this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Historical examples, like Revolutionary Catalonia for Anarchism, and the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc. for Marxism-Leninism, absolutely count as Socialist and should be learned from, both the good and bad.
If you dismiss them as "not real Socialism," you fail to learn from what did work in those instances, like literacy rates and life expectancy skyrocketing. If you dismiss the bad, you make the equal mistake of not accounting for the flaws in systems like Soviet Democracy, which resulted in a corrupt Politburo with outsized power.
Study them in detail and find what to take and what to leave behind.
communism is a classless stateless moneyless society. is that how you'd describe any of those societies? i wouldn't. because it's not true. but there are certainly anarchist and communist societies that have existed.
Do you consider America a capitalist society?
say what you mean.
Capitalism is also a stateless economic philosophy, and like communism, is completely incompatible with modern politics (for better or worse, your choice). The argument that the Soviet Union, China, etc. weren't real Communism because they didn't meet some make-believe qualifications is pointlessly redundant when those states were very proud to call themselves Communists. In other words, their existence retroactively changed the working definition of what a Communist state is by virtue of being the only realized state to call themselves such.
if i call myself the queen of england, it doesn't make it so. communism has a definition and it is impossible for a state to be communist since communism is stateless.
no, it's not. the term is coined by marx in reference to a system of production in which the ownership of the means of production is held by a capitalist class by means of private property claims. private property claims necessarily depend on a state to do things like write deeds and enforce them. whoever told you otherwise is lying.