Help me understand Communism a little better.

[Comrade Fleisch Esser]

Greetings, now from my understanding Communism is suppose to bring the community together and make everyone equal which I think is a very good idea thus why I say I'm Communist.

Now when I tried to discuss this with friends who live near me, of course they are Capitalists if anyone wants to know, they said that with Communism everything will fall because they try to make everything equal but they need a leader and having a leader means having higher power which breaks the point of Communism.

I have not learned everything about Communism yet, but I have been learning and it seems like the best way to go, so I'd like some other comments and opinions on this.

-Comrade Fleisch Esser

[The Intransigent Faction]

First off, welcome, comrade.

Now, what you can tell them is that:

"1. Overthrow the business owners & government
2. Everybody is equal. Celebrate!"

...is not quite how it works.

In order to wither away the remnants of the bourgeois and bourgeois society, a transition stage of Socialism is necessary. Here's an excerpt from Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme (perhsps more appropriate than one I had initially from the Manifesto. Forgive me, I haven't slept much):


In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

The more the remnants of bourgeois society fade away, the more that decentralization is possible without threatening the gains of the revolution.
Leadership from a vanguard would be especially necessary in modern Western society, as a result of "cultural hegemony". Many in the West have come to believe that the bourgeois rule for the benefit of the workers. Only by being exposed to the worst effects of Capitalism can they come to understand otherwise. Ultimately, however, the working class is the leader, for there will be no state once Communism is achieved, and prior to that, the initial carrying out of a revolution would require enough popular support to overthrow the bourgeois.

On the question of leadership, or more accurately, on the dictatorship of the proletariat, Mao Zedong said:
"The People's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most far-sighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs."

I hope I was clear.

[Sasha]

note that the otherwise excelent reply from brad is purely the (authoritarian) marxist-leninst view on communism, there are much other/diffrent strands, ideas and advocates of communism to be found, also on this site.
council-communism, syndicalism, left-communism and anarcho-communism to name only a few of many.

[The Intransigent Faction]

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

Sorry, I accidentally did a double post at first, but I thought this quote would help explain better.

[The Intransigent Faction]

note that the otherwise excelent reply from brad is purely the (authoritarian) marxist-leninst view on communism, there are much other/diffrent strands, ideas and advocates of communism to be found, also on this site.
council-communism, syndicalism, left-communism and anarcho-communism to name only a few of many.

Yes.
I am sorry, I simply explained it as I understood it, but this is true.
A common mistake among anti-Communists, at least those that I know, is the assumption that it is a uniform movement, based on the confusion of Socialism (transition) with Communism (result). This confusion over a fundamental part of Marxist-Leninist theory distorts the overall view of the Communist movement as something uniform, when in fact there are, as psycho said, many approaches.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Greetings, now from my understanding Communism is suppose to bring the community together and make everyone equal which I think is a very good idea thus why I say I'm Communist.

Now when I tried to discuss this with friends who live near me, of course they are Capitalists if anyone wants to know, they said that with Communism everything will fall because they try to make everything equal but they need a leader and having a leader means having higher power which breaks the point of Communism.

I have not learned everything about Communism yet, but I have been learning and it seems like the best way to go, so I'd like some other comments and opinions on this.

Once you understand it more it's really not difficult to counter these arguments. First of all, technically Communism is "stateless" so naturally there wouldn't be a leader. In Communism there's direct democracy. Your friends are probably referring to places such as Stalinist Russia and China. For starters, those places were NOT Communist. Communism is the final stage after the transition from Capitalism. Therefore China and the USSR were just oppressive forms of Socialism. The Soviet Communist party knew they weren't Communist hence the country's name "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Anyway, if you have any questions just PM me. :) I'm always happy to help.

[ZeroNowhere]

In socialism, there is no leader. As for the whole 'making everybody equal' crap, that's basically a load of silliness based on the whole 'class based on income' thing. Abolishing slavery does not mean making everybody the same. People can become better at stuff, etc, but not get people to become their slaves.

[mikelepore]

Phrases like "making everyone equal" make it sound as though something is being rammed into place. I think the opposite is true. Having social institutions that are already set up to treat people unequally is an artificiality that gets forced on everyone. Making a great social change, we can allow -- not make -- people to develop normal human relationships of their own choice, because we have decided that we will no longer require the population to form two lines, those who will be destined to spend a lifetime giving orders, and those who will be destined to spend a lifetime taking orders.