Shout out to The Daily Show (or was it somebody else?) for getting an actual communist to sound off on this question and not some guy quoting the latest trendy twitter hot take.

The market mechanism follow up explanation is equally bad. Literally every Communist society that has ever existed has used market mechanisms, even if abandoning them was the eventual goal, because nobody knows how to fully abolish the markets successfully so what they’ve all done is establish state supremacy over the markets in order to direct them better than the markets naturally direct themselves.

I think that as socialism becomes less of a dirty word in American politics again this is the inevitable route a lot of people are going to take to square their lifelong anticommunist indoctrination with the obvious fact that socialist policies are popular and effective (when there isn’t a bigger country fucking yours up). Separating Socialism from Communism and watering it down even further from what it is now is the process of coopting that the capitalist system does to all reformist and revolutionary movements.

edit: we really need to frontload class struggle and property relations in our rhetoric. Marx’s book is called Capital, not “markets”.