Hi there folks,
While trying to learn about communism, I’m having problems finding literature that provides and example life under Communism. What I do find is propaganda either against or for it, involving unrealistic and bombastic content that is clearly not rooted in reality.
I’m not looking for historical content because I’m just trying to figure out what a life that the group is striving for would be like.
Thanks for your time!
Could you clarify what you mean when you say you are ‘not looking for historical content’?
If it’s not an historical example, won’t it necessarily be speculative?
Marxists aren’t utopian. To paraphrase, communism is the real movement of the abolition of the current state of the world. Marxists obviously have an idea of what might come next. But Marx and Engels didn’t really flesh that out. It’s impossible to predict the specifics. It’s hard to even imagine what socialism will look like.
All we can really say is that socialism will come out of and resolve the contradictions of capitalism. Communism will come out of and resolve the contradictions of socialism.
That said, all history is the history of class struggle. Socialism involves a dictatorship of the proletariat. The class that is currently exploited will become the ruling class. There will still be exploitation for a while. Perhaps for a long while. But the intention will be to create the conditions to end exploitation. Socialism, and thus communism, will be whatever the working class wants it to be, collectively.
Examples from the USSR, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Laos, Vietnam, and depending on the definition, Ghana, Chile under Allende, and a host of other states will show you what communists try to achieve when they get into power. They struggle because they get attacked (literally invaded, carpet bombed, sanctioned, and/or couped). Due to that, the legacy of the previous system, and material limits to what’s possible, actual examples (AES) are all flawed. Still, they tend to manage to: abolish illiteracy, massively increase industrial output, and abolish homelessness. They build roads, hospitals, schools, houses. And they keep going until they are defeated, which ranges from a few months to several decades to not yet.
Sorry, my OP wasn’t very clear in my hope. By not historical, I should have said “distant historical, more current so I could understand how communism would interact or be influenced by today’s technological advancements and influence”.
Are you saying that we’ve yet to see a long-established communist system in recent history so all examples will be less than representative, since they are tainted by the previous systems or abolished prior to being able to fully establish the system?
I can only imagine how muddled my part of the discussion is and I’m sorry for that. I’m basically starting at ground 0 and don’t even really know what to call what I’m looking to learn about yet so I call things by the wrong terminology, making it hard for you guys to help me.
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i will try to put what highalectical said in simpler terms, and starting pointing out that this discussion is very very important to new people.
so, how communism itself will look in the future will be determined by the material conditions of the future, since we are not there yet, we can’t say for sure, only speculate. but you can say you dream of a society that has x characteristic.
the same goes for socialism itself, how its gonna look for each country, will be determined by said country, for good or bad. that is why soviet socialism is different from chinese, that is different from yugoslavia, that is different from korea and so on.
but if we take all of those and try to dawn similarities, we can note a certain tendency, and that tendency is a uplift on quality of life, like the other comrade said in another comment, drastic reduction or extinction of illiteracy, full employment for long periods of time, agrarian reform, reduction or extinction of homelessness and so on.
and why that discussion is important, there are some revisionists line that throw materialism out of the window and create an abstract form of socialism, and they use that abstraction to shit on former socialists and current ones, for example abolition of family and moneyless economy, no socialist country ever came close to both of these, so these lines spew that there was never a “true socialist country”, all were horrific oriental despotism dictatorship and etc.
Thanks for taking the time to simplify it. I really appreciate it.
Could you further exemplify this? I’m finding it a challenge to understand the mechanism of manipulation.