jaydot wrote:communism has only been practised by small groups of people such as those at findhorn and Machynlleth, insofar as they share toils and eat communally. there is no preclusion in communism to personal possessions, including housing.
Wrong. The entire basis of even utopian Communism is that the individual owns nothing, not even his body or his labor.
what was practised in russia and is current elsewhere is not communism; it is totalitarianism, a whole different ball of wax.
Why, yes, you're right. The only problem for you is that communism = totalitarianism one-hundred percent of the time in any community of more than a very few willing individuals. The instant someone objects to communal ownership of everything, including the means of production and every other thing, the "communist" society either becomes totalitarian to enforce the ideology or it removes the objector from the community. At Findhorn they just ask someone to leave. In every other communist society of any size, they usually just imprison and kill them for being "counterrevolutionaries."
when considering communism, think linux. each of the people who submit code to the github do so for one of two reasons, or both - they wish to have a utility that is yet to exist; they wish to offer a useful utility to the communality. those who can't code, but wish to contribute, do so in a variety of ways, managing image downloads being one. linux is communism in its purest form - from each according to his means; to each according to his needs. each individual owns the copyright to the code he or she wrote, while giving it away freely under the creative commons licence.
Which works just fine only so long as participation in the "communal work" is entirely voluntary and any person who wishes to write his own code, copyright it and sell it as the fruits of his individual labor is free to do so.
The problem with communism in fact is that operationally no large group of people can or will accept a member who refuses to "give according to his ability" in return for what the community offers by way of "according to his need."
If someone takes Linux, writes a module to enhance the system and then claims copyright (exclusive possession and use) of the resulting system because he has input his labor and does not wish to share the fruits of that labor with others, the Linux society will without any question whatsoever eject and exclude him from the "community" in the future, and will likely sue him (liquidate him in Stalinistic terms) to prevent him from using the "common" product they all "freely" contributed to because they don't get a piece of his pie.
Exactly the same thing happens in communist societies. When the free riders appear and start consuming resources "given according to the ability" of the rest of the members of the community without themselves giving anything those who labor rightfully object and the whole system falls apart, as it's doomed to do as a result of it's idiotic and fatally flawed philosophical and political underpinnings.
Communism does not and cannot ever work in the long term because it fundamentally ignores actual human behavior in favor of a utopian ideal of human interaction that has never and will never exist for any but the shortest time, usually failing spectacularly and fatally for those involved.
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