[kahljorn]

Marx never mentions a totalitarian or authoritarian rule. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't sound as harsh and nasty when you figure that most people are proletarian; it just means a rule of the working people.

I'm about to go to bed, so more in the morning:
During the revolution, what would happen to people, organizations, businesses and political parties which support bourgeois values or which support the bourgeois class?
What would the government do if people started talking about a return to bourgeois values?

How could a commune really function well unless everybody is doing what the commune says, with absolute obedience to it? And how will the commune, as a whole, do anything but have total control over everything? including the ideology of its constituents?

Really, I don't see how the government could manage an entire commune without it being a huge bureaucracy. How are they going to keep track of resources what needs to be produced and when and in what quantity and with which raw materials allocated to it?
It seems to me that communism requires such a drastic level control over the slightest details of economic and industrial control-- and such a high degree of cooperation between its individual parts -- due to the fact that they don't have a natural force such as the almighty hand influencing which things will be produced and why and when and for what purpose.
If communism doesn't have the level of control required to manage all of these things, then it will likely fail. As such, it needs to have absolute control in order to make all decisions, and each individual in the system needs to cooperate with these decisions absolutely.

No, people don't get to choose their own job ("I want to be a pilot!") or live like a king... nobody is really promising that, are they?

No but what I'm saying is that this is an example of "total government control."

The point is to lessen these things over time by putting the means of production in the hands of a democratically run state

Well, I'll just say it, since when has democracy really solved anything?

A group of ex-soviet citizens living in America is hardly a great basis for your study

From what I saw, since it was just an abstract, they arrived at their data by extrapolating it from soviet documentation/statistics (although obviously they weren't directly related to unemployment). i would respond to some other stuff you said, but since you conceded, i suppose its unnecessary.

anyway that turned out longer than i thought and i dont even know if it made sense. Good night. lol nm i edited shit