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Notes -
I wouldn't say "vaguely" at all. The USA in Atlas Shrugged is pretty much explicitly a Communist state.
It's years (might be close to 20 years, actually), since I read AS but if I recall correctly, even the end-state government in Atlas Shrugged isn't really communist. There's still private businesses (again, I think?), they're just regulated to hell and back, and the looter/moocher government isn't as much controlled by an explicitly ideological party on a crusade to implement a formal Marxist-Leninist ideology as just operating on general collectivist principles and being steered by ad hoc ideas and power struggles inside the ruling clique. It's more like a big Venezuela than Soviet Union. You might call it "Socialist", but "Socialist" is a fairly wider and more inchoate, as a concept, than "Communist". However, my feel is that the "People's States" that appear to be in power everywhere else are supposed to be communist.
Of course, I might be wrong on this, but I guess checking this would require reading the whole book again, which isn't exactly a quick project...
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It's in the process of becoming one, not already one. A repeated conflict is the government nationalizing private enterprise.
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