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Notes -
Good question. I suppose that would be, what gives me the most accurate mental model to work with? Modeling NK as "democratic," for example, would not be very accurate at all for any reasonable common understanding of the word "democratic." You'd have to construct so many epicycles to make that model work that it's much easier to model NK as simply being a very undemocratic dictatorship.
Right, and when "private ownership" and "worker control" start blending into each other, what use do the labels have anymore? To go back to the beginning of this thread,
Well that depends on what is meant by "socialism", no? If by "socialism" you mean a Chinese-style economy where you can have more billionaires than the US, but the billionaires are explicitly subordinate to the state, then yeah I'm sure that's more palatable to a lot of people. It sounds pretty similar to a fascist Nazi Germany or modern Russia where the state has overwhelming power to direct industrial titans to work towards the state's goals, and neither of those were/are communist states.
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