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The last stage of the Marxist evolution of communism involves the decay of state institutions through neglect, as they become redundant in a post-scarcity no-cops Utopia.
But there are a bunch of prior stages (including capitalist industrialization even!) that are neglected. And even then, the utopian end-game is routinely disputed by the subsequent generations of Leninists and Maoists who believe we will never truly escape the revolutionary cycle.
There absolutely are Already Existing Socialist states attempting to move themselves from primitive accumulation, through industrial capitalism, and into a collectively governed socialist post-scarcity society. And people absolutely are living in them. And none of them are Utopian (although the quality of life in many of these countries is exhaustively propagandized to be by degrees to be between Unbearably Hellish and FALGSC-adjacent).
The problems that these countries typically have, however, aren't ones that armchair communists on a niche western internet platform are capable of solving. You're not going to break the Cuban blockade. You're not going to settle the endless territorial disputes plaguing Vietnam. You're not going to undo the legacy of generations of apartheid in South Africa overnight. You're not going to Make the USSR Great Again.
So maybe save yourself some angst and stop trying to tell Nicholas Maduro and Kim Jung Un how to do their jobs. Maybe worry more about why your local chapter of the DSA can't get a teacher's union off the ground.
All these "you"s make me think that you might addressing me personally.
I make no claim to solve anything, nor how anyone should do their job.
I have provided an (incomplete) explanation as to what communism is, why it does not actually exist in practice and why therefore people commenting cannot be from a communist state.
Apologies, I intended to use the Royal You and was speaking primarily to the British Crown.
A country in which the government has transitioned from primitive feudal to industrial capital and is now under a revolutionary socialist government is still communist at least in so far as its following the roadmap Marx and his peers tried to lay out two centuries ago.
If nothing else, these are communist governments in the sense that they take their governing philosophy from Marx, Lenin, and Mao (and Castro and Allende and Mandela and Ho Chi Mein and we can even throw in Fred Hampton and Rosa Luxemburg and Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim and the thousands of other notable revolutionaries if we're being generous) in pursuit of the communist goal.
To claim otherwise would be akin to claiming you're not a capitalist because you haven't successfully privatized your industry. Or to claim you aren't feudalist because you're not in the Royal Family.
I would argue that in a world where the terms are not synonymous, socialist countries are in fact socialist, not communist.
Following a roadmap to some target literally means that you have not yet achieved that target.
The argument is not that their are no communists, the argument is that they have not established actual communism, therefore the states they govern are not communist states.
Whether or not they want to establish communism does not factor into it.
To claim otherwise would be akin to claiming that a company on a roadmap to profitability is already profitable, while actually still losing money.
Countries that reform their private sectors in order to adopt socialist policies are pursuing communism.
Countries that reform their socialist sectors in order to adopt privatization policies are not pursuing communism.
Right. You are implementing a policy that pursues a target.
"Mao wasn't a communist in 1953 because his country hadn't completed its first five year plan yet" is one hell of a claim.
It would be nutso to say Caryle Group isn't interested in investing in profitable companies.
And yet the entire strategy of growth investing is to identify companies with strong roadmaps and lend to them at higher return rates.
So your analogy works, but not for the reason you'd expected.
One hell of a straw man, you mean.
At what point have I denied that people are communists?
Mao may be a communist and follow a philosophy called communism but China has not established a social order called communism as envisioned by communists.
Countries -> Large collections of People
Not communist -> denying that these large collections of people are communist
Uh huh.