What constitutes a legitimate definition of communism?

[Shaduru]

For the fascist in our country, everyone who does not agree with them, is communist.

For the communist in my country, everyone who does not agree with them, is fascist.

[Rojava Free State]

For the fascist in our country, everyone who does not agree with them, is communist.

For the communist in my country, everyone who does not agree with them, is fascist.

For the Centrists in my country, everyone who doesn't agree with them is a communist or fascist.

[Shanghai industrial complex]

Your description is obviously not comprehensive.The Manifesto of the Communist Party is very clear

1.Democracy and freedom.The country is ruled by the people, and the laborer owns the means of production,Eliminate capitalists.
2.Replacing private ownership with public ownership.Social welfare and state-owned enterprises are only part of the public ownership society
3.Class struggle and violent revolution.The communists will not compromise in exterminating the capitalists
People get rid of the shackles of labor and employment system to gain freedom. People are no longer worried about losing their jobs, they are no longer afraid to lose their jobs, and they are even willing to sell their souls for money.Everyone will get enough material and education. To do his best and favorite job, but everyone has to work.Extermination of religion.Democracy, freedom, science and Trinity are indispensable.
The reason why Marxism is a utopia is that the present social productivity and cultural level are far from being reached.Because now we have to rely on capital to produce

At what point does the leadership class become obsolete? Understanding that human beings with the intellectual freedom to produce the much talked about Marxist utopia are individuals that do not operate on hive mind instinct, someone is going to have to lead them into the communist future. At which point does that leadership class (which is exactly what it is, a social class in a classless society) decide "okay, I've done enough. Time to re-integrate into the workers as one of them. Time to abdicate all of my political power."

Time has proven, again and again, that the communist "leaders" are communists in name only. They attain political power, they keep their political power, and the context of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat changes from one of economic capital to political capital as the leadership class becomes the Marxist definition of a "capitalist" but with political power. One class has all the power, the other class is shackled by their powerlessness. The Chinese "communists" are perfectly content to have their Proletariat in the supine position they have been forced into.

Yes, only nominal communism.
But people don't need to be led. There can be leaders, but they still belong to the people.The leadership class is not out of date because there is no real communism. When true communism emerges, the privileged will be wiped out.The people do not need the leadership of the privileged class, because all people can lead themselves.Choosing leaders from among them does not mean turning them into an independent class. When they finished their work, they returned to the people. Their class is still the same.
One reason for the failure of the Soviet Union was that its rulers formed the actual privileged class. The Soviet Union gave up the significance of its founding, democracy, and the leadership of the whole proletariat.CCCP was no longer communism in Stalin's time. They were Soviet Revisionism. It became the Social Imperialism in Lenin's mouth.
And China went to capitalism in Deng Xiaoping's time. Now he is a mixture of socialism and capitalism. Or it can be said that pragmatism.In fact, China does not belong to any ideology.From the very beginning, North Korea was not communism. Its essence was feudal dictatorship.Cuba and Yugoslavia have always been built on personal worship. Eastern Europe was a puppet state of the Soviet Union, not a true communist.There has never been a communist country in the world.
Communism means that there is no privileged class and all people are equal. Communism does not mean poverty, but wealth. Communism does not represent struggle, but harmony.Those who are biased against communism, what you have seen are false communism. Those people just claim that they are, not actually.It only exists in the hearts of proletarian revolutionaries

[Risottia]

At what point does the leadership class become obsolete?

Terms: in Marxist theory, there is no "leadership class" as one's class is determined by his position in the productive process, which again, in the capitalist method of production, is determined by his relation to the surplus-value accumulation mechanism.
Anyway, since government is a superstructure, a stable leadership group would become obsolete when the productive structure has no need for it; that is when a functional communist society has been achieved. Theorically.

[Union of Sovereign States and Republics]

A failed and widely discredited ideology whose legacy is poverty, mass starvation, cultural suicide and genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, infanticide, torture, mass murder, the dismantling of longstanding cultural and political institutions, state capitalism, greed, corruption, megalomania, ultranationalism, racism, homophobia, imperialism, neocolonialism, broken promises, outright lies, shameless propaganda, face-saving coverups, deadly viral pandemics, entitled, elitist, conservative, upper-class snobbery and the accompanying oppression and subjugation of the working poor, and fascism.

Communism is what China used to practice. Fascism is its legacy.

Also the official ideology of a group of rag-tag murderers and terrorists in Malaya and Sarawak during the Cold War, and drug lords and terrorists in Colombia.

An ideology that seeks to confiscate all of my property and see me and my family executed for being "capitalist roaders", "running dogs of Western imperialists" and "bourgeois reactionaries".

[Senkaku]

communism is whatever the last person who lectured me about what communism is says it is

[San Marlindo]

So des[ote my clear pattern of opposition to the current Chinese regime, there is one particular subset of it that always bothered me, and that is when people blame "communism" for its woes.

This strikes me as weird. Most of the world doesn't take China's word for being a "people's republic," so why do they take its word for being "communist?"

Karl Marx, in the book in which he invented the word "communist," claimed that capitalism was so exploitative it would collapse in on itself, paving the way for collective ownership of the means of production. Doesn't this mean that, since the Bolsheviks overthrew an autocracy, ant the Chinese communist party seized power in a civil war, while the USA has capitalists getting rich enough to buy politicians' loyalty on behalf of non-capitalistic policies, that the USA is closer to communism than China or the Soviet Union ever were, while none of those three quite count as communist?

And if Karl Marx's definition doesn't count, by what standard do the rest of us get to redefine a word that was never ours to redefine?

Most Cold War era socialist regimes that built institutions modeled after those of the Soviet Union used the pretext of communism - here broadly interpreted to mean the Soviet system, which Marxist purists in the West argue was not in fact communism - to justify the extreme centralization of power. The PRC is no exception. In that sense it is no different from the old regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and the other Warsaw Pact states. The overarching totalitarian bureaucracy, the obsession with documentation and legalism, the Stasi/Cheka esque secret police network, and the overemphasis on militant nationalism are all inherited from the Soviet model. Even the red and gold hammer and sickle iconography of Soviet origin have become national symbols of the PRC and CCP.

While it has evolved into its own beast, the PRC has its roots in the Soviet model, and that legacy continues today. I like to compare how the Red Chinese system has evolved to the evolution of the SKS rifle: a weapon of Soviet origin, originally built along the lines of Soviet military doctrine and philosophy, assembled in China with Soviet parts and under the instruction of Soviet technicians. Then the Soviet parts and technicians are removed from the equation, and substituted with Chinese parts, some detail Chinese modifications, and Chinese technicians just as skilled as their Soviet counterparts. In time the Chinese version of the product becomes unique in its own right, but at the end of the day it’s just a variation of a Soviet weapon built for the same purpose.

It is the PRC that is the true heir to Lenin and Stalin, not modern Russia, which has overthrown the Soviet system.

[Rojava Free State]

So des[ote my clear pattern of opposition to the current Chinese regime, there is one particular subset of it that always bothered me, and that is when people blame "communism" for its woes.

This strikes me as weird. Most of the world doesn't take China's word for being a "people's republic," so why do they take its word for being "communist?"

Karl Marx, in the book in which he invented the word "communist," claimed that capitalism was so exploitative it would collapse in on itself, paving the way for collective ownership of the means of production. Doesn't this mean that, since the Bolsheviks overthrew an autocracy, ant the Chinese communist party seized power in a civil war, while the USA has capitalists getting rich enough to buy politicians' loyalty on behalf of non-capitalistic policies, that the USA is closer to communism than China or the Soviet Union ever were, while none of those three quite count as communist?

And if Karl Marx's definition doesn't count, by what standard do the rest of us get to redefine a word that was never ours to redefine?

Most Cold War era socialist regimes that built institutions modeled after those of the Soviet Union used the pretext of communism - here broadly interpreted to mean the Soviet system, which Marxist purists in the West argue was not in fact communism - to justify the extreme centralization of power. The PRC is no exception. In that sense it is no different from the old regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and the other Warsaw Pact states. The overarching totalitarian bureaucracy, the obsession with documentation and legalism, the Stasi/Cheka esque secret police network, and the overemphasis on militant nationalism are all inherited from the Soviet model. Even the red and gold hammer and sickle iconography of Soviet origin have become national symbols of the PRC and CCP.

While it has evolved into its own beast, the PRC has its roots in the Soviet model, and that legacy continues today. I like to compare how the Red Chinese system has evolved to the evolution of the SKS rifle: a weapon of Soviet origin, originally built along the lines of Soviet military doctrine and philosophy, assembled in China with Soviet parts and under the instruction of Soviet technicians. Then the Soviet parts and technicians are removed from the equation, and substituted with Chinese parts, some detail Chinese modifications, and Chinese technicians just as skilled as their Soviet counterparts. In time the Chinese version of the product becomes unique in its own right, but at the end of the day it’s just a variation of a Soviet weapon built for the same purpose.

It is the PRC that is the true heir to Lenin and Stalin, not modern Russia, which has overthrown the Soviet system.

Indeed.

[Union of Sovereign States and Republics]

So des[ote my clear pattern of opposition to the current Chinese regime, there is one particular subset of it that always bothered me, and that is when people blame "communism" for its woes.

This strikes me as weird. Most of the world doesn't take China's word for being a "people's republic," so why do they take its word for being "communist?"

Karl Marx, in the book in which he invented the word "communist," claimed that capitalism was so exploitative it would collapse in on itself, paving the way for collective ownership of the means of production. Doesn't this mean that, since the Bolsheviks overthrew an autocracy, ant the Chinese communist party seized power in a civil war, while the USA has capitalists getting rich enough to buy politicians' loyalty on behalf of non-capitalistic policies, that the USA is closer to communism than China or the Soviet Union ever were, while none of those three quite count as communist?

And if Karl Marx's definition doesn't count, by what standard do the rest of us get to redefine a word that was never ours to redefine?

Most Cold War era socialist regimes that built institutions modeled after those of the Soviet Union used the pretext of communism - here broadly interpreted to mean the Soviet system, which Marxist purists in the West argue was not in fact communism - to justify the extreme centralization of power. The PRC is no exception. In that sense it is no different from the old regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and the other Warsaw Pact states. The overarching totalitarian bureaucracy, the obsession with documentation and legalism, the Stasi/Cheka esque secret police network, and the overemphasis on militant nationalism are all inherited from the Soviet model. Even the red and gold hammer and sickle iconography of Soviet origin have become national symbols of the PRC and CCP.

While it has evolved into its own beast, the PRC has its roots in the Soviet model, and that legacy continues today. I like to compare how the Red Chinese system has evolved to the evolution of the SKS rifle: a weapon of Soviet origin, originally built along the lines of Soviet military doctrine and philosophy, assembled in China with Soviet parts and under the instruction of Soviet technicians. Then the Soviet parts and technicians are removed from the equation, and substituted with Chinese parts, some detail Chinese modifications, and Chinese technicians just as skilled as their Soviet counterparts. In time the Chinese version of the product becomes unique in its own right, but at the end of the day it’s just a variation of a Soviet weapon built for the same purpose.

It is the PRC that is the true heir to Lenin and Stalin, not modern Russia, which has overthrown the Soviet system.

The thing is, though, the PRC isn't even remotely communist in practice. It acts only so much like the USSR and its satellites; it's a totalitarian government that claims to be socialist. While the USSR and its satellites were 'socialist' in practice, the PRC allows private corporations, private enterprise, private property, and even has a stock exchange. The PRC is at the least state capitalist and at the most corporate fascist.

[Shanghai industrial complex]

Most Cold War era socialist regimes that built institutions modeled after those of the Soviet Union used the pretext of communism - here broadly interpreted to mean the Soviet system, which Marxist purists in the West argue was not in fact communism - to justify the extreme centralization of power. The PRC is no exception. In that sense it is no different from the old regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and the other Warsaw Pact states. The overarching totalitarian bureaucracy, the obsession with documentation and legalism, the Stasi/Cheka esque secret police network, and the overemphasis on militant nationalism are all inherited from the Soviet model. Even the red and gold hammer and sickle iconography of Soviet origin have become national symbols of the PRC and CCP.

While it has evolved into its own beast, the PRC has its roots in the Soviet model, and that legacy continues today. I like to compare how the Red Chinese system has evolved to the evolution of the SKS rifle: a weapon of Soviet origin, originally built along the lines of Soviet military doctrine and philosophy, assembled in China with Soviet parts and under the instruction of Soviet technicians. Then the Soviet parts and technicians are removed from the equation, and substituted with Chinese parts, some detail Chinese modifications, and Chinese technicians just as skilled as their Soviet counterparts. In time the Chinese version of the product becomes unique in its own right, but at the end of the day it’s just a variation of a Soviet weapon built for the same purpose.

It is the PRC that is the true heir to Lenin and Stalin, not modern Russia, which has overthrown the Soviet system.

The thing is, though, the PRC isn't even remotely communist in practice. It acts only so much like the USSR and its satellites; it's a totalitarian government that claims to be socialist. While the USSR and its satellites were 'socialist' in practice, the PRC allows private corporations, private enterprise, private property, and even has a stock exchange. The PRC is at the least state capitalist and at the most corporate fascist.

The Soviet Union is not socialism.In Stalin's time, it became Lenin's Social Imperialism. Socialism in name and imperialism in fact.

[Dogmeat]

It's communism if Liberty Prime tries to blow it up.

[Hammer Britannia]

The definition of Communism changes about as frequently as the leaders who supposedly wish to achieve it

In other words, there is no answer at this point

[Duvniask]

The definition of Communism changes about as frequently as the leaders who supposedly wish to achieve it

In other words, there is no answer at this point

Not really. Even the most braindead of Stalinist apologists tend to agree, definitionally, with other communists on what it roughly entails.

[The Archregimancy]

True communism is a perfect and historically inevitable system of social organisation that simply hasn't been tried yet, and therefore remains both perfect and inevitable.

False communism is anything I don't like.

[Carvio Saikesenassia]

honest question, does that even matter at this point? maybe im just weary of cap vs soc/com debates but debating """the true definition""" of big tent ideologies is so wasteful that its better to talk about more 'disaggregated' policy instead

[LimaUniformNovemberAlpha]

The definition of Communism changes about as frequently as the leaders who supposedly wish to achieve it

In other words, there is no answer at this point

What makes any definition other than that of whomever invented the word legitimate?

honest question, does that even matter at this point? maybe im just weary of cap vs soc/com debates but debating """the true definition""" of big tent ideologies is so wasteful that its better to talk about more 'disaggregated' policy instead

All else held constant, if someone gets a key definition wrong, they're either ignorant, stupid, or dishonest, at least compared to the rest of us. This tells us to whom not to listen, at least on the most closely related key issues.

[Carvio Saikesenassia]

The definition of Communism changes about as frequently as the leaders who supposedly wish to achieve it

In other words, there is no answer at this point

What makes any definition other than that of whomever invented the word legitimate?

honest question, does that even matter at this point? maybe im just weary of cap vs soc/com debates but debating """the true definition""" of big tent ideologies is so wasteful that its better to talk about more 'disaggregated' policy instead

All else held constant, if someone gets a key definition wrong, they're either ignorant, stupid, or dishonest, at least compared to the rest of us. This tells us to whom not to listen, at least on the most closely related key issues.

when said key definition refers to a big tent movement then it sort of loses its meaning imo. bad equivalent but its like trying to define "what constitutes a legitimate definition of being a Democrat?" when the DNC is broken down by at least three major vertents

[Duvniask]

honest question, does that even matter at this point? maybe im just weary of cap vs soc/com debates but debating """the true definition""" of big tent ideologies is so wasteful that its better to talk about more 'disaggregated' policy instead

It only keeps being a debate because certain people can't be bothered or are too stupid to read even the most basic of theory. Obviously it matters to anyone who is a communist that their views are distorted in the most egregious of ways, but it also matters to anyone who holds the truth as a virtue. When conspiracy nuts like Glenn Beck and other GOP-shill dipshits called Obama a socialist, Marxist, etc. it's important that people are able to see through such lies. Even if you are not a communist it is in your interest to know what it means to be one, so that you, by virtue of being a better informed person, are capable of choosing for yourself. The only way you can say it doesn't matter is if you don't care about the ills that arise from distortions and lies, as if it's somehow good that people are misinformed.

[LimaUniformNovemberAlpha]

What makes any definition other than that of whomever invented the word legitimate?



All else held constant, if someone gets a key definition wrong, they're either ignorant, stupid, or dishonest, at least compared to the rest of us. This tells us to whom not to listen, at least on the most closely related key issues.

when said key definition refers to a big tent movement then it sort of loses its meaning imo. bad equivalent but its like trying to define "what constitutes a legitimate definition of being a Democrat?" when the DNC is broken down by at least three major vertents

Political parties are organizations and as such their definitions are subject to change. To say otherwise is to deny their history of switching roles on issues ranging from segregation to whether or not the USA should be the police of the world.

Communist is more so an ideology label. So it'd be more analogous to asking what constitutes a legitimate definition of being left-wing, except that one was more ambiguous from the start.

[Green October Z]

Seeing as how my parents fled communism and told me all about it, I would say that communism is oppression, starvation, extreme human rights abuses, poverty, and a lot of violence. It is darkness with no light in sight.

[Aya Democratic Republic]

So des[ote my clear pattern of opposition to the current Chinese regime, there is one particular subset of it that always bothered me, and that is when people blame "communism" for its woes.

This strikes me as weird. Most of the world doesn't take China's word for being a "people's republic," so why do they take its word for being "communist?"

Karl Marx, in the book in which he invented the word "communist," claimed that capitalism was so exploitative it would collapse in on itself, paving the way for collective ownership of the means of production. Doesn't this mean that, since the Bolsheviks overthrew an autocracy, ant the Chinese communist party seized power in a civil war, while the USA has capitalists getting rich enough to buy politicians' loyalty on behalf of non-capitalistic policies, that the USA is closer to communism than China or the Soviet Union ever were, while none of those three quite count as communist?

Karl Marx’s Definition Is The Definition. The Reason Communism & Socialism Got Redefined Was Because Of Stalin’s Regime In The Soviet Union Which Is Not Socialism As He Blamed The Kulaks (Poor People Who Became Rich Enough To Grow Crops) For The Poor Management Of Crops Which Wasn’t True Stalin Just Implemented Rules That Made Him Stay In Power. He Took The Kulaks Crops Back To Moscow. Large Uprisings Went Across The Soviet Union Which Were Taken Down By The Red Army And Almost Killed As Many People As The Nazis Did. Stalin Redefined Communism As Stalinism And Replaced Socialistic Ideas With Just Ideas To Keep Him In Power. So We Really Have No Say In Redefining Communism Because Of This Large Misunderstanding.

And if Karl Marx's definition doesn't count, by what standard do the rest of us get to redefine a word that was never ours to redefine?

[Rojava Free State]

Seeing as how my parents fled communism and told me all about it, I would say that communism is oppression, starvation, extreme human rights abuses, poverty, and a lot of violence. It is darkness with no light in sight.

That's literally almost every dictatorship ever. Those factors aren't unique to communism, and I would argue that those countries aren't truly communist.

Before anyone jumps on me and says I'm an apologist, I am against communism because I support nationalism and private property and I think that communism could only work in a small village of maybe 100 people. All nations that try communism are doomed to end up like Mao China.

[Rojava Free State]

Communism is anything Candace Owens doesn't like. According to Candace, I live in a communist shithole (it's only one of those two things, and not the one candace thinks it is).

[Mirjt]

Communism is a form of anarchism, which is a form of libertarian socialism.

Communism is when you have an stateless, moneyless, classless, egalitarian society where all of the economy has been socialized and private ownership of the means of production abolished.

The Soviet Union was not communist, they still had a state, they still used money, they still had classes, they were not egalitarian, and the economy was not truly socialized. They may have had government ownership over every aspect of the economy, but public ownership through the government is only one form of socialism and only counts as socialism if the people have democratic control over their workplaces, which they didn't have in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was part of a trend in the 20th century of a tendency within marxism, marxist-lenninism to be taken out of contexts and transformed into other ideologies such as trotskyism, stalinism, and maoism. Stalinism and maoism claimed to be an intermediary phase before communism is realized, they claimed that a dictatorship of the preletariot was needed, that a state is okay because it will wither away on its own when it is no longer needed, and so on. They do not represent the views of all socialists, marxists, communists, or even all marxist-lenninists, though these ideologies and regimes were labelled as and self-identified as communist.

[Strahcoin]

Here's my take on this (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):

Communism is the last stage of Marxism, which is as follows (super simplified, but basically the point):

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat in capitalism, causing the proletariat - lead by intellectuals - to violently revolt against the system once they're aware of their "exploitation", instilling a dictatorship of the proletariat (a socialist dictatorship). In theory, once capitalism is wiped out from the world, society will (somehow (I don't know the details)) become stateless communes where workers are happy productive members of society, effectively reaching "communism".

Of course, due to human nature, Marxist dictators (Lenin, Mao, etc.) get stuck at the "dictatorship of the proletariat" part, and capitalism (fortunately, in my opinion) reigns supreme.