Can anyone succinctly explain communism? Everything I’ve read in the past said that the state owns the means of production and in practice (in real life) that seems to be the reality. However I encountered a random idiot on the Internet that claimed in communism, there is no state and it is a stateless society. I immediately rejected this idea because it was counter to what I knew about communism irl. In searching using these keywords, I came across the ideas that in communism, it does strive to be a stateless society. So which one is it? If it’s supposed to be a stateless society, why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?
Describing economic and political systems is tough because people have different interpretations of them and they can all be correct. Denmark and the US are both capitalist but their systems are incredibly different.
The simplest description that applies to all forms of communism but not to systems that aren’t communist, is that the means of production (typically defined as land and capital) are state owned (with the intention that their use is decided democratically by the public).
Other descriptions could also apply but they’re also not required. Like how a watch is still a watch whether or not it has a hand to indicate seconds.