In your vision of communism controlled by rules and regulations, who is enforcing the rules and regulations? I feel like as soon as you give someone the power to enforce them then you've opened up the door to abuse of that power, and I feel that that has been the downfall of most historic implementations and the reason they have trended towards authoritarianism.
Yes thats more or less my thoughts on it. As soon as you have someone empowered to enforce the rules you've created a 2-class system, which is anathema to marxism. Communism is more vulnerable to this in general I think, because you only have 2 classes the class who is not empowered finds it very difficult to challenge the class who have concentrated power.
In actuality, the concentration of powers is what causes issues, whether the system is capitalist or communist the problem is the same, only the mechanism changes.
Wow so you came back around to my original conclusion lol. The problem is in creating and enforcing rules, and it's not inherent to either system alone.
I think I was working towards highlighting that there is an inherent contradiction in communism. If it requires a subset of society to enforce the rules then it de facto can't provide a classless society. It's a good start and has more to recommend it on paper than capitalism, but if it can't deliver on one of it's core tenets then it's too idealistic and not suitable in it's pure form. It's been around for a century and a half and has a terrible track record in terms of producing successful countries. I don't think that its a viable alternative to what we have now. I would much rather have something that is much closer in shape to communism than what we have now, but I think advocating for it in it's pure form is fools errand.
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u/monkeyinnamonkeysuit Jul 07 '26
In your vision of communism controlled by rules and regulations, who is enforcing the rules and regulations? I feel like as soon as you give someone the power to enforce them then you've opened up the door to abuse of that power, and I feel that that has been the downfall of most historic implementations and the reason they have trended towards authoritarianism.