I strongly encourage ACTUALLY reading Marx and not just the facebook post equivalents that various influencers love to spout.
But, at a very high level: Marxism is largely built around communism (well, the other way around, but just roll with it). Which does have implications for governing and decision making, but is largely a socioeconomic system. So the better “opposite” would be Capitalism. Although, even that is a pretty reductive approach and is arguably wrong.
That said: Communism requires some form of centralized planning. And while there is nothing that says that can’t come from a true Democracy, it tends to favor republics which may or may not use democracy to select. The US, as the chuds so often like to exclaim, is a Democratic Republic (sort of) in that we use Democracy-ish to select our representatives.
Communism most certainly doesn’t require centralized planning - all it requires is a method of providing start up capital without giving away ownership.
It could be from local government taxes, federal coining of money, crowdsourced or some combination of these - you’d just need a mechanism of some sort to give loans to groups looking to start a worker-owned company. That’s the only requirement
There’s an infinite number of ways to slice it - centralized planning is super worrisome IMO because it creates a locus of power. But not only is it unnecessary, the same result
can be achieved far more effectively with a digital marketplace that matches buyers and sellers. You just have to remove incentives and power from the entities managing it - with a fairly small amount of money, you could host a standard system with an open and auditable code base
But you could also just design an open market without ownership of companies - that’s communism. You’d have to decommodify certain basic needs and shape incentives carefully, so it’s a bit more complicated than that… But not much
I strongly encourage ACTUALLY reading Marx and not just the facebook post equivalents that various influencers love to spout.
But, at a very high level: Marxism is largely built around communism (well, the other way around, but just roll with it). Which does have implications for governing and decision making, but is largely a socioeconomic system. So the better “opposite” would be Capitalism. Although, even that is a pretty reductive approach and is arguably wrong.
That said: Communism requires some form of centralized planning. And while there is nothing that says that can’t come from a true Democracy, it tends to favor republics which may or may not use democracy to select. The US, as the chuds so often like to exclaim, is a Democratic Republic (sort of) in that we use Democracy-ish to select our representatives.
Communism most certainly doesn’t require centralized planning - all it requires is a method of providing start up capital without giving away ownership.
It could be from local government taxes, federal coining of money, crowdsourced or some combination of these - you’d just need a mechanism of some sort to give loans to groups looking to start a worker-owned company. That’s the only requirement
There’s an infinite number of ways to slice it - centralized planning is super worrisome IMO because it creates a locus of power. But not only is it unnecessary, the same result can be achieved far more effectively with a digital marketplace that matches buyers and sellers. You just have to remove incentives and power from the entities managing it - with a fairly small amount of money, you could host a standard system with an open and auditable code base
But you could also just design an open market without ownership of companies - that’s communism. You’d have to decommodify certain basic needs and shape incentives carefully, so it’s a bit more complicated than that… But not much