> [...] I don’t know what to call these countries Marxist-Leninist, Communist. It's what they were always described as. There's historical context here. You

> [...] I don’t know what to call these countries Marxist-Leninist, Communist. It's what they were always described as. There's historical context here. You have offered no objection to the use of the term "Leninist" other than it being what these states describe themselves as. What's wrong with that? Does "Leninist" have some other competing meaning that would be confusing? (Like with the "Democratic" of the DPRK?) Accepting self-terminology does not endorse it. Or everyone who called the USSR Communist back in the day was accepting that they were, in fact, on the way to communism. (That's not usually what someone means when they called these states communist, and such people aren't usually being naive or dishonest either. Nice dichotomy, by the way.) Would you have preferred capital-C Communist? That's basically a synonym for Marxist-Leninist.