[dwiel]

It's not even a book by that title, it's an interview of him where the interviewer included the word communism in the title of the interview. I've read the books referred to in the interview and they definitely aren't about communism.

[SequoiaHope]

You read the book Walkaway? Where the first chapter is called "Communist Party", where the protagonists of the book take over a furniture factory to produce free furniture for their friends, then go off to live in a world where machines provide for everyone and no one is required to work for their survival?

Are you familiar with the Marxist concept of "worker ownership of the means of production?" That is what they are alluding to both in the first chapter and in the rest of the book. The people in the first chapter regularly refer to themselves as communists. That is why they call their party a communist party. And they have taken over a factory to produce free goods for their friends. That is a very communist thing to do!

Perhaps you have confused anarchist communism, which is described in his books, with the authoritarian communism common in the 20th century, which is not described in his books.

But he writes extensively about worlds where the means of production are held in common ownership to produce enough for everyone, so no one has to work if they don't want to. These have always been the ideals of communism.

EDIT: Here is Doctorow saying on his own website that the people in the book Walkaway are communists. https://craphound.com/podcast/2019/12/02/party-discipline-a-...

"Party Discipline is a story set in the world of Walkaway, about two high-school seniors who conspire to throw a “Communist Party” at a sheet metal factory whose owners are shutting down and stealing their workers’ final paychecks. These parties are both literally parties — music, dancing, intoxicants — and “Communist” in that the partygoers take over the means of production and start them up, giving away the products they create to the attendees. Walkaway opens with a Communist Party and I wanted to dig into what might go into pulling one of those off."

[imtringued]

Why can't we just make the people with the means of production (land and money) pay for the right to own them? You wouldn't need to steal the factory, in fact you wouldn't even want to.

[TaylorAlexander]

This is basically my theory. It’s complicated because the sum of all the money of the bottom 90% of people is still way way less than the value held by the top 1%. So you can’t just have them buy everything. They can’t afford it.

However we don’t need to buy everything. We can buy some of it, and build other parts from scratch for cheap, and skip some parts of it entirely because lots of manufacturing capacity goes towards making things which don’t really materially improve peoples lives.

Under this scenario, you still fight over control of land and intellectual property. Control of land is essentially political. I think we should find ways to distribute land to all people. And I think we should abolish or severely limit intellectual property restrictions.

[dwiel]

You are right, I was mixing up authoritarian communism and anarchist communism, thank you.