chat

a) Referendums and recall elections (to pick two examples) are both cool and good

What year were you born, just to be clear? In any case, the Soviet Union was a revisionist government really from the late 40s on (though much more openly so after the Secret Speech), we (the people on this instance) have severe criticisms of it, but the misappropriation of Marxism, etc. by Khrushchev does not mean they own the term, and I guess that leads me to the better response to your question: Marxism is the best way to analyze politics and form a worker's movement to oppose the capitalists, with the goal of ending class antagonisms by ending class itself. That's what communism is, and it would be silly (and obscurantist) to try to say "Oh, we're not communists, we just have this belief system that people referred to as communism for almost 200 years, but that we call, uh, workerism" or whatever. Not that our beliefs are 1) identical to Marx's or 2) monolithic, but there's a clear genealogy here.

b) Being a capitalist inherently means having power. Removing all power from a capitalist means making them not a capitalist. As an ultimate goal, yes, we'd like to do that, but each country's level of development is different, and it could be necessary to keep capitalists around for some time in many of them, albeit suppressed by the proletariat. This is not the case in America, where the level of development means the intermediary period, the dictatorship of the proletariat as it is conventionally called, would need only be very short. In India, it would need to be somewhat longer and in other states, longer still.