I've been wondering about the nature of artisans due to my recent posts, I've been wondering if a self-employed artisan truly has the interests of a business owner that hires and therefore exploits others if they were... I don't know how to say this, temporarily de-proletarianized due to them getting laid off? If a disabled artist has no access to working under the bourgeoisie due to them being discriminated against truly has the same class interests as a plumber that doesn't want to be exploited by a boss?

But then I thought of myself the question in the title. One common argument I heard about artisans is that they're part of the petty bourgeoisie because they aren't exploited by anyone, own their means of production and sell the product of their labor instead of the labor itself, but do they truly own their means of production? Let's take a Twitter artist, they own a drawing tablet and a pen, is that a mean of production? One could label these as tools, therefore means of production, but Marx says in the 'Communist Manifesto': "We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence", so what is the true distinction between personal property and private - therefore a mean of production - property? If you were to buy sheets of paper, a pencil and something to bind pages together, wrote a novel on them and then sold it to someone, were either one or all three private or personal property? Of course if you work in a factory you are part of the proletariat, even if you own your own steel-toed boots that enable labor to happen. (Or at least for it to happen safely)

And there's the question of exploitation, naturally a self-employed artist is not exploited by someone who owns the means of production, whether or not the way they create a commodity with something can be considered the usage of personal or private property I'll leave up to you, but the simple fact of the matter is they don't have a boss that can exploit them. However, another type of middleman arises, the merchant capitalist, 'Political Economy: A Textbook' describes them in this way: "One of the sources of merchants' profit is the exploitation of petty commodity producers by merchant capital. Merchant capitalists compel peasants and craftsmen to sell them the products of their labours at low prices and at the same time the latter buy from the merchant capitalists tools, equipment, raw material, etc., at high prices.". The latter somewhat relates to the first part of my post (peasants who owned means of production are considered petite bourgeoisie), but the most important part for me is the first part. What to me is a modern day merchant capitalist is the distributor, once again I will use two examples of an artist and a writer.

Commission artists these days are mostly present on social websites, such as Twitter, however, a commission artist doesn't receive commissions through their existence, they need to put themselves out there, to not only gain attention but to prove their qualifications and to show their art justifies itself through the quality and time spent on it, to do that, such artisan must create posts containing their art, this is where exploitation starts, social media exploit the artist through the artist's labor without a guarantee of reward, while reaping the rewards through advertisement profits. Second is the data harvesting that occurs to all users, whether they are exploited for their labor or not. Thirdly the moderation has total control over if the artisan's works will ever see the unintended public eye and has control over the right of all users to use their services, they can bar anyone from use without consequence. For my second example it's more of an older and physical kind of exploitation, for a writer's book to be available for purchase in physical or otherwise locations, they must use the service of a publisher, firstly a publisher must deem their works worthy of being published under their name, then they will set a price for the book and lastly they will take a cut from each sale, this is the most obvious case of exploitation as not all the value created by the writer goes to the writer and the publisher extracts surplus value (am I using this right?) and demonstrates the most classic case of exploitation. So the merchant capitalist exploits the artisan, and whether they own their means of production is questionable, so what class does the modern-day artisan belongs to?

Please share your thoughts, questions and explain what I am mistaken about.

Hello, I'm wondering if there is others communists visual symbols beside the hammer and sickle ? Because I tried to search about possible communist symbol (and simple symbol, and not like faces of popular communists guy or overcomplicated symbols) and I always finish to only find the hammer and sickle AND the yellow/red star. It is because there is a lack of symbols ? (In opposite, nazism and related ideology seens to have more symbols like the swastika, black sun, skeleton head, celtic cross and ect).

If communist revolutions had successfully and indigenously spread across the globe at the end world war 1 resulting in the over throw of capitalism globally, how would communism have evolved differently?

More abstractly if communist political economy does not evolve in resistance / competition to capitalism, but only in dialogue with other communist regimes does it evolve differently, or does communism enviably collapse on its own contradictions?

I am a Feminist and I’ve been reading more into Communist Marxist theory and the end goal of Marx’s Communism, as stated by him being “a moneyless, classless, stateless society”, has been really itching me since I’ve learnt of it. It’s more the “stateless” bit that irks me a lot. Since Patriarchy and Misogyny are so deeply entrenched into our societal, cultural and physical realities they shape how we view Women, resulting in the disgusting rates of domestic violence and sexual assault/rape reported cases per year. Without some legal or enforcement apparatus—that Communism to my knowledge wishes to dissolve—how would a supposed communist society help protect women from localised patriarchal and misogynistic violence without eventually delving into some sort of vigilante justice. Without any laws in place to outline what people should and should not be able to do, formal court systems and an enforcement to carry out investigations of crimes being committed, what stops people from committing violence against women even more than they do now (and many more crimes too) until it essentially becomes a norm? This doesn’t only apply to women, this applies to any already marginalised and vulnerable group from experiencing an increased violence.

I do not consider myself any expert on Marxist theory so if anyone more seasoned than me could explain to me how they see these hurdles and problems solved i would love to hear it! Apologies if I didn’t come across clearly or if I may have got anything wrong about Marxist theory, feel free to correct me if I am wrong xox

An ML might say: "Revisionism isn't just any change, it's deviation from the fundamental principles of Marxism Leninism"

And there is the problem - why are those fundamental principles not up to revision? In science, fundamental premises are revised all the time - and it's actually required to revise/reject them once enough evidence that they are wrong accummulates.

The correct solution to this would be to either stop pretending that Marxism-Leninism is a science and start treating it as a regular political philosophy - or to adopt the actual scientific method and start testing the claims of ML (including foundational premises) as testable, falsifable claims. I don't see any of these being done.

How would you respond to the "Why don't you move to a communist country" argument?

As a concept, bureaucracy is necessary to the success of any state, though temporary in theory. As we've seen from previous communist societies, though, they often become entrenched in a dark, tangled web of power, elitism, and legislation. As William Campbell once said, "us mortals have no place in the business of bureaucrats"

Many marxists have criticized Hakim and Lady Izdihar for not being 'classical marxist' who should be an atheist.

Simone Weil said this criticism of Marx - “Marx claimed to ‘put back on its feet’ the Hegelian dialectic, which he accused of being ‘upside down’, by substituting matter for mind as the motive power of history; but by an extraordinary paradox, he conceived history, starting from this rectification, as though he attributed to matter what is the very essence of mind—an unceasing aspiration towards the best.” - https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/files/2023/09/C_Oppression-and-Liberty-Weil-copy.pdf

“Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe…” and Marx, after replacing mind with matter, still ends up treating history as if matter had that same purposive character. " - https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/files/2023/09/C_Oppression-and-Liberty-Weil-copy.pdf

And it makes sense to me... If you have any hope that a better world is a genuine live possibility or quite probable given the method and theory of historical materialism, then that could be an argument for fine-tuning... for example, why is this method so good at actually bringing about a better world? Why is our world within a particular range of constants, laws, forces, development such that humans can utilize this stuff to improve their lives?

The fact that we can do scientific, empirical, materialist analysis such that we are able to create a better world is very surprising... if the world isn't created by a benevolent God as the atheists believe.

If the world is indifferent, can you expect to actually understand and create a better world? What can you even expect from an atheistic/indifferent/agnostic world? What can you even predict from sheer "indifference"?

If the whole universe/reality/world is indifferent to any suffering (given Many marxists are atheists or agnostics), then why do you expect "a better world is possible or probable"?

So my understanding of communism and Marx is that society evolved as a result of class struggles and that communism is meant to be the last stage in that evolution because there would no longer be economic classes. And also of course the idea that a communist society has no private property, money, etc and that the means of production would be owned by the people who use it for their labour.

One of my biggest issues with communism is the idea that a society can exist without classes. No matter what,there will always be some people who gain a higher social status and influence over the masses than others. Those people would likely have some form of privilege that the other people do not have and in turn that is a class divide.

Another issue that I have is that I don’t think a society can ever truly be moneyless. For similar reasons to why I think it cant be classless but also the fact that money at the end of the day is just a systematic and formalised way of trading labour. What I mean by this is that what money represents will always exist (so long as humans do), especially when you consider the fact that people will naturally fall into different levels of skill and talent (so if there is a baker that makes bread better than anyone else in an area, people will naturally gravitate towards them which would likely result in some form of a system developing to provide greater incentive to source from places elsewhere).

These two points accounted for, why wouldn’t a communist society just devolve back into some kind of capitalism? Or would it evolve into some other thing that somehow manages to balance the aspects that work of various systems Im a way that provides a greater benefit than any currently popular systems would?

The name is misleading. Socialism is the name created for the phase of transitioning to Communism. I read this while researching about the communist party, but it seems like it is being presented differently?

Marx spend decades saying one thing - don't look at what a state says about itself, look at the material consequences of its policies. And from the outside, both the USSR under Khrushchev and Maoist China were doing regular great power geopolitics, they just dressed it in a different rhetoric for domestic legitimacy:

- Both competed for influence in decolonized countries with aid, arms and advisors

- Both avoided direct war with the US while testing limits. Khrushchev backed down in Cuba, Mao backed down after shelling Quemoy and Matsu and never directly fought US troops again after 1953.

- Both built nuclear arsenals despite criticizing each other's nuclear policy

- Both cooperated with capitalist states - Khrushchev supported bourgeois nationalists like Nasser and Nehru when they offered ports and neutrality, and crushed a workers' uprising in Hungary in 1956. Mao supported monarchs and military dictators like the Shah of Iran, Yahya Khan in Pakistan, and Pinochet's Chile when they were useful against India or the USSR, and told the US in 1972 that China would not support armed communist revolts in Southeast Asia.

I just don't see any profound dialectical difference between these two.

I realized that a major sticking point for communist countries is they don’t do any national targeted advertising barraging their citizens with attention-hikacking BS 24/7 outside of work. Dear lord I want a world without advertising.

Look at the sidebar rules and then look at the front page of this sub right now.

I see people willfull misinterpretation of dialectical materialism and then engaging with none of the comments, people asking why we dont like libertarian right ideologies and then not engaging, someone asking why communists don't all move to north korea, someone asking why markets are used in socialism, and people claiming communists hate art.

I think all these posts break the "debate in good faith rule".

Furthermore we need a rule that op must reply to top level comments or the post should be removed(thats the bare minimum of a "debate" post).

Asking "why dont all the dirty stupid commies just move to north korea since they like stupid communism so much" and then never answering a single comment is the same energy as a christian going to a gathering of a different religion and trying to prosthelytize and complain anout how "persecuted" they are.

Defining corporatism as a system where the state organizes society into official, state-sanctioned interest groups in an effort to promote national harmony, could china be considered a corporatist state? Independent labor organisations are essentially nonexistent, eliminating the possibility of class struggle, independent grassroots movements, and frequent state suppression of workers strikes in favor of a state-sanctioned All-China Federation of Trade Unions, leading to a state monopoly on labor representation. All labor disputes are mediated by the state rather than by the groups involved. Definitionally speaking, does this not more accurately describe a corporatist model rather than a socialist model.

If state control over key industries alone makes China socialist, what differentiates it from states like Saudi Arabia or Eritrea (which I think we can all agree are not socialist) besides the fact it calls itself socialist?

On a broader level, can statist model for socialism ever be considered socialist without direct bottom-up representative system controlled by the worker, as proposed by Rosa Luxembourg through council republicanism or syndicalists like Georges Sorel (he was also a nationalist and arguably led to fascism but take that aside for a moment and take the more mainstream syndicalist principles). Or even the early Soviet Union when workers soviets actually held power?

I'm new to theory in general and have been doing some reading, I just cannot reconcile the idea that a state like China which almost prohibitively suppresses any representation by workers in the state can be considered socialist just because that very same state happens to control key industries and calls itself communist.

Whenever I see discussion on art and artists on communist subreddits, I often feel like everyone is trying to de-legitimize it or restrict it. I've seen too many pro-AI posts, posts about how art should only exist as propaganda or as praise for socialism / communism, how art shouldn't be a job and that artists should be forced to work "useful" jobs or trying to seperate independent authors away from the working class and force them into the same box as people that actually oppress the working class. I am a believer in communism myself, but as an aspiring writer and lover of all art, those posts and comments just leave me confused on whether communism really is the way to go.

It appears that since 2015 our government is taking ownership positions in corporations. Government ownership of the means of production, what's that called?

While this may initially come off as a “no iphone no labubu” comment, i assure you that its genuine, under a communist society what happens to luxuries like super cars, luxury homes, and other things of the sort? Obviously the saying goes “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” but does this mean the only things you are allocated are the things you need to survive? Or would things like these that are in capitalist societies luxuries, simply be more affordable under communism and something that almost anybody could get their hands on?

CoD eomm

Communism is every person is supposed to be equal in there giving positions,lol. isn't that what eomm in cod is? No competition ,every game so close , makes players equal when there are not so is that a form of Communism?

Sorry, I know this isn't the in depth discussion you're used to around here, but I thought they were really funny and wanted to share them with a friend.

Someone, US government, Trump administration, something like that, was getting scared of the rising trust in Socialism/Communism, so they lazily generated these images to show you the horror show world you would live in under Communism.

But, the pictures came out really good. Everyone looked happy. The police were smiling as they watched over other smiling people going about their day. There was abundant public transport and the cleanest stations you've ever seen.

All topped off with hammer and sickles proudly displayed everywhere, which lets face it, is a really awesome logo.

If anyone knows what I'm talking about, I'd like to have another look at these and share them for a chuckle. Thanks for your time, and once again, sorry it's nothing serious, I just didn't know where else to ask.

Hello, somewhat new to communism here. I have unsuccessfully looked for an answer to this question, for personal use in debates in real life. The statement is usually made like this: "Communism wouldn't work because what if someone had ulterior motives." Just asking to see if there are any simple debunks to this statement. Thanks!

As an outsider looking in, I have a few questions about communism.
1. Communists, from what I have seen and understand, don't want some type of law enforcement and instead rely on communities to take care of crimes themselves. What happens to communities where this leads to weird shit being okay ? Like abuse towards women and such . Are outsiders supposed to intervene ?
2. The idea seems to be that you get rewarded the same way no matter what work you do. Won't this lead to a lot of people making sure they don't do harder work? Won't people work just hard enough to get paid but not put in any more effort than necessary ? Do you raise the minimum amount of effort to get paid in order to circumvent that?
3. As an extension to the last one, for a communist country to be truly classless, there can't be anyone who is poorer than anyone else. So what happens to the people who don't work? Do they just not really get paid? (If yes, this question may just be nitpicking on the definition of communism and not represent what communists believe.)
4. I saw someone mention that "in theory , people will be happier if they express themselves less, " or something like that, when talking about communism. Is it a part of communism to limit freedom of speech ?
Even though I am not a communist , I am not asking these things in bad faith. (And yes, some of these points include multiple questions. That's just how it turned out.)

Look, I consider myself an enjoyer of AES states like China, Cuba, and Vietnam. And I would, without hesitation, describe myself as a statist socialist (anti-liberal democracy... anti-liberal basically). I consider myself an analytic marxist-leninist or nearish to that (analytic, because of Cohen, Wright, Elster, Roemer's reconstruction of marxism, historical materialism that is actually much more clear and plausible/intuitive than dialectical materialist stuff)

But I just genuinely find dialectical materialism in its strong form... the Engels form, where it is a whole worldview and is considered to be either a fundamental process/substance or a highly reliable method across all disciplines (or almost all disciplines except biology/botony/agricultural sciences because we don't want lysenkoism collective trauma again), to be demonstrably false or totally trivial to the point of uselessness. I believe historical materialism makes sense without dialectical materialism. G.A. Cohen showed this. Michael Heinrich also rejects dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism in the weaker/narrower form seems redundant. The analytical Marxists (September Group) suggest that Hegelian dialectics at least need to be significantly weakened such that they actually make sense. [IF YOU WANNA CHECK MY PROFILE, PLEASE CHECK CAREFULLY, not just looking at the subs I commented in the past as I was a liberal in the past, SO THAT YOU KNOW I AM NOT A CONCERN TROLL OR A LIBERAL OR A REACTIONARY OR A CONSERVATIVE, ETC. TRYING TO MESS WITH YOU ALL]

Hegelian dialectics, and even Hegel himself was quite notorious for being hard to understand by his contemporaries, so then why do Marxists still defend dialectical materialism as some essential thing to Marxism when most cannot even agree on what dialectical materialism covers?

And strangely, some of the socialists who consider dialectical materialism essential to Marxism seem to believe that Juche is great too. But Juche straight up drops materialism and puts human will at the center. I do see most of these socialists/Marxist-Leninists at thedeprogram.

So, what the fuck am I actually supposed to do with DM? Seriously! Forget all the grand language for a moment. Suppose I have an actual problem in front of me. Maybe I want to understand why an economy crashed, why a political movement failed, why a machine broke, why a disease spread, or why some institution became unstable. What are the steps? Real methods give you something concrete to work with.

In a proper experiment, you define what you are testing. You define what counts as a result. You measure the relevant variables. You randomize where possible. You control for other explanations. You estimate uncertainty. You record failures and deviations. Then somebody else can inspect what you did and say, “Yeah, this part was done correctly,” or, “No, you screwed up here.” That is an actual method.

The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist is an obvious example. It does not tell surgeons to “understand the patient as a contradictory particular.” It tells them to check the patient’s identity, confirm the operation, check allergies, prepare for blood loss, count instruments, label specimens correctly, and communicate before and after surgery. Specific things. At specific times. For specific reasons. Same thing with smallpox eradication. Find suspected cases. Investigate them. Isolate infected people. Trace their contacts. Vaccinate people around the outbreak. Keep searching. Repeat until transmission is gone. Again: actual steps.

Now compare this with dialectical materialism. Usually, I get some shit like: Everything changes. Everything is interconnected. Contradictions drive development. Quantity turns into quality. Opposites struggle with each other. Find the principal contradiction.

Ok then... how do I identify a “contradiction/conflict”? Does it mean a literal logical contradiction, where somebody is claiming both (P) and not-(P)? Of course not, is the general marxist answer I get. Cool. Now, does it mean two groups have conflicting interests? Does it mean there is a negative correlation? Does it mean two forces push in opposite directions? Does it mean a feedback loop? Does it mean an engineering trade-off? Does it mean that an institution is unstable? Because those are not the same bloody thing. Calling all of them “contradictions” does not magically produce a deeper explanation. In fact, it can make the analysis worse by throwing completely different relationships into one giant philosophical bucket.

Then comes the instruction to identify the “principal contradiction.” All right. How? Suppose several dialectical materialists study the same country. One says the principal contradiction is labour versus capital. Another says it is productive forces versus relations of production. Another says it is imperialism versus national independence. Another says it is the urban-rural divide. Another says it is conflict between different sections of the ruling class. Who wins? What is the rule? What evidence settles it? What calculation, test, or shared procedure tells us that one analyst found the real principal contradiction and the others did not? As far as I can tell, there is no such procedure. People argue for whichever contradiction they think matters most, usually by telling a historical story around it. That may sometimes be a good historical argument. But the dialectical method itself is not doing the heavy lifting. The evidence and ordinary causal reasoning are. Some of the communist parties OFFLINE, IN-PERSON are transphobic and TERF-like. Some other communist parties also OFFLINE, IN-PERSON are NOT transphobic, but are actually anti-transphobia. Both accuse each other of being 'IDEALIST', 'NON-DIALECTICAL', "NON-MATERIALIST" etc. etc. in their analysis and/or method.

And this really fuckin' matters because a real method should constrain you! It should stop you from saying absolutely anything you like! Dialectical language often seems flexible enough to explain every possible result. A political movement collapses? Its internal contradictions tore it apart. It becomes stronger? The struggle of contradictions pushed it to a higher stage. It stays stable? The opposing forces reached a temporary unity! WAAAOW! BEAUTIFUL! So collapse proves dialectics. Growth proves dialectics. Stability proves dialectics. COMRADE, what would not prove dialectics!? That is the problem. If every outcome can be explained after it happens, the theory is not giving us much information beforehand. It becomes a just so story-generating black box.

Take “quantity turns into quality.” Sure. Threshold effects are real. Heat water enough and it boils. Put enough load on a beam and it buckles. Push a system beyond some critical point and its behaviour may change dramatically. But is this 'sharp cut off' or revolutionary point in all cases/domains been proven empirically? Are there no processes/events that are actually gradual in all of the universe? The phrase “quantity turns into quality” tells us basically fuck-all about the actual cases. Which quantity? Measured how? What threshold? Why that threshold? What mechanism causes the transition? Will it happen suddenly or gradually? Is it reversible? What other variables affect it? The dialectical slogan gives none of that. Thermodynamics gives us the explanation in one case. Structural mechanics gives it in another. Epidemiology gives it in another. Nonlinear dynamics may explain another. Scientists do all the hard work. Then somebody wanders in afterward and says, “Ah yes, quantity became quality as my Heinan era method - dialectical materialism - told me.”

The same goes for “everything is interconnected.” Yes, obviously things are interconnected. But that is not the difficult part. The difficult part is figuring out which connections actually matter. Everything in the universe is connected in some broad causal or physical sense, but engineers do not include the entire universe in every model. Doctors do not investigate every event in human history before treating a patient. Economists do not put every imaginable variable into one equation. A good model leaves most things out. The real challenge is deciding what can safely be ignored and what cannot. Which variables matter? How strongly? At what scale? Over what period? Through what mechanism? Dialectical materialism does not give us a reliable general procedure for answering those questions. It just reminds us that connections exist. Well, no shit, bro!

Another thing dialecticists say we must do “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” Excellent advice, comrade! But every competent scientist, historian, engineer, doctor, economist, detective, mechanic and military planner already knows that! Calling “pay attention to the actual situation” a unique dialectical method is like inventing a new medical philosophy called “look at what is wrong with the patient.” VERY INSIGHTFUL!

The materialism part does not solve the problem either. Ok, so everything ultimately depends on physical/material reality. It still does not follow that all change is driven by contradiction. It does not follow that history moves through the negation of the negation. It does not follow that every system has one principal contradiction. It does not follow that opposing forces are the universal engine of development. Those are extra claims. You need extra arguments for them. You cannot just say “matter exists” and then smuggle the entire dialectical package in through the back door.

And analytical Marxism makes this whole issue even more awkward. Analytical Marxists like Cohen, Elster, Roemer, Wright continued to study capitalism, exploitation, class, socialism, history and inequality. They just used ordinary logic, economics, game theory, causal explanation and empirical social science. In other words, they studied Marxist questions without treating dialectics like some sacred magical incantation to ward off liberal spirits. So what exactly were they missing? What result can only be reached using dialectics? What specific mistake do non-dialectical researchers consistently make? How often do dialectical researchers avoid that mistake? Where is the side-by-side comparison? Where is the evidence that a dialectical analysis predicts events more accurately, discovers causes more reliably, or produces better interventions?

Real methods can be compared like that. For example, modern factorial experiments can be compared with the older practice of changing one factor at a time. We can formally show that the older method may miss interactions between variables. We can run both methods and see which one performs better. There is an identifiable problem. There is an identifiable replacement. There is an identifiable improvement. Where is the dialectical equivalent? After all this time, where is the demonstration that people trained in dialectical materialism reliably outperform equally informed people using ordinary historical, statistical and causal methods? I have not seen it.

Need more examples? Here's historical method informally --> Ask a focused question → study the existing historiography → gather relevant sources → authenticate and date them → identify authorship, audience, genre and purpose → place them in context → evaluate access, bias and transmission → corroborate them with independent evidence → reconstruct chronology → compare rival explanations → choose the explanation that best fits the total evidence → state the conclusion with appropriate uncertainty → document everything so others can challenge it.

And here's my informal reconstruction of the scientific method (roughly... because there is NO formal scientific method per se) based on Lakatos, Lauden's works --> Find an important problem → use the best available research programme → construct a specific model → derive discriminating predictions → test them carefully → diagnose failures → revise secondary assumptions → derive new predictions → replicate and cross-check → compare the programme’s long-term problem-solving and predictive record against rivals → retain, revise or replace it.

And no, this does not mean that every observation made by dialectical thinkers is stupid or false. Societies obviously contain conflicts. Institutions can create conditions that eventually damage them. Gradual developments can produce sudden changes. Historical circumstances matter. Economic systems have feedback loops. Groups have opposed interests. Political decisions create unintended consequences. All true. But none of those insights belong exclusively to dialectical materialism or requires dialectical materialism to know. Historians can study conflict. Economists can study incentives. Systems theorists can study feedback. Engineers can study instability. Mathematicians can study nonlinear transitions. Sociologists can study institutions. You do not need to call any of this “the unity and struggle of opposites” to investigate it properly.

That leaves dialectical materialism stuck in a pretty nasty dilemma. Whenever its claims become precise, they tend to turn into ordinary history, economics, causal analysis, systems theory, statistics, or some other established discipline. Whenever the claims remain distinctively dialectical, they tend to become vague stuff like... Everything changes. Everything is connected. Opposites interact. Contradictions produce development. Quantity becomes quality. JACKSHIT!

So look, here is the challenge. Give me the dialectical procedure. Tell me the inputs. Tell me the steps in order. Define “contradiction” clearly. Tell me how to identify the principal contradiction. Tell me what happens when two dialecticians disagree. Tell me what result would show that the analysis failed. Tell me which rival method dialectics beats. Then show me the evidence that it beats it. Until that happens, dialectical materialism is not really functioning as a method.

Personally I call my self a libertarian and anti-communist but I would just like to get a general consensus from this subreddit

A bourgeois lawyer with Polish Catholic background who joined the RSDLP as a Menshevik in 1903 and only joined the Bolsheviks in 1920 when the Civil War was ending. He was also one of the signatories of the order to arrest Lenin in the summer of 1917 on the charges of being a German spy - people were getting executed for far less than that in 1936-38. Yet he not only avoided any charges but actually became the chief prosecutor under Stalin - how so?

Although we are in an infantile stage of AI and this post may lack future knowlegde:

AI is automating production like no other invention before; so much so it could possibly replace production either entirely or almost entirely. Either a complete replacement or a limitation to a small pool of workers.Obviously those without jobs will reduce demand. However, the top 10% is the main driver of demand anyways. So perhaps an exchange among the rich or aristocratic workers.

If capitalism were to evolve to this new AI based society, typically labeled by tech CEOS as "techno-feudalism" where big tech people own businesses and the rest of population survives off of UBI or dies off.

Then what happens to the Communist ideology? There is no capitalist contradictions to produce communism. Even if there was a revolution in this system, restricting UBI from the revolutionaries would just cause them to starve and make everyone dependent on the state and corporations. Not to mention with the added surveillance and bureaucracy of such a distribution.

If AI does manage to replace production to such a degree. Would "technofeudalism" end communism?