I often wonder if what people refer to as communism, wasn't just a corrupted implementation of it, pretty much the same as we currently see under socialist and democratic governments.
I've got no experience under such regime, but I can't say I've lived under a socialist and/or democratic regime either.
In theory, maybe all of them could work great, but we would never find that reflected in practice due to our human nature.
> I often wonder if what people refer to as communism, wasn't just a corrupted implementation of it
History tends to repeat itself. Your words are almost exactly the same as those used by communist leaders in Poland during periods of social unrest (they referred to "a period of mistakes and distortions").
I am scared of the resurgence of idealized communism, here on HN and elsewhere (see how my comment above has been downvoted). People build their own ideas of what communism is, failing to grasp that it has a fundamental problem with incentives and can never work. It's been tried many times, and it failed every time, with the exact same issues.
If you want to fight wealth inequality, great, more power to you. But that's not communism. The central tenet of communism is common (social) ownership, which is exactly what removes incentives and what has been shown to fail every time.
From what I can see, the understanding of communism online is pretty shallow, with most people focusing on the "let's have a revolution and take away from the rich people" part, with a minor addition of "things communism got right".
This tends to get a lot of people angry but every nominal historical communist government and its leaders were essentially fascists wearing the trappings of communism as a skin. All attempts to force it under a violent revolutions under such ideologies will essentially end the same way and it is madness to assume "this time" will be different.
Voluntary cooperatives can actually work (by no means guaranteed) but scaling up tends to be the issue.
I've got no experience under such regime, but I can't say I've lived under a socialist and/or democratic regime either.
In theory, maybe all of them could work great, but we would never find that reflected in practice due to our human nature.