> It is no more peculiar to insist on this way of
> talking that to say, for example, that socialism means not what
> actual real world socialists have mainly done when they have gotten
> into power (massacred real and imagined opposition, imposed
> one-party dictatorships and idiotic censorship, choked the economy
> with a command style central planning, etc)
Nice try, but no cigar. There have never been "real world socialists" in the periphery. The USSR, China, Vietnam - all autarkic peasant-developmental states, where the one-party-state was (or still is) accumulator-in-chief. Capitalisms without capital, as Heiner Mueller put it pithily.
I seem to recall a little thing called 300 years of liberal-era colonialism as having something to do with that lack of capital.
-- DRR