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China is communist in name only these days.



Well, China is a country of socialism with Chinese characteristics.


It is still very much a one-party state, which is a key component of communism. Same as Vietnam.


Wrong. The key point of communism is that everyone contributes to society as much work as they can and gets as much goods as they need. So money become unnecessary. In software world, I would say open source software ecosystem definitely looks like communism. When installing Linux, you install communism.


It's a key component of dictature, not especially of communism.

Vietnam today might be even less communist than China.


It's a key component of communism when that one party is a communist party. It is definitely not "name only" (the claim to which I was replying).

I would agree that Vietnam is probably less communist than China. That doesn't really impact my point.


It’s called the Communist Party, but its agenda and policies are not particularly Communist.


No True Scotsman


Not really.

That is the key component of all communist countries we have had experiences of it but in theory you could see a country adopting a communist constitution and multiple parties fighting over elections to govern and decide on the specifics. So it is not really a key component of communism.

Human greed makes it so that it wouldn't last for long though.


That just sounds like a remix of "real communism has never been tried". Lots of things are possible in theory, but in practice a big part of why anyone would describe a certain country as "communist" is due to that country being a one-party communist state. If in practice a multi-party democracy and economic communism mix about as well as oil and water, a country still being a single party is relevant.

You can split hairs about marxist-leninist communism and politburos and some sort of pure economic communism, but that mostly seems like pedantry.


But that is still not what defines a country being communist. Just a dictature pretending to implement communism.

Your point is that all red cars with a prancing horse logo are Ferrari. What I am telling you is you will find plenty of red pontiac fiero and toyota MR2 looking like Ferrari up to the prancing horse logo from very far away but when you go much closer or hear them revving it quickly become obvious these are body kits on top of cars that don't have a single genuine Ferrari part inside.


What makes a country communist?




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