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Please excuse my naïveté here, but communism is an economic system and not a form of government, no?

My understanding is that economics and governance are largely - though not completely - orthogonal.

I don't see how they can be kept separate. Governance is to a large degree the creation of policies for managing of resources, and managing resources is what economics is about.

Marxist theory says that the separation between economic and state power is illusory at best and intentionally deceptive at worst. So a communist isn't going to think it possible to separate economic and state power, whereas that concept of that separation of powers is a foundational component of modern liberalism. It's why the two camps have a such a hard time talking to each other; they really don't see things the same way.

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