> I greatly enjoyed your analysis and appreciate the time you spent making it

Well, I see that you wrote this response after your others, so I guess you realized I wasn't talking about you earlier. :) I also appreciate your thoughtful response.

> but I reject this premise as a matter of theory.

And I, yours. :)

> The intent of communism was to create a distributed system of governance in which workers would delegate some of their number as administrators, who were subject to recall at any time and who were expected to both legislate and administrate.

This is the fundamental problem with communism, which I addressed in my first comment: its theories do not work in practice, because they do not account for the realities of human nature. Therefore, it is GIGO: theory is built upon incorrect hypotheses, and when put into practice, it leads to poor results. The intentions of medieval alchemists are irrelevant, because their theories were wrong. In the same way, the intentions of Marx, et al are irrelevant; what matters is end results. And the end results are 100 million dead people in the 20th century, as well as significant suffering among those who survived. In contrast, capitalistic nations have achieved prosperity and liberty far beyond any others in human history.

It would be one thing to advocate communism 150 years ago, but now we have real data proving that communism produced more human suffering than any other ideology in history. There is no excuse for supporting it now. It's not much different than claiming that Earth is flat when we have circumnavigation and photographs from orbit.

> Clearly there was something structurally wrong about the way the Russians implemented their scheme of governance that made it vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

I think every form of governance is vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. The best defense against it is a strong constitution, but even that is vulnerable if it can be amended, or if it outlives its society's respect for it.

Again, this is a matter of human nature: humans desire power, and there will always be those who will strive to achieve it at others' expense. Therefore the best way to mitigate authoritarianism is to compartmentalize to reduce the potential authority that can be accumulated. This, of course, is not generally compatible with communism. In theory, it could be, because free people can freely enter agreements and pool resources. But communism only works in theory at a large scale, and that necessarily means enforcement, not liberty--and by so doing it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Humans are not machines, yet they are the "workers" of communism, and communism destroys its workers, and thereby itself.

> You might be surprised o learn that prior to his exily Trotsky had been engaged in a battle of ideas with Stalin where Trotsky was arguing for the maintenance of markets in grain and agricultural equipment because he considered market mechanisms superior to central planning and much more likely to reflect the goals of the people doing the work.

But markets are not communism.

> Had his advice been heeded, at least one disastrous famine might have been avoided.

Or, had communism not been enacted in the first place, over 100 million lives could have been saved. I don't know where you stand on this, but I don't subscribe to the "you must break a few eggs to make an omelet" theory. Those deaths can never be justified, especially not in the name of communistic trial-and-error.

> But anarchy is the end goal of communism - the withering away fo the state...This is anarchy in the definitional sense of 'without rulers' as opposed to the propagandistic sense of general mayhem and disorder.

As I mentioned in another comment, that is not stateless. The system does not function, does not even exist, without rulers.

> and its replacement by voluntary mutualism,

There is nothing voluntary about it, because it's enforced by the state.

> abundance through industrial production

"Abundance" is, not to be rude, but a useless platitude, a distraction, and begging the question. It's entirely theoretical, and the theory was completely disproven by the 20th century. Again, intentions and theory don't matter--only results matter.

> and an equitable distribution of time

What is equitable is necessarily defined by an entity, which is the state.

> with the goal of minimizing work

The goals are decided by the state. The state is not a computer program--it is human beings, who have different opinions, different goals, are greedy, etc.

> and maximizing freedom

Communism is incompatible with freedom, because the system necessarily requires compliance. Compliance != freedom.

The real question is, freedom as defined by whom? The answer is, as the 20th century demonstrated, as defined by the Party, whose members live in luxury, while the People live in squalor--the opposite of all the promises they made to the people.

But communism isn't supposed to work that way, right? Theoretically, the people in charge are all good and selfless and fair and experts in their fields who apply their knowledge impartially to benefit all people equally. But in practice it results in unprecedented evil and suffering, therefore it's a disproven theory.

> The internet qua self-routing persistent network was/is anarchic in many respects

The low-level protocols (theory) are anarchic. The network (practice) is not. Without, e.g. ARIN, ICANN, etc, the Internet as we know it would not exist. Someday there might come to be a usable kind of mesh network with automatic addressing, routing, and naming, but of course, such a system would necessarily be vulnerable to DoS attacks. TANSTAAFL.

> sadly I don't have a general theory of distribution v. resource concentration that allows for concentrations of resources for industrial production without concentrations of authority or its proxies - yet.

I encourage you to not go down that road, friend. Don't waste your time, falling into the same trap that Marx, et al did. It would be like trying to create one enormous computer to take the place of every computer on the Internet. Distributed, federated systems work, the same way that markets and individual liberty work. Build on that, stand on the shoulders of giants; don't go backward into the crab bucket.

Or, another way to look at it is, we already have such a theory: it's called capitalism. It is not perfect, but nothing is, and by impinging upon it, you necessarily increase state control, reduce individual liberty, and increase vulnerability to authoritarianism.

These problems are political, not economic. They are people problems, not resource management problems. To fix these problems you must fix people, which is ultimately impossible. The best we can do is try to create good, selfless people, who make the system good from the bottom, up.

I've never met you, so I'm not accusing you of having this trait, but: don't have the hubris to think that you can create a general theory to "solve" economics and society and governance. Such a task is beyond anyone. The closest we have ever come is to do the opposite: to compartmentalize and allow individuals to freely associate and govern themselves, to the extent practical; to allow each group to choose the systems most appropriate for their circumstances, and bargain freely with other groups, rapidly iterating freely, borrowing good ideas and discarding bad ones.

This is even more important because of technology. For millennia, technology changed very little, and everything happened very slowly. Just in the last 100 years, the pace has increased by orders of magnitude, and it appears to be continuing to do so. Whether it will ever plateau, no one knows. So while ideas and theories conceived hundreds of thousands of years ago could be valid for a long time, that is no longer the case. The pace of change is now so fast that the useful life of any such theory is far shorter than we expect. The most effective theories will be ones that operate on a small scale, not a universal one.

> Apologies if this seems nitpicky. but to begin from the premise that communism is about increasing state control without acknowledging the explicit aim (in the Communist Manifesto, no less) of deconstructing state power undermines your whole argument, notwithstanding your many correct observations.

No, it's not nitpicky, it misses my point: that communism is fundamentally flawed. Your argument is undermined by your not recognizing that explicit aims are irrelevant--what matters is only results. Early attempts at flying machines failed; it does not matter that the explicit aim of their inventors was to fly. Their aerodynamic theories were disproven, and in the same way, communism has been.

It's false that it deconstructs state power, because it does not exist without state power--it merely reforms and repurposes it. To say that it deconstructs state power is to misrepresent it, and this is what the "anarchists" do to obscure their real intentions. This is how the communists manipulated masses of people into thinking that they were on their side, when what they really wanted was to replace the government and take power for themselves.

That they just want to help; that they want to be fair; that they are altruistic; that it will work this time; that they know how to do it--it's all a big lie, and it always was, full of hubris that men could effectively be gods, omnipotent, solving every problem, making everything optimal.

100 million people dead--that's the truth.