It has long been thought a country that calls itself communist or socialist is communist or socialist- this is simply untrue.
In fact if anything, no communist or socialist state has ever existed. Left wing beliefs have been achieved but they have never truly made it through the mechanisms of an entire nation. By this I mean industries have been nationalised and health care has been made public, but private businesses still exist as does private health care. Steps have been taken, but they haven't gone through the entire walk.
The People's Republic of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and other fancy sounding national titles all sound great and communist, but in reality they are a facade, a delusion created by the government of those nations. Every nation that has classed itself socialist or communist has done so through the wrong means, they haven't followed a Marxist path, and when in power they have gone against many ideals that the Left wing hold dear. Contrary to popular belief, Marxism isn't all encompassing when it comes to communism, and certainly not so when it comes to socialism, but I shall be using Marx to explain why all these fancy sounding nations where not true communist/socialist states.
Marx put forward that a nation will ideally not, but likely will endue a revolution to bring around communism- most of the nations we're talking about have done that, but what they missed was the time of when to alter the state. A state should only begin the transition to communism when its capitalist functions have depleted. Meaning that out of the dying remains of capitalism, comes communism. Our nations here did not do this, they waged revolutions in times of peasants and agriculture, not industrial capitalism (for that country). If you pay attention to many of the pictures from these nations, you'll often see people working in the fields and such. It is here where they initially differ from Marx.
This is why no communist state has ever been created, because the potentials grew from the wrongly timed ingredients. As for when the "communist" governments where in power, I shouldn't really need to say, but locking people in Gulags and undergoing purges is certainly not the humanity loving communism that theory speaks of. In practice the taking of a single life is inherently wrong in the eyes of communism, this does leave a contradiction with revolution, but as Marx pointed out Communism is also empiricalist (going off the numbers), and so if it costs 1,000 lives to save 1,000,000 then so be it, as cruel and harsh as it sounds, it is the case. Not a single person reading this should object to saving 1,000,000 over 1,000, and this merciless logic persists despite the figures, as long as one outweighs the other than the larger must be sought after.
Granted the numerical argument could be used in support of the Gulags etc. but in my opinion there is a difference between leadership paranoia and the collective good.
Next I think I'll go over laziness in a communist state, as that too is an understandable misconception.
