fair enough

It seems to me that you think that authoritarian goverments on avarage have a higher gini(income inequality) than democratic goverments and i dont think there is a correlation at all about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#/media/File:Economist_Intelligence_Unit_Democracy_Index_2023.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Yes Europe is democratic and has a low gini but then there is South america and the US and south africa that are democratic and have the highest ginis in the world.

If India went the path of the chinese in 1955 instead of democratic capitalism i think they would have had the same results as China today. You could argue China has been also prevented from improving medical care until the communist party stopped letting it happen.

As more of a maoist i would not say China today is socialist with those billionaires owning stakes in those chinese companies and influencing the state to have this high income inequality there now and not offering everybody a job as they used to under mao etc. . Automation has been going on since the 19th century and has not overthrown capitalism and unemployment is not any worse than it was during the great depression. Things are not any more toxic and untenable than during the gilded age in america. One big change now is that there are forums like reddit and lemmy were people get access to statistics like life expectancy which was not the case in the gilded age were the 99% only would read the biggest newspapers which were controlled by the top 1%.

What really matters is that it is clear what MLs want and what anarchocommunists want and that it is clear what they mean when they use the words "communism" and "socialism". And if what anarchocommunists mean with "communism" is real communism and what MLs mean is fake communism then so be it. Thats something i dont care about. I was not trying to gaslight you.

I am not justifying anything. I am just describing one use of the word "communist country". In the dictionary you will often see many uses listed of a word. And that was the use of the western media. The actual communists had a different use of the word. But most people, who dont read deep into communist ideology, are more used to the use of the western media thats why i used it that way in this thread.

What is a core ideology of communism is socialism. Understood as seizing most of the means of production from capitalists. And the MLs interpreted that as nationalizing most of it and using it as vanguards for the benefit of the working class. Thats were the more than 60% of employees working for the state comes from.

The western media during the cold war called communist countries countries that had more than 60% of the employees work for government owned enterprises. And according to that definion most of the world has not been communist for a long time(for longer than 10 years) except those few countries(eastern bloc, yugoslavia, china, cuba, north korea, vietnam, maybe i miss some countries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size Cuba according to that definion would still today be a communist country. North korea went back to a semi-feudal system i have heard and china has still massive state ownership like 60% of all the wealth is owned by the goverment in china but they have privatized stakes in almost all state owned companies so in the statistic it shows only 8% of the employees work for the goverment. Yes i know the communists in the east didnt even call their countries communist countries they called themselves socialist countries. USSR is short for united socialist soviet republics. And they said they worked towards communism which they thought would take 100s of years.

Can culture get changed through policy? I think so. The soviet union was very heavily isolationist and still industrialized cause it was in their central plan to do it.

Edit: if you look at the export and import to gdp ratios https://www.reddit.com/user/nerbert123/comments/1czws2d/soviet_union_statistics/#lightbox

Yes both can achieve industrilization but communists had a better track record(higher percentage of countries(and population) that implemented communism industrialized and also with lower inequality) than capitalism when you look at africa and south america and india etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/561htv/map_of_public_sector_employees_as_a_percentage_of/.

And through the comparison with the world avarage there was no comparison with apples and oranges.

why did it spread to south korea only in 1960? and not earlier? Why has it still not spread to africa and india today?

I was just saying it cause some people might think that it cant be true when the great leap forward happened.

For china i am talking until mao died in 1976. For russia income inequality was low until 1991 when the communist party gave up power.