[yehat]

I know there's predominant thinking that "communism" existed somewhere, but in fact it doesn't. It was the ideology developed in the West and brutally imported into the East. Why I say that and why it matters to understand the difference? Because there was no "communist" thinking behind the motivation to do whatever by the ordinary people. There was something deeper that manifested in a way that many people mistake for "communist" thinking. And that's natural, because people's thinking is not same in the West as in the East, and even more in far-East. Ok, enough on that, everyone's right to call it whatever they want, just pitching some clues that can help avoiding the cliché. My journey also started when first seeing IMKO-2 in 1984, then there was a popular magazine for the young "engineers" called "МЛАД КОНСТРУКТОР" (full archive here https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bw941VGG9Tjc... )that started publishing a course of BASIC. So I learned virtually and even wrote programs on paper before the first actual contact with the computer, which happened 1 year later on the newly acquired by my school couple of PRAVETZ-82.

[varjag]

It's a bit of No True Scotsman. USSR (and other places) did an earnest attempt to build communist societies based on Marxist tenets. They went full in: class war, expropriation, even the attempts to abolish money and family. That it failed after decades of attempts was not for the lack of trying, so maybe at this point it's worth reconsidering viability of the idea.

[tryauuum]

Is not a "no true Scotsman" situation.

USSR itself did acknowledge that whatever they have is not communism. Because they knew the definition, they knew that it's a utopian society which, as you mentioned, doesn't use money

The rest of the world had to name this regime somehow. Since there was only one party, the communist party, the west named the regime "communism".

Now we have a word with different meanings, depending to whom you speak. Certainly makes discussions between ex-ussr people and americans hard. I remember how my school teacher got irritated when we asked her "how was the life under communism". "We never lived under it, we lived under socialism" she said

To sum up, this is not a "no true Scotsman" situation, since the observing part of the world decided to extend the meaning

[imtringued]

Ok, so you're telling me Marxist socialists propagate an idea that they have no idea how to accomplish?

I mean, I knew that, but the idea that someone would tell me this in defense of Marxist socialism by being pedantic over linguistics is kind of wild.

Your school teacher got irritated and deflected immediately rather than using this as an educational opportunity. This type of behavior clearly doesn't radiate fondness of that time. Those kids know nothing, which is why their question was "wrong". They have to pull the right levers to get answers from the teacher, as if this was some kind of unpleasant interrogation.

[tryauuum]

> Marxist socialists propagate an idea that they have no idea how to accomplish?

I have no idea

> someone would tell me this in defense of Marxist socialism

If you talk about me, then I don't defend it. I defend proper word usage. Same thing with people calling everything "fascism" nowadays. Words have meanings!

[flohofwoe]

It's quite simple really: "communism" was the carrot which the governments of socialist countries dangled in front of their people to distract from all the problems and hardships caused by the top-down planning economy and to move the blame from the elites to the lazy workers who just don't work hard enough to enable the communist utopia (which was like fusion power, always only a generation away).

[dirasieb]

voted down for speaking the truth

this website and free discussion as a whole would not exist if communist governments had their way, something to keep in mind