Who determines what is produced in a communist society?
The same people who determine it now: corporate committees.
How consumer goods will be distributed amongst members of society?
Money.
In particular, how worker's salary will be determined and regulated, basing on his skill and performance? Will there be any sort of market regulations for such things?
I believe in legislation limiting the highest and lowest paid wages within a company to X times the other, but otherwise such things would be up to the workers themselves to decide. Its their money, after all.
Does Communism have anything in regards to the unemployed workers?
Employment would exist for all who are willing to work.
Regardless of utility, would you have an abundance of iPhones and Lamborghinis, or would you not?
If there were a sufficient market for it, yet.
The point of this question is that if you don't have abundance, you would have to work out how to allocate limited products, then you'd come to the question of whom we should listen to. This is a real problem, and Leninism was the only practical solution that has ever been proposed by communists. If you do not have an alternative solution, by what logic can you say your version of communism would turn out to be different from the Soviet Union?
I'm not going to waste my time with your leading questions, but I will leave you with the parting thought that
perhaps socialists aren't that interested in a formally planned economy.
Indeed. I thank you for taking the time to write this.
My pleasure. Teaching is my great joy in life.
A noble idea that I can see working for a community. But how can this be scaled up to a nation?
By the time we reach this point, nations will have ceased to exist. Remember that nations exist to perpetuate the strength of their leaders, and forward their political goals. They exist to represent their peoples therein in the ever-waging battle for scarce resources. But since communism will remove the sources of power accumulation through wealth, and will remove the divisions between man and man over silly things like resource monopolization, and he will instead disperse things equally to those who require it, the needs for the nation as a political entity will dissipate.
So I suppose the transition to Communism will not be done until workers in developing nations demand their rights.
Socialism. Communism is still a long way away after that. Perhaps even centuries from it.
It is important to remember what Lenin said: "If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years."
We cannot wait for everyone. But we must wait for mass movements, if we are turning to revolution. If we play by their game and choose democracy, then we must wait for majorities.
I am personally split on the issue. The last thing I want to do is drive the country into civil war, and cause the needless the deaths of lots of people, and all the more to destroy democracy. But if that were the only choice left, then I would take it. We can reform socialism later, even if we cannot bring back the dead. But know that it is not a decision I make readily.
And thus Communism is now associated with authoritarianism, and the social experiment of the Russian Revolution regresses, only going to capitalism nearly a century later.
Indeed. Though I cannot help but wonder if the USSR might have faltered during those vulnerable years without Stalin at the helm. Might Trotsky have too antagonized the West, and forced them into the Fascist camp in a mutual war against socialism? Might Bukharin or Zinoviev have slowed economic development so much that the USSR crumbled under the Nazi invasion? We cannot know.
Why do you believe that egalitarianism is a good thing?
Because I do not want to be among the ones who whomever decides these things deigns to be inferior. Because I have lived the life of one of them, and seen far worse than I have had, but also seen the lives of the affluent and the rich, and seen what so many lack and so few have, and how much better things can be for so many people if only we got rid of this abhorrent idea that some people are better and more entitled than others.
Certainly plenty of things require good sized teams but a whole lot of products out there are designed by single people or very small groups.
