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Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?
The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.
Yeah, workers' coops are an actually possible thing in America, but this is ignored.
I think anarchists are about the only faction of communism that realizes that they could just start communism with each other, in the form of workers' cooperatives and in communal villages, voluntarily. I think they are a far less harmful version of the ideology, and if all of the Marxists were instead anarchists, all the better; now you just have a bunch of people who vote left to shift the Overton window left without actually planning on doing anything nefarious (or doing much of anything at all, considering the anarchists I have interacted with).
Since anarchism is voluntary, the idea is that the commune shows people how things could be, and everyone slowly realizes the way things could be and join up themselves, I think. If the commune reaches a certain size, reality will check it and check it hard, so this bastion of freedom doesn't live very long and doesn't convince anyone who wasn't already a deviant. I consider that more benign, because it only disadvantages accountable people who willingly joined in.
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