[geezerjay]

> Do workers own the means of production? No. Are they going toward that? No. It's not "communist" then.

Newsflash: workers never owned the means of production in any communist state. They were told they would, but they were subjected to compulsory work to cater to the communist regime's elite goals while owning nothing at all.

That sort of bait and switch is pretty much the hallmark of every single communist regime since the very beginning.

[pas]

As far as I know Revolutionary Catalonia came the closest to that.

That said, I don't really care that dictatorships after dictatorships called themselves socialist and communist, people's this and that, they - as good populists always do - subverted the people and their ideas.

Just as North Korea is a "democratic" "republic".

Mistake not this nitpicking for defense of communism. I don't think it makes any economic sense to strip away savings and investment and everything else connected to those for compulsory ownership of your workplace.

So yes, bait and switch is what populism is. And it worked and continues to work wonderfully independent of political leaning/orientation.