82
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
82 points (84.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43783 readers
838 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
This would be public property. No private ownership.
So this is how I understand it. Achieving the communist utopia in its purest form would be impossible. However, the goal should be to go as close to it as possible. In your scenario, your neighbor would just be "nice", thus stopping any escalation of your conflict. Again, as it's impossible for this to happen completely, we would still require the presence of SOME coercive entity. However, the scale of this entity would reduce over time, as people would tend to be less asshole-ey over time (consider how wars have reduced over time).
It is. However, this isn't necessarily contradictory. Say you have an institution with 121 coercion points. You thus overthrow this institution, thus becoming worth say 70 coercion points. After the overthrowing is complete, you dissolve your own institution that did the coercion on the other coercive institution. Thus, 0 coercion achieved.
Another way to explain this: The Nazis started a war. The goal was to end this war. However, to end this war, the allies entered the war, thus expanding its scale. In the end however, the war ended.
Public property doesn't make the situation easier, because now you have lots more people who have to be involved in decision making.
Maybe some people want the road paved but others think it's a waste of their money. Now what do you do? Force the people to pay up or deny them usage of the road? Or would you let them free-load and use the nice paved road without paying for it?
All three options are unfair. If you force them to pay for something they don't want to, that's clearly unfair. If you deny them the usage of the road, they lose access to what they had access too before (the road). If you let them free-load, that's unfair to the people who now had to pay more, and chances are that next time more people will say they are against it, even though they want to have the change, but that way they get the stuff for free.
The communist utopia would be a post scarcity society, where money would be irrelevant at individual level. Hence, "paving the road" wouldn't be a scarce service. Therefore, noone would oppose it. But let's assume that some still oppose. In this case, it would just be democracy at work. That's why the communist utopia is something that we can get extremely close to, instead of actually reaching it.
For instance, "banning murder" is coercive for murderers. Now, they are coerced into not murdering people. This however doesn't mean that shall be allowed to go on murdering people, right?
That's the question. At what point is a society with democracy, laws and a police still an anarchistic, stateless society?
To me this quickly overlaps with a libertarian democracy with direct democracy on the local levels, just with a different name. It's kinda scary to me how quickly the left and the right converge here.
Post-scarcity is a nice concept, but that will never happen. Many countries in Europe are effectively post-scarcity if you only consider basic needs.
Here in Austria, for example, we have a thing called "Mindestsicherung" which anyone is eligeable for if they are an Austrian citizen or have lived here for >5 years if they earn less than €1050 a month (median income is €2240). What happens then is the state pays them extra money so that together with their income they earn €1050 (even if you have no income at all). Then you get a flat in public housing and they pay for that too. Also you get free public transport passes, don't have to pay a TV license and get a free basic phone and internet contract. You even get a vouchers for clothing if you need new clothing.
Living, food, clothing, mobility, communication and internet are all taken care of. That's post-scarcity on the basic level.
I have a good friend who suffers from severe depression. He's been living off Mindestsicherung for the last 10 years. He doesn't have a lot of money but enough to go around and still have some money left for hobbies.
Still capitalism is alive and well here with only a low rate of long-term unemployed people. Because people don't only work to save themselves from starving, but because they want a higher living standard and more cool gadgets. So for money to not be important, everyone would have to have everything that they can think of.