A centralized state ruled by a party is not the commonly understood sense, or people would think that all dictatorships are communist, which they don't. In either case, it is bizarre to try to correct the record with something that is in and of itself a misunderstanding.
The Bolsheviks were very forthcoming. They professed from even before the revolution that they were aiming for a pretty centralized state ruled by a vanguard party. They never pretended anything else. It is only after the death of Lenin that they started diverging more and more from what they originally professed.
Kropotkin was critical of the Bolsheviks from before the revolution and actually became more amicable to them after the revolution than before. Indeed he found the fact that they had managed to lead a revolution to be a profound good for humanity that would, in his own words, "enlighten the path of the civilised countries for at least a century", and agreed that the Bolsheviks were communists just as well as him, only that they would be eventually unsuccessful.
In any case, the sense the word is understood by many at this time is itself a misunderstanding. There is a reason why China agrees that their system is not communism, and indeed the word is still used in the way it was intended originally by a great many people. Taking it to be the common sense in English instead of the correct sense is to be in error.
A centralized state ruled by the communist party is the commonly understood meaning. You almost certainly understood the intent before you mistook the explanation for a definition, dropped the word "communist", and argued against a literal interpretation of the words.
Pre-revolution Bolsheviks argued that a centralized socialist state was a necessary step before achieving "true" communism. Kropotkin disagreed (one meaning of "critical") with that. He supported the February revolution and returned to the country after that, but he refused to take a position in the moderate socialist government. Kropotkin gladly supported the October revolution that replaced the moderate socialists with radical ones. He was strongly opposed to (another meaning of "critical") the "war communism" that emerged after the second revolution, and he didn't live to see the period of state capitalism that followed.
In any case, the system we currently understand as communism didn't emerge until around 1930, making it irrelevant when talking about Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was equally as opposed to war communism as a centrally planned economy and as opposed as he would have been to the NEP.
I don't think that, after thinking for a few seconds, the regular person would arrive to the conclusion that the USSR was only communist because of the name of the ruling party.
I also don't agree that, if people were introduced to society like the USSR with the only exception that they had decentralized planning, would conclude that it wasn't communist anymore.
Similarly a lot of people in the US have called the economic system of the AANES communist despite being neither centralized nor run by a communist party. All the people that called Bernie Sanders a communist despite him not being a member of the communist party also don't agree. Largely from, you know, collectivizing agriculture and seizing a third of the productive capital to then put it under the control of soviets.
In summary I don't think that people commonly understand communism as being dependent on the name of the ruling party.
Words gain meaning from their usage. Instead of definitions, there are explanations and examples.
In the widely understood meaning, communism refers to a centralized state ruled by the communist party. Not by something called a communist party but by something that is a communist party.
The USSR was the canonical example of a communist state. States similar to it are generally seen as communist states, while states that are too different are not. Decentralized states otherwise similar to the USSR have never existed, so we don't know if people would consider them communist states.
Well, this is a dead thread but I thought I'd help out anyway.
What Russia did in the 20th century was called a workers dictatorship, and was meant to be a transition into communism, which is defined as a stateless and classless society. So, calling what Russia did 'communism' is a bit like calling what the fascists did 'capitalism', and then saying that because it didn't work, therefore capitalism doesn't work. Anarchists have generally stood against workers dictatorships because they seem to be an ineffective way of achieving communism, but they do want communism.
Soviet rule was at best state-capitalism, with the government creating market quotas, trading with other countries, annexing other countries for their resources, and ultimately still doing everything capitalist countries do, but with more state-intervention.
> One is : a society that is not capitalist, ie, the means of production are owned by the workers.
Among living socialists and communists, I'd argue that that is actually their definition of "socialism", while their definition of "communism" is a moneyless, classless and stateless society, the idea being that the former could lead to the later if implemented. All three words have changed their meanings over the last 200 years though. To most people today, "communism" just means an authoritarian state ruled by a communist party with a centralized economy and "socialism" means widely different things to different people depending on where you live and what media you read.
The Bolsheviks were very forthcoming. They professed from even before the revolution that they were aiming for a pretty centralized state ruled by a vanguard party. They never pretended anything else. It is only after the death of Lenin that they started diverging more and more from what they originally professed.
Kropotkin was critical of the Bolsheviks from before the revolution and actually became more amicable to them after the revolution than before. Indeed he found the fact that they had managed to lead a revolution to be a profound good for humanity that would, in his own words, "enlighten the path of the civilised countries for at least a century", and agreed that the Bolsheviks were communists just as well as him, only that they would be eventually unsuccessful.
In any case, the sense the word is understood by many at this time is itself a misunderstanding. There is a reason why China agrees that their system is not communism, and indeed the word is still used in the way it was intended originally by a great many people. Taking it to be the common sense in English instead of the correct sense is to be in error.