No, you don't need capitalism first in order to have communism. Turtle Island did communism without having capitalism first. Aren't you paying attention? Don't use assertions drag has already disputed as the basis for your arguments. You won't convince drag that way, you'll just wear drag out from repeating the same things over and over.
Try attempting to understand the entirety of drag's argument, instead of bouncing between pieces of it and addressing them one at a time with the same old rhetoric.
You can't address a unique and coherent argument by reading the counter to each part off your script.
Indigenous societies had complex networks of management and labour specialisation. Robust power grids and machinery don't change whether something is communism or not.
and more are entirely different from small communes
You're saying they're different because they're different. This argument is going around in circles just like your logic.
It's like when a Discord moderator puts a rule that says no politics on their server. Everything is political, so now they can remove anything they don't like with a justification.
But all your arguments are based on technology and scale differences. You haven't named any differences based on principles of economic organisation. Drag says technology and scale aren't meaningful differences in this context.
You're not being attacked. People are just refusing to give you free money. Lemmy.dbzer0.com doesn't have the same problems, and they're communist.
You can either dig your heels in, cry oppression, and stop working on Lemmy, or you can listen to other people and work to be someone they think deserves their money. "Identifying the goal" doesn't change the outcome. And it's wrong, too. Lots of communists on Lemmy who don't like your server.
To paraphrase Gandhi: "I like your communism, but I do not like your communists." People just don't think you're a good communist. Insulting them isn't going to get you money.
If you exclude Turtle Island and Australia from the dataset, the continents with the best record of recent communism, then there's no point in this conversation, because drag is talking about continents with recent communism and a strong historical record.
You're making a circular argument. You're saying the distinction between "primitive communism" (can we avoid using 200 year old terms that belittle indigenous people?) and industrialised communism is meaningful, BECAUSE tribes aren't "primitive" anymore. That's an argument going in circles.
Drag is arguing at the level of meaning: drag says you can draw the distinction, but your reasons for doing so are bad and you shouldn't. The reliability of a measure is irrelevant if its construct validity is in question.
Tribes are perfectly capable of running industrial manufacturing supply lines in terms of administrative ability. In Australia, tribes are refuelling helicopters. They're doing it under capitalism, because white people suck, but they could just as easily do it under communism if the white people had left well enough alone and not stolen the land and enslaved generations.
Here in the communist movement, we use actually existing communism, or AEC, as a model. You guys emulate failed states like the USSR that collapsed without ever achieving communism due to administrative mismanagement. We emulate economies that successfully did communism for thousands of years.
The only difference you're talking about is quantity, not quality. Drag feels you're othering them on a weak basis. Industrialised communists have ten times as much in common with tribal communists as with industrialised capitalists, and what differences do exist, are our lack of knowledge of the land and respect for the traditional ways. We have more to learn from them than we have to teach them. You're dismissing them unfairly.
And the fact that you don't want the anarchists to win is why we say you have no belief in left unity and aren't a leftist. We ancoms, syndicalists, soulists, mutualists, trade unionists, anarcho-pacifists, transhumanists, market socialists, egoists, and so on will sit over here in our big leftism tent and actually get work done while you guys argue about theory and try to fracture the movement apart.
You want a "socialist" revolution, and would turn your nose up at a communist revolution creating communism immediately. Drag thinks you have to support the idea of a communist revolution in order to be a communist. Unless you already live in communism.
It's important to draw a line between Primitive Communism and Communism as a post-Socialist society. Primitive Communism is founded upon small, isolated communities, while Marx's Communism is one of large industry run along a common plan, democratically, to suit the needs of all.
That feels like some noble savage stuff. Societies aren't different because they have different technology with the same economic system. It feels like you're saying indigenous societies wouldn't have been able to industrialise without changing their political system radically.
But indigenous societies made conscious political choices about how to structure society, and drag believes they had the political structure required to adapt to industrialisation without losing their political system.
Drag doesn't buy the distinction you're making between indigenous communism and industrialised communism. Drag doesn't think the difference is relevant to whether something is communism, and the only way drag could see it being relevant is through the noble savage trope.
Communism is human nature. Communism existed in the Americas and Australia for thousands of years. It probably existed in the rest of the world too before agriculture, but our historical records from other regions were destroyed. By contrast, Australia has the most intact ancient histories in the world.
They claim to be orthodox Marxist, but they deny that and many other things Marx said. Like that the revolution must be worldwide. Stalin created the idea of "communism in one country" as part of his "Marxism-Leninism", which doesn't have much to do with Marx or Lenin. They get all their opinions on Marx and Lenin from Stalin, who was co-opting their images to promote himself while betraying their ideals.
Just one more lane