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Notes -
There's endless amounts of ink spilled on what is or isn't communism. The discussion on what does or doesn't count can be interesting. But when the people doing it call it communism and it fits the mold of what a lot of people trying to practice communism are also doing I think it is at the very least a variant of communism even if it isn't the stateless moneyless utopia some theorists imagine. We call the US capitalist despite not being anything like a theoretical perfectly free market and most people who are pro-capitalist don't even want perfectly free markets either.
There are even some arguments for how having a strong state that owns all the productive assets is communism, everyone is a stakeholder in the state and the state owns all the businesses so it's basically like everyone owning their own workplace if you squint. It solves a lot of design problems to do it this way. There are of course problems with this design and Venezuela is a pretty central example of one of the common failure modes, but it's probably fair to call it communism.
Great points
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