> They had a marginal role because they were less productive

This is a straw man.

They were not less productive, they were less pollution intensive.

One does not imply the other.

Iraq is surely less productive than us, the west, and yet they are one of the most polluted countries in the World.

> Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.

North Korea is not communists, it claims to be, but it's not. Just like the USA claim to be a democracy of the people but are an oligopoly run but white, wealthy, anglo-saxon men, and technically was born as a republic, not a democracy, the founding fathers abhorred democracy.

Communism means a lot of things, a dictatorship run by the son of the former ruler, called the Prince, by means of dynasty, with absolute and undisputable power, is not communist.

USSR was not communist, they never established the ground rules that define what a communist nation is.

One cannot simply claim to be communist and do nothing of the things that being communist imply.

As two professors of Economics (Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick) at the University of Massachusetts put it

the 20th century's great ideological schism actually pitted the private capitalism of the West against the "state capitalism" of the USSR. "The struggle between communism and capitalism never happened," says Wolff. "The Soviets didn't establish communism. They thought about it, but never did it."

Under a true communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials.

> The opposite of a capitalist society is exactly

a non capitalistic society. that's all we can derive from this sentence. but, as the story teaches us, people have confused free market capitalism (which is not really free market BTW, far from it, it's more like a monopolistic or oligopolistic market) with capitalism and state capitalism (the opposite of the free market) with communism.

We live in impure systems, USA just plainly refuse to even mention the name "socialism" but it doesn't mean they've built a better system, just different, with different warts, that are less evident because they're actually are the ruling country of the World and their propaganda is the strongest one. But if WW2 went differently, Germany could be at the same spot and nobody would notice any difference. Starting from the fact that many prominent nazis went to work for the USA, first and foremost, Wernher von Braun. The man who made a decisive contribution (together with "The Huntsville Germans") to win the space race for the USA.

> And yes socialist means leaving the means of production to government

Nope, it wants the the people (not the government) to own the means of production and nope it does not want the government more involved, it wants the people more involved because everything is fairly and equally shared, including the decisions.

More government and more layers is exactly why scholars say that the USSR was not communist: socialism wanted to abolish social classes, social differences and hierarchical structures of government and power.

> Ahh yeah you tell that to the Kulags who got killed by Stalin.

that's another straw man.

they have been overthrown when they lost support of the people.

the fact that many were killed, doesn't mean that the majority was against it.

USA have caused the death of supposedly (estimates are hard, but usually not far from the truth) tens of millions of people in their modern history (post WW1) and yet people are still with them.

An article from Washington Post "Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests" [1] while according to The Wilson Center "18 million people passed through the work camps. While approximately 1.6 million died, a large number were released and reintegrated into Soviet society." [2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terro...

[2] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/death-and-redemption-the-...