No Stupid Questions

Rather than imagining jumping straight into communism directly, let's look at what it would mean to move towards it gradually.

Right now, people have to work in order to provide the basic necessities of life, like food and housing. However, suppose the state provides those things at little or no cost, without changing anything else. The profit motive still exists, and people work for pretty much the same reasons as before. If you want to buy a big TV, video games, a boat, whatever, you have to work for it. Money still exists, and is still valuable, but it's not essential.

Suppose I'm in a relationship I'm unhappy in, but I feel the need to stay together because of rent. If rent is no longer a concern, then I'm now more free to decide who to date based on things other than money. Then, someone who might otherwise be focused on money as a way of attracting a partner, might try to appeal to them in other ways, by showing off physical fitness, creativity and artistic skill, education, etc. Then, perhaps a company appeals to that person by offering a way to develop skills, rather than just money.

To use a fictional example, in Star Trek, everyone's basic material needs are met, but you still have groups like the Ferengi who are focused on profits and money, which is often used for rare goods and collectibles. Many people don't seem to have much use for it. While money still exists, it's not really the same as we think of money today, because the things it's used for are so much more limited.

Of course, we can't just abolish money overnight, but what we can do is work towards a world people are free to act on motives other than making money. And future generations growing up in a world where money isn't essential might look at it in a completely different way than we can even imagine.

I love how you can always spot the spanish speakers by how they use punctuation

1. Charging money for things is not a prerequisite to tracking which things are being acquired. You'd still have something roughly equivalent to stores in a moneyless society, because things still need to get from the people who make them to the people who use them. It's inconvenient and inefficient for individuals to go to a bunch of different farms for different foods, different factories to get different tools, and so on instead of each farm and factory loading giant quantities onto trains and shipping them to centralized places.

2. Look up Catalonia during the most recent Spanish civil war. Incentives aren't nearly the problem that most people assume they are. Those happy chemicals actually work quite well.

The core idea of communism is the goal for a classless, stateless society where all are equal. Unfortunately for us, the Soviets have successfully made the concept associated with Bolshevism / Marxist-Leninism, which calls for a vanguard party to represent the working people, i.e. an authoritarian one-party state. Communism by itself is not the antithesis to democracy, but Marxist-Leninist states are usually very authoritarian. And once you have a dictatorship, you foster a cult of personality and policy is based on the decision of one person, and that never ends well for anybody but them and their inner circle.

Communism was born when capitalism was uncontrolled, working people did not have minimum wages with poor working conditions and, often times, no rights either if they were the wrong gender, background, religion, sexual orientation, or simply social class. Don't get me wrong, capitalism now is still bad (for both people and the environment), but unions are stronger, restrictions on corporations is stronger, and society is more equal. Freedom of speech and the press is more prevalent, though certainly more can be done, and inequality of all kinds is still a global issue that must be tackled.

Is communism "dead" then? No, of course not. I respect all who work towards the goal of an equal, classless society freed from the shackles of capitalism. But those who want to stifle democracy and establish dictatorships, I do not respect.

My extremely uninformed and non-professional take is that communism only really works on small scales. at a small scale, maybe less than 150 people, what actually needs to be produced can be handled by a few people who understand the needs of the community, or people can present what their own needs are and others can help them. For incentives, pretty much the only one is dopamine like you said, but helping out in a community and seeing the impact should not be underestimated as a motivator, and neither should reciprocity (I got helped so I'll help other people).

Larger than that you'll need an organizational structure to handle needs and potentially an enforcement structure to handle motivation or lack thereof, inherently leading to people with more power than others who might abuse that power to garner more of it.

chile had created this system to manage production and actually in its hey day a lot of russian stuff was considered very durable and sometimes also advantages were seen with limited selection. One theory was they did very well with computer science because all of their people trained on the same machines so there was a massive amount of consistancy.

Will not claim that these are or were strictly communist, but you may find them interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Marx doesn't say how communism could be achieved. It's an ideal. At the end of history communism will be achieved.

So if you think it's possible, you have to help us figure out how to build it.

Communism tends to not know what is actually needed to produce

It can know, the issue is delay. It's trivial to make statistics of units sold and make predictions for what should be produced next. But any change in people's needs will take a while to propagate to statisticians, and then to production. Having a more direct feedback from people is very handy.

Communism has problem on incentives

Yes. But also, communism is considered to be the end goal for a society that has been grown, through socialism, in the respect for labor and understanding what makes it essential. Basically, the idea is to carry, through the generations, the idea that everything around you was made by people and you need to take part as well. It's probably not possible in the short term, but it's not the goal to go straight to communism. It's sort of the beacon, and idea of what society can transform to over long time. Socialism is the first step, and it does work.

The original communes are not "stateless" or "businessless", they're just outside that, more like a monestery. But they can easily interact with states and businesses - those'd just be outside the commune.

Lots of communes work quite well in small scale.

Many family or tribal groups are basically communes (not all though), some companies or workplaces work kindof like that too. They're using (cheap) trust and fair shares within the bounds of the commune, instead of (expensive) lawyers, ownership and micro-contracting. Though of course you can have personal property within a commune.

But scale up beyond easy observability, and beyond the effectiveness of tit-fot-tat justice (and the power of things like shame) and you get similar problems to all larger scale human societies. The situation diminishes from a repeated "prisoners dilemma" with observability, to a one-shot "game".

First start with socialism, trying to dilute ownership and present a much less extreme version of their end goal under the guise of worker control. Then they remove democracy because everything is collectively owned and were are transitioning to a stateless classless society. They bring workplaces under state control because they need to control it for national security. Thats it you have lost all power in your country and all power has been centralised. It will never go from that to a stateless classless society the entire ideology is just a lie to get to this goal. The people pushing this only do so because they think they'll be party of the ingroup.

lots of people will have different opinions about this, and many will disagree with me, but i think the inherent problem in today's world is progress itself.

progress brings with it all bad things. it makes people greedy, because now suddenly there's something to gain. it makes people fierce and fiery and competitive, and suddenly your life isn't chill anymore but you have to do something, you have to work a job, because otherwise your neighbors are gonna complain about you being a lazy slob and not contributing to society somewhat, and suddenly you'll find yourself surrounded by angry cousins in your peaceful back-yard that you thought was yours, because they'll demand that you work (just like everyone else), and "who doesn't work doesn't deserve to eat" and all that.

truly, progress is like the atlantic, it might bring us to a shiny new place but the journey itself is wild and fearsome. what i'm saying is that the best way to stay out of trouble is to never have left the ocean in the first place, probably.