I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus. Marx explained how to get things started, less the ultimate goals, so I might be thinking of a dubdivision of communist theory. Soviet communism (lower case, like soviet – referring to committees) still had public officials in its provisional state that had more power than the common citizen, at least within the purview of their office, but officials trusted with power is regarded as a necessary evil.
Participatory democracy (in which everyone votes on every little thing – at least every thing to which they’re a stakeholder) is another model that works similarly, but again, without some amazing databasing tools and personal platform customization, it’s not possible to do this effectively even if we master internet voting: We’d need to find a balance between reducing constituent administrative burden and providing enough time and means so that everyone is sufficiently participating in their civic duties, and voting as suits their personal best interests (and not on any superfluous issues that don’t concern them).
Communism and democracy are multiple models aiming for the same outcome, but again, we expect to get closer without ever reaching absolute perfection of even distribution of power… Well, we expect to get closer when a society actually strives towards doing so, contrasting allowing a select few elites secure political power for themselves.
I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus
To my understanding, the way communists understand “the state” that they want dismantled, is the structures of power of class repression. Communists (myself included) define the state in capitalism as the set of institutions that maintain the repression on workers that enables the domination by capitalists. When we talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we simply mean that the state, instead of maintaining the repression against workers, is turned around and instead represses the capitalists to maintain the workers in power (which we see as desirable since workers are the majority and our goal is the elimination of the capitalist class and hence all class relations). The elimination of the state in end-goal communism, the way I see it, is about not needing anymore those structures to repress capitalists because capitalism has been thoroughly eliminated and history has progressed beyond it, in the same way that Europe hasn’t fallen back to feudalism because it was made obsolete by capitalism. This doesn’t mean, however, that all institutions are dismantled. Representative bodies, associations of technicians and specialists in one way or the other (research insitutes, healthcare, meteorology… you name it), and other types of institutions that we associate with modern states would still exist. Many of these imply political power: a higher-up of a research institution in nuclear power will obviously have some higher degree of decision-making over energy policy than your average citizen.
I don’t think communism and democracy aim at the same outcome. Democracy as a concept doesn’t explicitly aim to the elimination of class in society, and communism does, for example.
Do you have any comment on my insights on guaranteeing of human rights by historic socialist nations?
I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus. Marx explained how to get things started, less the ultimate goals, so I might be thinking of a dubdivision of communist theory. Soviet communism (lower case, like soviet – referring to committees) still had public officials in its provisional state that had more power than the common citizen, at least within the purview of their office, but officials trusted with power is regarded as a necessary evil.
Participatory democracy (in which everyone votes on every little thing – at least every thing to which they’re a stakeholder) is another model that works similarly, but again, without some amazing databasing tools and personal platform customization, it’s not possible to do this effectively even if we master internet voting: We’d need to find a balance between reducing constituent administrative burden and providing enough time and means so that everyone is sufficiently participating in their civic duties, and voting as suits their personal best interests (and not on any superfluous issues that don’t concern them).
Communism and democracy are multiple models aiming for the same outcome, but again, we expect to get closer without ever reaching absolute perfection of even distribution of power… Well, we expect to get closer when a society actually strives towards doing so, contrasting allowing a select few elites secure political power for themselves.
To my understanding, the way communists understand “the state” that they want dismantled, is the structures of power of class repression. Communists (myself included) define the state in capitalism as the set of institutions that maintain the repression on workers that enables the domination by capitalists. When we talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we simply mean that the state, instead of maintaining the repression against workers, is turned around and instead represses the capitalists to maintain the workers in power (which we see as desirable since workers are the majority and our goal is the elimination of the capitalist class and hence all class relations). The elimination of the state in end-goal communism, the way I see it, is about not needing anymore those structures to repress capitalists because capitalism has been thoroughly eliminated and history has progressed beyond it, in the same way that Europe hasn’t fallen back to feudalism because it was made obsolete by capitalism. This doesn’t mean, however, that all institutions are dismantled. Representative bodies, associations of technicians and specialists in one way or the other (research insitutes, healthcare, meteorology… you name it), and other types of institutions that we associate with modern states would still exist. Many of these imply political power: a higher-up of a research institution in nuclear power will obviously have some higher degree of decision-making over energy policy than your average citizen.
I don’t think communism and democracy aim at the same outcome. Democracy as a concept doesn’t explicitly aim to the elimination of class in society, and communism does, for example.
Do you have any comment on my insights on guaranteeing of human rights by historic socialist nations?