What do you mean? Communist podcasts I listened to consider them Communist, Internet search says the BBC says they are Communist.
Edit: you all like to downvote instead of having a conversation. Everybody hasn’t studied every subject, try sharing a little of what you know instead of discouraging discussion
Theyre a classless society with no currency?
You sure they arent a capitalist dictatorship disguised as Communist?
You make some good points. They most definitely have currency and a lower working class with an upper government official class. I would not consider them communist at all. North Korea is just an authoritarian capitalistic hellhole, that tries to sprinkle in one or two socialist policies to maintain the illusion of pursuing communism.
I see in reading more that NK is pretty far from communist. But I think people have imagined communism to be something that it never could be. I don’t see how society could exist without money. I see that Soviets thought that eventually they wouldn’t need money but I think this is unrealistic and I don’t see that existence of money in a society could be used to determine if it’s communist or not. .
Marx said that socialism is the gateway for communism. Bring the means of prouction to the working class, then youd be able to make the next transition to communism.
In any case, there are no societies currently that meet the primary criteria for being called socialist OR communist.
This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with “we haven’t done socialism right” is the same as “we haven’t done capitalism right”.
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can’t exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can’t even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You’d be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
Definition of Socialism: the workers own the means of production.
Which country were you born in where you owned the means of production?
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term “really existing socialism” to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn’t via the Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat” (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks – I think you see the pattern).
It’s rather anti communist to be ruled by a dictator, and certainly a hereditary one. That’s as close as you get to monarchy, which is the antithesis of communism.
The irony is that the people are good that they live in an communist utopia, and while everyone shares the same circumstances that can hold. It’s only when living abroad when they see they are being exploited, like the rioters in this case.
It’s okay to be downvoted. That just means you’re the proxy for which people question what should be questioned (even if the informed answers are already very clear), that you’ve touched on impactful and deep subject matter. Don’t be sad about a meaningless red number.
Nine times out of ten, those kinds of questions are never done in good faith so they tend to be downvoted. It’s called sealioning.
Oh wait that’s a much safer term to describe those antics than what I’ve been using. I’ve always known it as “JAQing off” (just asking questions).
And this is a place where we have the authority to call people out on their bullshit and make everybody more informed in the process. Deep Canvasing is more effective than Sealioning.
Nice iFunny watermark, heathen