this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Theres a lot of nuisance in the definitions of left and right that are lost in reductive and polarizing statements like this. For instance a far left idea is an extreme belief in the philosophy of equity. When brought to its pure conclusion you end up in a communist environment where the state ends of being the dictator of exactly how much resources every individual is allowed to have. The conclusion to radical left and radical right policies is actually exactly the same. Authoritarianism.
There are plenty of ideas and philosophies on the right and left that are absolutely reasonable. Universal Healthcare on the left. Some immigration reforms or trade tariffs on the right.
These types of memes are very reductionist an unhelpful in terms of influencing people who are already woefully uneducated in the world of politics, philosophy, or trade and finance and only serves to try and convince stupid people that one very large and diverse group of people are literally evil while another very large group of diverse people are the good and virtuous.
Communism is when the shared public mechanisms under socialism run so well a government is no longer necessary at all. If it has a dictator or a government it is, by definition, not communism.
Ignoring the dictator bit, this is an anti-Marxist take, Marx never stated that Communism would have no government. When speaking of the State, Marx specifically speaks of the institutions of a Capitalist Government that etrench the Capitalist class, ie Private Property Rights and the militarized institutions that uphold them (the Capitalist police).
Marx was not an anarchist, he was advocating for central planning, and you cannot have central planning without central planners. Simply saying that the public mechanisms would "run really well" hides the fact that government would remain, planning and administrating.
Even Cybernetics would still need to have human administration, elections, and so forth to represent the will of the people.
You may wish to visit Critique of the Gotha Programme.
I may be misremembering, but the way I recall Engles describing it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is that as you dissolve class relations you remove the previous purpose of government, which was to enforce class roles through, for instance, enforcement of private property rights. As the "Administration of People" becomes unnecessary, the government is relegated to "Administration of Things" which moves it away from controlling people, and let's it "melt away" as it's remaining functions become less "governmental" and more of just managing logistics of things.
Sort of. You remove the classist aspects of previous society. Socialism itself emerges from Capitalism, and Communism emerges from Socialism. When I say Communism has a government, I very much mean there would still be laws, social workers, central planners, administrators, elections, even police, but not the elements of previous class society like Private Property Rights.
This is why Marx specifically describes this process as "whithering away." He is not arguing that the government will dissolve itself, this argument has been levied against AES countries falsely. Instead, it is through lack of maintenance that these aspects erode over time, like how the Monarchy in the UK is vestigial, or how there are no longer streetlamp lighters. As technology and society progresses, what once was considered necessary makes itself obsolete and fades.
This is the core of dialectical materialism, ie a tree contains within it elements of its past as a seed and elements of its future as an older and eventualy dead tree, everything is a transformation of its previous self.