What do you mean when you say you are a 'communist'?

[ed miliband]

last night in the pub my (liberal "anarchist") friend introduced me to this really right-wing fella he lives with (who was chill enough to buy me a beer...) and he started defending capitalism in yr. usual cliched ways re: competition, greed, etc.

got me thinking about what i actually mean when i say i'm a communist. for me communism is self-interest, "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things", and a classless, stateless society. i'm a communist because i find capitalism dehumanising and, really, fucking boring. but i have no concrete aims or ideas about whatever some communist dawn will look like...

i was wondering, then, what communism meant to other people here?

[Marxaveli]

For me, it is the highest form of society possible....the ultimate democracy, and emancipation of not just society itself, but of the human condition (reaching Marx's concept of a 'species being') overall.

[Red Rosa]

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

[Искра]

Two words: Felix Dzerzhinsky :lol:

[Agent Equality]

A fair, equal, free society in which the horrors and ailments of capitalism are no longer felt where humanity can actually learn to get along with one another. I do it for ethical and personal reasons.

[Labor Shall Rule]

It's "not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself… [but] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

[Art Vandelay]

"I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. It is the slavery of other men that sets up a barrier to my freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, it is their bestiality which is the negation of my humanity. For my dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity."- Mikhail Bakunin

I come from a bourgeois family and I could probably have a fairly wealthy life under capitalism, so I guess its not a self-interest thing for me. I have been disillusioned with this world for a long time and I was falling into nihilism, communism gives us a way out of this hellhole.

[Nox]

For me it represents welfarecommunismsocialismkarlmarx

(inside joke)

[The Young Pioneer]

I never tell people out-right that I'm communist. That would never go over well where I live.

I just try to explain human equality, the belief that everyone has the right to a job, food, shelter, education, health, etc., and how the current system doesn't allow for those things. People are much more likely to agree with you if you explain yourself rather than giving them a label to stick on you.

'Course, that being said, the ignorance in my community had me labeled as "The Commie" in high school anyway (when I still considered myself a democrat). But that's only because I always had my nose in some Russian book... :laugh:

Interesting thread.

[StalinFanboy]

the destruction of civil society and the abolition of work

[Q]

When I say I am a communist it is because I believe in humanity's potential to free itself from the capital relation (wage labour, etc.) and become genuinly human, instead of things, part of a bigger something they cannot control, estranged from eachother. Communist politics, for me, is the project to this road.

[Rafiq]

a communist is someone who's interests are not separate from the proletariat's, and his end goal is the abolition of the present state of things.