All of the above interpreted Marx's theory and adapted it to their specific societies and goals so they indeed are communists in that sense. On the other hand, claiming that that's all communism is is just ignorant. None of the systems those people built were the kind of communism Marx originally envisioned. What really fucking annoys me is: "my specific, perfect, entirely infalliable..."
In this case sarcasm is a dishonest way to attack the argument and can be used against any ideology that has any kind of flaws and has several interpretations - in other words, pretty much all of them. "Yeah, crony capitalism sucks but my specific, perfect, entirely infallible brand of capitalism has never been tried!"
I've noticed the depressing trend (coming from progressives rather than neoliberals this time around) of saying, "We need to get rid of this crony capitalism so that true capitalism will fix our economic problems."
No. Beyond the obvious no-true-scotsman fallacy, just no.
Communists had to own up to the fact that the highly-flawed, authoritarian implementations of real-world communism are, in fact, communism. We need to ditch the "crony capitalism" phrase; if you're willing to say we live in a capitalist economy, you should also own up to the fact that cronyism is a natural outgrowth of the tenets of capitalism.
You know, there's a reason Marx's vision has never been tried: it's completely unworkable in the real world. And communism has failed every single time it was tried.
See, this is the kind of double-standard I'm talking about; motivated by little more than petty nationalism. What metric are you using to say communism has failed? China seems to be doing pretty well right now. What metric are you using to say capitalism is successful? The United States has what could generously be called a mixed economy and we have several command-economy structures in place to regulate the periodic failures of unrestrained capitalism.
Get your definitions straight before claiming either economic system has "failed".
