Blablabla but that wasn’t actually communism but authoritative democrapublic federalopol!
Technically it could be argued that they attempted to implement it, even if they failed 🤷
I agree with this, I don’t think Lenin for example was somehow inauthentic in their socialism / communism even if their implementation often fell short of their espoused ideals; I just think the attempts to make it work failed for various reasons.
(Maybe some of those reasons have to do with the ideology, e.g. vanguardism might pose a greater risk of the revolution being hijacked by a corrupt insider group - maybe Stalin was more inevitable given Lenin’s commitments to the vanguard; maybe commitments to viewing the revolution as a “totalitarianism of the proletariat” and insisting on centralizing power makes it easier for the state apparatus to be hijacked and used against the interests of the average person, and so on).
I mean… it wasn’t.
Communism means all things held in common. Theft wouldn’t be a thing because everyone owns all property together. Ownership is meaningless.
Every one of those societies only paid lip service to communism - partly because it only works when everyone in the commune knows everyone else and holds each other responsible. It doesn’t work at scale. What those societies really were was “The state owns everything and if you complain about it you get disappeared.”
