Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    No, now you’re talking only about Marxist communism. Communism as a whole does not state that a single central power owns everything or that individuals can’t own property. Marx was very much against almost all personal property, but communism is simply about making the means of production owned by the people doing the production and not a small subset of individuals. That doesn’t mean ownership by a single entity. That very much could be local community governments that own each factory or power plant or whatever. And it’s only about the “means of production” not the products necessarily. People can still own the products in many forms of communism. Communism doesn’t necessarily dictate a specific economic theory beyond the idea that entities that produce goods that are to be owned by the people, should be owned by the people making the goods, not individuals, and especially not individuals who don’t participate in the production, only in the sale and profit of the goods they don’t produce.

      • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        No there are many forms of communism besides Marxist. None have been successfully implemented, including Marxist communism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_ideologies

        Socialism, specifically in Marxism, is one of the steps of economic change between capitalism and communism. But yes it has many different forms outside of Marxism, just like communism has many different forms outside of Marxism.

        But I’m talking about communist ideology overall which in a very broad sense is designed to transfer power and economic control from the elite and/or wealthy to the general population, which by definition is a decentralization of power and wealth. Marxism starts with a centralized government designed to gather up all of the resources and power from those elite classes and redistribute that to the people, so while it starts out centralized, centralization is not the goal even in Marxism. But that’s the only step that has ever been implemented, so many people mistake it as the only step.