[surement]

> Yes, poverty is still high but sanctions are still oppressive.

Which sanctions exactly? Surely a communist country doesn't need free trade, that's a capitalist concept and Marx was against it.

> They have higher literacy rates than Canada

This shows you the value of literacy as a metric. North Korea also has high literacy, it's not a reason to prefer living there to Canada.

> It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.

The amount of people trying to immigrate to the US vs any other country contradicts this.

> What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?

Masturbatory terms dreamed up by people who don't want to understand economics because it deals with real tradeoffs, whereas politics is about promising the impossible while ignoring economics and history. Anarchism and communism are opposites.

[socialismisok]

The US embargo against Cuba.

And both council communism and Anarcho communism have long histories of communities actually practicing them. From gift economies in smaller indigenous communities to explicitly anarchocommunist zones in Korea and Spain in the 20s and 30s.

Anarchism is not the opposite of communism. It's the opposite of Stalinist communism, for sure. But anarchism is about the removal of unnecessary and unjust hierarchies. That's not in opposition with "and we should take care of everyone without a profit motive".

One could argue (and in fact, many scholars have) that the open source development model of Linux or other large systems are anarchocommunist in nature.