Quote:
Originally Posted by tater
No, to be a commie you need to be authoritarian.
Fewer than half of the "ten planks" are required to build the very definition of a totalitarian police state.
|
Not by actual definition of communism - the idealist "communist dream" is the lack of vertical authority as such and community consensus on the local level serving as the deciding force. The "practical communism" that we've seen is the oh-so-nice Marxist stage of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Funny how Marx didn't quite anticipate that once someone got a dictatorship, they wouldn't want to let it go...
Likewise I wouldn't confuse left-right with "state control" per se. The state as such is mostly in the middle of the spectrum. Both the far left and the far right are anti-state in their ideology - one believes in local community consensus as the driving force, the other believes in individual enterprise for profit. Both, in their "pure" forms dislike the notion of state. The real difference is in the motivation - individual gain or public good. Neither in itself is evil. Both are traditional sources for development, and in good ethical people tend to go hand-in-hand regardless. They only become evil when they're subverted unchecked greed or vertical authority.
Otherwise, state as such doesn't factor directly into the economic axis there. That's the other dimension.