RE: Hit the road Jack, or how Im hitchhiking between Tunka valley & Ulan-Ude. (Lots of photos!)
I am sorry, but you are confusing the communism, and the soviet establishment, which after some point had absolutely nothing to do with what communism is all about and is also coloured by the anti soviet propaganda. We were "The Enemy" for quite a while, right? For best results it is best to have your information from impartial source.
Communism is all about building the economics to remove the scarcity and enable people to cooperate on basis of mutual benefit based on their concious decisions. Once that point is reached there will be no need for state and money and both would be abolished.
Libertarians are somewhere between extreme left (communism) and extreme right (laissez faire capitalism). Took me a little while to understand that joke by Stand Up Economist.
Well, Anarchocapitalism is the successor that you are looking for. You see it in action right here. The objective of capitalism, in general, is to optimise resource distribution so as to diminish scarcity, first with most important things, and then steadily outwards to less important things.
There is a rhetorical mathematical puzzle that goes like this. If you want to get to some destination, which is x distance away, how long will it take for you to get there if every step you take is half the distance of the previous step. It is rhetorical, but it illustrates a mathematical concept called a 'limit'. The limit is effectively infinity. In the real world, everything has such a limitation on it. You can always go further, but you can never reach the ultimate destination. That is a place that will remain as far away for you now as it was for our ancestors, as for those living a billion years in the future. Zero scarcity is precisely a limit, and capitalism is the process of stepping forward towards that limit.
I recently learned about Lenin's New Economic Policy. This policy actually spread throughout the Communist Bloc to every part of it. This is why to this day, agriculture is still a vibrant and in fact, compared to the rest of the world, thriving business. This is why most farms in former communist nations are around 5 acres in size, and run by one family, not by a corporation, as is the more common situation in the USA, and much of the former British Commonwealth, and some of the western european nations.
This policy effectively limited the most socially destructive problem of communism, the centralised control of food production. Nothing will make people burn down parliament, or the palace, or the Bureau, or what have you, like empty bellies. Look at Venezuela right now.
Karl Marx was indeed one of the greatest economists - at the time he wrote his treatises. His work has been thoroughly disproven and far better models and theories that have proven themselves very well in the systems of decentralised, distributed cryptosystems that we see today. They really take as their most important Apostle, the great Ludwig von Mises, who used methodologies that he may or may not have taken from the at the time (1953) growing field of Chaos theory and Cybernetics. He called them 'mental experiments' and were a key tool within the text Human Action for justifying the decentralised economic regulation that he advocated.
He did not, as did his student, Murray Rothbard, outright reject authoritarianism, but if you spend a few weeks like I did, and read Human Action, and fully digest it (it took me two reads to fully absorb), you will also think as I do, and also notice that Mises great treatise effectively condemns any form of centralised economic management.
It was revolutionary for its time, and the subsequent development of Cybernetic and Chaos theory (a label, the latter, has been deprecated, but I think that is because people in mathematics don't think the ancient meaning of the word Chaos is very marketable), has further bolstered the theoretical supports that his economic theory is built upon, and these have been proven over and over again in computer science, in the last 30 years.
I think that within 100 years, Mises will be elevated to the position of a widely regarded visionary whose early vision predated most of the hard methodologies that have led to the Information Age.