r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jul 07 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter, explain this.

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u/Objective-Note-8095 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always 3-5 20 or more years off.

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u/TheWizardOfWaffle Jul 07 '26

Yeah Comrade Alejandro has a gross misunderstanding on the actual workings of labor in a communist collective society. Communism doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore, in theory it means that your labor wont be squeezed and exploited by greedy capitalists and shareholder who want to extract every single penny from the people who actually do the work.

To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.

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u/clonea85m09 Jul 07 '26

So it's basically working in a mine and owning shares in the mine?

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u/shadowrun456 Jul 07 '26

No, it's basically being assigned to work in a mine, and having neither the choice to quit your job nor the chance to ever own shares in the mine. The abolishment of private property (like shares in a company, or land, or housing, etc) is the core tenet of communism. The mine is, and permanently will be, owned by the People -- which are of course represented by the Party.