Comment by akubera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akubera | Hacker News Reader

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I'd recommend reading the communist manifesto to understand the issue better.

Buying beer and sharing with friends week after week is a good example of capitalism, as the bar owner is profiting so much from you and your friends buying all this beer.

Communism (of the Marxist variety) would be you and your friends being allocated the same amount of beer by the state, which owns the beer (along with all goods), and deals out the same amount of beer to everyone, regardless of what they do (i.e. what would have corresponded to their class).

I suppose there is another kind of communism where you and your friends live on a commune and some grow hops and some grow barley and some are in charge of fermentation vats and all just relax and drink their beer after a long day. That is, until the tax man cometh...

I'd recommend reading far more than The Communist Manifesto to understand the issue better. You're not describing Marx's conception and predictions of communism at all. And you seem to have misunderstood the Manifesto as the definition of communism. That was not its purpose. Its goal is to wake the consciousness of the working class to their condition, explain why this is important in simple terms, and suggest an immediate course of action for helping move society away from capitalism and toward communism. But the Manifesto was not a description of communism itself. For that, you must set the Manifesto aside and dig into Marx's other works. There is no state doling out equal portions of anything to anyone under communism—because, most critically, there is no state.

Communism proposes to collectivize the means of production; there's still _some_ individual ownership.

No, for Marx, there is no individual ownership, as the first, post-capital phase has removed private ownership of the means of production. There is social ownership only. There is individual participation as part of the social whole, but individual ownership and private property of any sort is abolished.

Private property does not include personal property, as Marxists understand it. The Marxian definition of private property is essentially capital.

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