Many of the first to be sent to the Gulags were also true believers. You should study your history. Marx wasn't the great intellectual you might think and Marxist Communism never ends well for anyone.
Trust me, I’m a libertarian communist meaning I oppose the use of the State or any force. There are no gulags nor prisons in my imagined future. Marx’s economic analysis of different ways to organize production is invaluable even in a completely voluntary society, which is what I advocate for. I want to build systems that help people the way Wikipedia helps people - in a “take it or leave it” totally voluntary way.
Even if you ignore Marx completely, the basic idea that “perhaps it is bad for most people to have society ruled by a small elite” is a quite reasonable one to have.
Regarding your "reasonable idea", does it account for real life constraints, namely greed, cruelty and other qualities found in humans today? Capitalism isn't great, but it works, while other models tend to fold under the weight of reality.
Meanwhile, I hear that "capitalism works" but we have tens of thousands of Americans dying each year due to lack of basic medical care, our students are saddled with educational debt that the boomer generation did not have to pay, people cannot survive working full time on minimum wage, and our politicians are pocketing huge financial gain to avoid a rapid conversion to renewable energy or affordable health care.
If you call that "working" then let me say we can do much much better.
All this are comical problems compared to what we'd had in a marxist regime. Instead of tens of thousands dying from lack of medical care, there would be tens of millions dead due to ideological cleanings (e.g. uygurs in china), and there won't be much of healthcare anyway because doctors don't like to work for free. This brings us to the education. In marxist regimes students are simply sent to work for a few years in places where the party needs them. No debts, but no freedom. The equivalent of the minimum wage problem in marxism is empty shelves: your salary buys a lot of stuff, on paper, but there's simply no goods to buy due to price control.
So far your arguments are just a wishlist: you say what you want, but don't explain how to get it.
I suppose you don’t know anything about the doctors in Cuba then.
> So far your arguments are just a wishlist: you say what you want, but don't explain how to get it.
Actually I often explain how I’m going to help create a system that can free people from the need to work. The fact that I’ve not explained it to you so far in this conversation is not evidence that I don’t have a plan.
I am a skilled robotics engineer and I will work with others to create productive machinery which lowers the cost of living until those benefitting from this system do not even need to work to get what they need.
What you do not realize is that the Marxist critique of the way capitalism organizes production can be applied to engineered systems without any use of force or state power. I will simply collaborate with others to build machines we own which provide for us. In this way we will create community ownership of the means of production in a voluntary system that works without any laws in the USA changing. This is a plan informed by Marx’s critique of capitalist production, and also informed by the failure of authoritarian communism.
Trust in good intentions is a huge red flag any time communism is being discussed. I'd like to believe that you are approaching this from good intentions and that you honestly can't see the horrific results that your proposed political/economic system would bring about - but there are just so many corpses tied to attempts to implement communism that anyone proposing it in serious conversation either does not fully understand the full history of it, or they are intentionally ignoring it for their own purposes.
Take for example your use of "libertarian communist." These are mutually incompatible ideologies. Libertarianism promotes maximum individual liberty (freedom). Communism by its very nature limits personal liberty to the maximum extent possible. You cannot have both because nature of communism will immediately begin to erode all liberties you may have envisioned.
No gulags or prisons? But where do you put the people who oppose the ideas you are proposing? But you will convince them your ideas are pure and you just want the best for everyone so you won't need to lock them away or dispose of them. But what about those who don't want to be convinced? Or the people who just don't like being told what to do? How will you incentivize them? There's a lot of people like that out there. You'd need an entire bureaucracy to promote your ideas to the non-believers. But some people would be silent dissenters - stirring up doubt and pursuading others away from your ideas through less public means. You'd need a way to keep tabs on these people to make sure they don't try to overthrow your administration before its had a chance to succeed. And what if they do find evidence of a conspiracy to abandon your ideas? Because your ideas are pure and the outcomes are expected to be glorious, anyone who rejects them must be...
And what of the people who do support you? How will you reward achievement and promote innovation in a system without means of reward? How will you keep them loyal? You will find the solution is quite simple actually - a system without reward mechanisms still has mechanisms for punishment.
So no - communism is not just misunderstood, it is not just implemented badly, it is not just attempted by the wrong people. It is rotten to the core. It is a fractally bad idea.
> No gulags or prisons? But where do you put the people who oppose the ideas you are proposing?
The same place the creators of Wikipedia put people who don’t like Wikipedia - nowhere, they don’t do anything to people who don’t want to participate.
> But what about those who don't want to be convinced? Or the people who just don't like being told what to do? How will you incentivize them?
My system is purely voluntary and it works with the participation of a small number of volunteers. You really have not appreciated that when I say it is libertarian I actually know what I am saying.
> You'd need a way to keep tabs on these people to make sure they don't try to overthrow your administration before its had a chance to succeed. And what if they do find evidence of a conspiracy to abandon your ideas?
You’re really letting your mind wander. Again think of Wikipedia. If someone wants to stop contributing, absolutely nothing will happen to them.
> So no - communism is not just misunderstood
At least on your end, the misunderstanding is significant. It would be great if, instead of telling me libertarian communism is an impossibility and wholly misinterpreting my goals, you kept an open mind and considered what a libertarian communism would be like.
Do you know about the Sikhs in India? How they produce and give away over one million free meals a day across the country? How they have massive Langar kitchens that produce 100,000 free meals a day? I am a robotics engineer, and a damn good one. I want to create facilities which can produce tens of thousands of delicious healthy organic meals per day to distribute for free or with a payment optional model. I want to provide free community robotics classes so the members of the community can learn useful skills to help repair and improve the machine and to get better jobs.
I call what I aim for communism because it is based on Marxist principles of community ownership of the means of production, and based on the ideals of libertarian communists from the past (there is a long history of that term going back to the 1800’s and you should look it up before so horribly misunderstanding it).
You could say “giving things to people in need is capitalism! It’s charity!” And the truth is the meaning of the terms overlaps. And we can both be right. But I follow in the libertarian communist tradition and I’m quite proud of that. I don’t usually hear capitalists saying every person deserves food and shelter and clothes no matter whether they can or do work.
I want to help create a world where having a job is totally optional. And we can do that through concentrated automation of core human needs with machines owned by the community they serve. Community ownership of the means of production. Imagine how much freedom a person would have if they did not have to work! They would have the freedom to spend time with loved ones, to paint, to read, to bike. For the average person this would be a life changing situation. One that our current form of capitalism seems to have no interest in producing.
What are your thoughts on how Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot conducted themselves? They also believed that they were doing the best possible good for their societies.
I believe the disconnect here is you seem to be suggesting that Marxist / communist ideology can be safely restrained from eroding personal liberty. I do not and would rather not run the experiment because history has shown it tends toward genocide - regardless of the good intentions of its supporters. It's the parable of the scorpion and the frog.
I'm happy to encourage people to continue to help the needy. But communism is a hard nope.
How can you account for the millions of Americans who have died over the past 50 years due to lack of medical care? How about the millions of Vietnamese people killed in their own country fighting for independence from colonial rule? How about all those innocent people killed by the USA in the Middle East?
The problem with all that and the people you mentioned is authoritarianism, not their preferred way of organizing production.
In the USA post-McCarthy “communism” was understood as synonymous with authoritarian communism. But authoritarian communism does not and has never represented the whole of communist thought. There have always been libertarian communists also called anarchist communists, as Peter Kropotkin identified himself in his famous 1892 book.
If you think all communism leads to authoritarianism then of course you would oppose it. But isn’t is the case that capitalism is just as susceptible to authoritarian control, as we see when the USA overthrows governments to secure cheap oil and a pliable labor force?
We can an must oppose authoritarianism in all its forms.
But you’re getting hung up on terms. I’m sure if I told you I want to marshall resources from donors to build a facility that makes automated meals for everyone, you’d be supportive. It is only when I say that every person deserves this regardless of their ability or desire to work that you will get concerned.
In the words of Hélder Câmara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
