Image Transcription:
An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying "Russia".
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with "Russia".
The third panel is Phoebe saying "has invaded".
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back "has invaded".
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying "Ukraine".
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back "Ukraine".
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase "Russia has invaded Ukraine".
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming "NATO just started a proxy war".
Going back to my original comment, no they weren't. They were dictatorships, and dictatorships can't be communist, no matter what the propaganda they put out. A dictatorship is closer to feudalism than communism. The King owning everything, even your house is no different from "the State" owning everything, even your house, because at the heart of it, the dictator is the state.
True communism might have a government, but it will be made up of the people, and it will serve the people. People would own their own homes, and collectively own their workplaces. It would be like putting the union in charge of the work site.
That's the dream, but the dream is often betrayed. A dream betrayed is a nightmare.
Also, the rich assholes are actively trying to abolish the vote because the majority support taxing their asses. Because in a capitalist society, the rich hate the poor, and work to prevent the poor from having a voice.
My point (and I can't stress this enough) is that a political philosophy that relies on dismantling democratic processes and disenfranchising a large portion of the electorate to function is not democratic, even in theory.
Marx's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat may not have been authoritarian, but Lenin's was; I understand what you are saying (essentially that communism must be democratic, and that therefore anything that calls itself communism that is not democratic must in fact not be democratic).
At the same time, communist theorists have made up marvelously positive-sounding terms that boil down to "dictatorship is good if it's the right dictator", and that's what tankies (the people OP was referring to) use to justify supporting authoritarianism.
If you'd like to define "true communism" as excluding all actual communist regimes, do you -- I'm not trying to argue over whether communism is good or bad in theory.
A few points;
A; The rich are not a "large portion of the electorate" They are a tiny minority with extremely outsized influence.
B; Lenin betrayed the revolution. He established a dictatorship, which is feudalism with a coat of paint. And yeah, tankies idolize that shit. They see the rich (or the merely educated) as an enemy to be hurt, and once the rich are gone, they turn on other enemies of the State. Tankies are much closer to Fascism than Communism.
Their king doles out wealth to the loyal, and uses the power of the State to hurt their enemies, enemies who Dear Leader tells them to hate.
A sort of Feudalist Fascism, it's a step back from even capitalism, which Marx saw as a necessary step between feudalism and communism.
It's clear you feel very passionately about this, I'm certainly willing to concede that it's theoretically possible for an entirely democratic country to choose a genuinely communist model in an entirely democratic way.
I do see a path to it, one that Marx thought he saw, but it was far too early for.
It relies on automation. Marx saw this starting in factories, there were more goods produced in one day than any single village could need in a year. But the problem was, those goods still took human labor to make, and toiling away in a factory leaves little time for revolution.
The modern world is rapidly changing, jobs are vanishing now in ways that have never happened before. In the past, it was some rich asshole getting richer off of my labor. Now it's some rich asshole getting richer off of an AI trained on my data.
We're not quite there yet, but soon the predictions of the video "Humans need not apply" will come true.
When no one has a job anymore, when no one can have a job, well, then you'll see a democratic push for then next step towards communism, UBI.
Countries that resist UBI will see revolution, and will then likely fall to dictatorship.
All of this will be on a backdrop of climate crisis, where governments are forced to take desperate measures to try to save what they can. Which will be another vector for possible dictatorships, because it's easy for people to fall prey to a single voice yelling that they alone can fix all the problems of the world if you just trust them. This yelling is usually quietly followed with them telling you who their enemies are, and that they believe that hurting said enemies will fix things.