Memes

Already we’re dropping the pretense of eliminating class, which is the entire premise of communism. A system which establishes supremacy in any form could never hope to eliminate class.

Nope. Communism is a post-socialist mode of production established by resolving the contradictions within socialism. States eradicate themselves by eradicating the basis of class, and this happens by collectivizing production and distribution. This can only happen under proletarian states, because the proletariat resolves the class contradiction between bourgeois and proletarian by collectivizing property. This is how the state withers into statelessness.

And again you are uncritically equivocating socialism and the state. Socialism can and does exist independently of the state whenever workers collectively organize production and distribution anywhere and for any reason. Cooperatives are socialist, not petty bourgeois, because the workers themselves have collectivized the means of production. Small businesses that are privately owned are petty bourgeois.

Cooperatives are petty bourgeois collectives of private property, not socialist property. The idea of competing small cells of worker-owners is petty bourgeois in origin and stands opposed to collectivized production and distribution.

Always transitioning towards but never quite getting any closer and never will without the people themselves acting collectively to dismantle the state. The idea that the state will just “dissolve,” or even more ridiculously disassemble itself, is absurd.

The transition between capitalism and communism is slow, long, queer, messy, and protracted. The state does not "just dissolve" or "disassemble itself," the proletariat erases the basis of the state, class, by collectivizing production and distribution. This does not mean collapsing into fully decentralized nothingness, but collectivized production and distribution.

Again, people collectivizing the means of production on their own terms does not undermine socialism, it undermines the state. It’s funny you suggest people acting on their own initiative undermines their own will, and not the state cracking down on them. I thought from our previous interactions that you were more reasonable than this.

Moving away from collectivized production and distribution towards individualist minor collectives is undermining socialism in favor of cooperative, petty bourgeois quasi-socialism. It both undermines socialism and the socialist state, preparing conditions for capitalist states based on cooperative ownership of private property. The fact that I disagree with your framing of socialism and communism doesn't mean I'm doing so unreasonably, this critique is as old as Marx and Engels and is elaborated on thoroughly in Anti-Dühring. For something smaller, Cooperative Property is not Socialist.

A union in any system that stops short of supplanting the boss and siezing the means of production is class collaborationist. Such a union in a capitalist republic is essentially just a bureaucratic arm of the company that serves as controlled opposition, and in a “socialist” republic is a bureaucratic arm of the state that exists to ensure the working class acts in the state’s interest. You think the latter is acceptable because you believe the state truly represents the will of the people, but I believe that only the people themselves are truly representative of their will.

When said union is trying to supplant socialism and sieze the means of production from the proletariat in favor of small, petty bourgeois cooperatives, then it is working against socialism. I trust the people to own and direct production and distribution, which is why I support socialist states, approving of them preventing small cells of worker-owners turning over public property back into private, establishing the basis of capitalism once again.