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by close04
2828 days ago
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And China calls itself democratic. So did the GDR. Socialism is just an economic system. It becomes communism when it's controlled by a single ruling power: the communist party. So communism is the combination of political ideology controlling the socialist economy. There's no point in getting into semantics, the USSR and the "aligned" countries (all of which put Socialist or Republic in their names) were very much communist countries even if they didn't achieve the ideal textbook communism. Just like there's no textbook example of a free market. I said the fall of communism because it encompasses both the political and economic systems. And the communist ideology might have played a big role on gender equality. |
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Your definition of communism seems to be out of nowhere. I would dare say that the people who first introduced the word, get to define what it means. It can gradually evolve from there (as "democracy" did), but what you suggest is throwing it away entirely and replacing it with something completely different, which is unnecessarily confusing.
In its proper meaning, communism means an Utopian society. That was there in the original definition, very explicitly: per Marx, communism is "classless" and therefore "stateless". If you redefine communism to be something else, how do you describe what USSR was ostensibly trying to achieve? "More communism"? - but that doesn't make sense, because there was supposed to be a qualitative difference between socialism and communism; it wasn't just a matter of "becoming more communist" over time - it was always meant to be something like a state transition.
And you don't need to arbitrarily redefine that word to describe USSR, China etc. It can be perfectly well described as "authoritarian socialism", just as USA can be described as "democratic capitalism", and, say, Franco's Spain as "authoritarian capitalism". Either way, these are two different axes - there's no need to conflate it. Furthermore, "socialism" describes the economic reality in the USSR quite well, so it's not at all the same as "democratic" in DPRK etc.