yourself if five armed home invaders silently broke into your house and shoot you before you wake up.
Just because some rare situations are a kobayashi maru, does that mean you shouldn’t prepare for the situations you can handle?
Since you can’t put out a fire with an extinguisher if it starts in your sleep before it grows too big, should you not have a fire extinguisher just in case one starts while you are awake?
Does your alarm system not make loud “wake the fuck up” noises?
Did you not put good locks and 3" door screws on your door?
No dog?
Live in feudal Japan?
Sleep with earplugs?
Nope. I live in an actually developed country where the police generally does a very good job (nothing is perfect) and there is maybe one home invasion in the whole country every 10 years.
No need to have an alarm system, a dog or a fortificated bunker as a home. Also very few people (even very few criminals) have guns, hence gun violence even in criminal settings is close to non-existent.
The murder rate here is 1/10 of the murder rate in the USA, with almost all of the murders are people killing their spouses. Other kinds of murder are very rare.
We never had a single school shooting ever.
There are places like that in the US, with very little crime, there are also places with a lot, the US is the size of the entire EU and it’s incredibly likely your country is the size of Michigan alone.
What you don’t seem to realize though is that if someone wanted to sneak in and slit throats in the wee hours of the night you people are incredibly vulnerable, as you do literally nothing to prevent it instead just trusting that it won’t happen. And that’s great, I hope it never does, but the only thing stopping them is willpower. I say the same to people living in ideallic small towns in tge US where so many people say “we have so little crime here I don’t even lock my doors,” well, the only thing keeping you from some Richard Chase type is luck.
There are also places in the US that are not like that, where you basically need a gun, amd the people in those places are usually too poor to move but can afford $500 for something that may save their life. You judging those people for wanting to stay alive is called “classism.”
You do understand that “rate” means “per capita” and thus it doesn’t matter if my country has a few million or a billion inhabitants when comparing a rate?
If you are incredibly afraid about an event where the likeliness of it occurring even once in your lifetime is roughly 1:150 000, then it’s not called “being prepared” but “being paranoid”. Your chance of dieing in a transportation accident is much, much higher and still your response isn’t to fortify yourself in your house and never leave it.
Is it called “classism” if our poorest and worst locations are much better than your average?
Also, consider that more people die due to suicide or accidents using their own gun than people get killed by someone else’s gun.