Why Weren't (The Soviet Union - Maoist China - North Korea - North Vietnam) Real Communism™?
To whit, my claim is not that you have to recognize it as such; you likely won't if your definition of capitalism posits an opposition between State and market. But I do contend that Marx would have, and the best demonstration of this is through a juxtaposition of the writings of Marx and Stalin. The opening section of Das Kapital begins with an analysis of the commodity form. The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, ...