Oh this is an easy one! Tenants just wouldn't pay rent, so there'd be no value to extract. This would be completely legal and socially acceptable (expected, even). A piece of paper saying "I own this" is just make-believe without a judicial system and police force that will enforce it.

In every story what post apocalyptic society survives? Communist. Every post apocalyptic society that leads to hellish dystopia? Capitalist. Prove me wrong.

you're probably more of an anarchist than you think!

I have a general rule where if someone is not able to summarize their thoughts in one or two paragraphs, I am not going to waste time reading their 134 page document or 2 hour video they throw at me.

If you think communism on a large scale doesn't have to be authoritarian, you haven't looked enough at history and how humans work.

Thanks, you are the first person out of many to provide a real answer and not just get angry at the question!

I was thinking more along the lines of a factory or a farm, but ok let’s go with a rental home.

Let’s say the billionaire’s security guards stop allowing the nonpaying tenant to access the property. Does the nonauthoritarian communist government go arrest the security guards?

Ok.

Every post-apocalyptic society we can point to is fictional. After all, we’ve never actually experienced an apocalypse on that scale.

But just off the top of my head, The Book of Eli depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has largely devolved into anarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of warlords and whoever can enforce their will through violence.

Cyborg presents a similar picture: societal collapse, competing factions, and survival through force.

Then there’s Mad Max, where civilization has collapsed into violent competition over increasingly scarce resources, with whoever controls the necessities of life holding the power.

But I’d also venture to say that many of the post-apocalyptic societies people point to as examples of socialism are actually post-scarcity societies, or at least societies in which scarcity has been resolved to some degree. When the necessities of life are readily available, the incentive to hoard resources and compete for basic survival diminishes. That creates the conditions for people to organize society around collective needs rather than individual accumulation.

In other words, what people identify as socialism in these fictional settings may actually be the result of a fundamental change in the material conditions of society.

The interesting question isn’t whether people are naturally selfish or naturally cooperative. It’s how the conditions people live under influence which behaviors become necessary for survival. When resources are scarce and institutions collapse, people may turn to violence and self-preservation. When their basic needs are reliably met, cooperation and collective ownership become much more practical.

Of course, neither outcome is inevitable. Scarcity doesn't automatically produce anarchy, and abundance doesn't automatically produce socialism. But the material conditions of a society have a tremendous influence on the political and economic systems that can realistically emerge.

and yet neither can actually discuss Marx and shit for real

which was written in 1872 and is kinda way way way way way way way past its selling date.

you know anything can happen in fiction? you can plausible write a post-apocalyptic capitalist society as well.

like it is barely manageable to maintain farming collectives which is relatively small scale but anything past that is bound to endless ugly mutations into something unfair and cruel.

!["The ultimate goal of our oppressors is to limit our imagination about what is possible without them, so that we might never imagine more for ourselves and the world we live in. We can only imagine what is in front of us because the power structure decrees that there are no alternatives other than what currently exists. We humans have lived the alternative for tens of thousands of years. We are capable of building a free society, a brighter future, because we already have ideas about what that might look like. We know what societies without bureaucracies are capable of."

— David Graeber, cultural anthropologist]()

It is people who continue to claim that humanity must be authoritarian are the ones who have no idea of how humans work and are ignorant of history.

Right? Who'd ever listen to women of history, like Emma Goldman, and especially women of color, like Lucy Parsons. They've certainly never mentioned anything worthwhile about this topic. /s

According to that logic the warsaw uprising was also authoritarian because the rebels imposed their will onto the nazi occupiers.

there is a difference between using force as a means of self defense and for dominance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_d8_VpLc-k

Tankies: ackshually, the term "authoritarian" is not narrowly defined and therefore has no meaning! Checkmate libs1

Yeah, because it only takes a few detractors to completely ruin the system.

People hate working out on the field. Yet some of us happily spend time in the garden. Working all day in a workshop fixing cars can get boring. But there are some people who enjoy tinkering with their car in their garage.

The human brain functions similar to a muscle, doing the same tasks over and over again becomes exhausting after a while.
In a better world, we would regularly rotate tasks to prevent such mental exhaustion.

What if they try to force others to submit to their dear leader aswell?

This is such a cringe-inducing post. Like ...

We humans have lived the alternative for tens of thousands of years.

Yeah in fucking caves and clay huts. In absolute poverty without security, safe food supply, healthcare and rights. If some dude wanted something you own and was stronger than you, he'd beat you up and then take it. What a glorious time to be alive.

I had some half-finished text here, but I considered it unnecessary to argue with someone on lemmy about communism, so I deleted it and stopped.

you don't even need detractors to mess things up - the hierarchies and privileges form naturally over time - some are better performers and eventually they get more pull while others fall behind

the leftist version

Are they leftists, though? They call themselves leftists, sure, but if it walks like a duck...

Dune. Turns out feudalism was what made it out of the machine apocalypse and ensuing Butlerian Jihad. Feudalism with nukes.

Authority is when steam engine

Democracy is akshually authoritarian because there are laws.

So you're saying that communism only exists as a literary fantasy?

Snowcrash is an example.

If you value any economic system above democracy, you'll end up being authoritarian no matter what your preferred system is.

Sylvia Pankhurst promoted Luxemburg's views after her death. She also became disillusioned with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

yup

I prefer Stakeholder Socialism.

I hate being told I'm not socialist for wanting coöperative ownership and a coöp commonwealth economy, but that they are real the "real" socialists when they just want state owned corporations.

Certainly the forced removal of their wealth must look like authoritarianism to the billionaire, no?

How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better, even to the point of undermining the democratic process itself? Sure we could argue at some point democracy had the effect of improving living conditions but should we expect that to be true forever in all circumstances?

I dont believe that democracy is valuable as an end unto itself, it is a tool that should serve its people and if it stops doing that we shouldn't be dogmatic about it. Authoritarian systems certainly arent the way, and I would guess what we need doesnt even have a name yet.

Upvoting not because I agree but because this claim is very common and needs visibility.

Let me know when you come up with a way to force people to accept an unpopular system without an authoritarian regime.

Natural laws? Sounds like authoritarianism.

Sorry, I should have said intruders as well as internal bad faith actors.

There will still be psychopaths and sociopaths and serial killers and pedophiles in a communist or anarchist society.

Communities will still need to deal with those malignant people, whether by outcasting/exiling/deporting them or inflicting punishment + delivering rehabilitation. Those activities will be authoritarian over the bad actors.

Shouldn't have just said intruders. Of course self defense isn't authoritarian. Authoritarianism takes place above and over a society's own people. I meant to also include internal bad actors like psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, racists, etc. For those criminals within society, it's still best to remove them from that same society via exile/deportation or take away their rights to punish them then rehabilitate them. Those actions will appear as authoritarian to the bad actors.

Elections are not democratic because the candidates are always elites of some form. Even with universal sufferage and an egalitarian society there will always be a selection bias towards people who want power and people who are good at winning elections (but not necessarily good at governing). A real democracy would have election by lottery to ensure every segment of the population was represented. This hasn't ever existed because past governments who elected by lottery (e.g. Ancient Athens) had only a small percentage of society represented as citizens.

When the dollar can vote you no longer have a democracy.

Regardless of the system, it will always have PEOPLE running it. It will always be fucked.

How do you justify democracy when people are voting for life to be worse instead of better

How are you determining "better" and "worse"? In most cases, there's no way of knowing what is "better" or "worse" sub species aeterinatis, because most government decisions are not optimizing a single parameter, and are instead making a judgement call by choosing one of multiple options from a Pareto frontier. With democracy, the people get what the majority of people want. Majority rule is better than minority rule.

Honestly, that's a great rule.

To answer your question, i don't presume to have the singular correct strategy, but I personally believe the most sensible route out of capitalism is to build parallel structures at multiple levels: neighborhood mutual aid, community farms, county land banks, national single payer healthcare, etc.

I think that this will build an organizing structure and a vision for change, and by supporting more and more people we create conditions that free them from the coercive power of capitalism, which makes more radical actions like a general strike easier to sustain.

As more and more people withdraw from participating in capitalism, the tools of coercion will become increasingly direct, violent, and punitive, and revolution will take the form of a comiserately forceful refusal to submit.

You're speaking about socialism. Communism can't be authoritarian.

Bourgeois democracy is minority rule tho, I want a democracy where money doesn't have a voice

Guy Debord criticized the Soviet Union for creating a new class system. He still believed in Marxism, but didn't believe that the structure of the Soviet Union was able to create the conditions for communism.

Literally do not care if they weren't popular or didn't have elections. It was necessary that they suppressed the SRs, because democratic socialists are idealists who will run you into the ground. The majority of Russians were antisemitic, does that mean that's just fine?

ITT: libs

Ok, the actually rebut what he said. Should be simple if he's wrong, shouldn't it?