Have there been any true communist implementations at a national level? My understanding is that countries like the USSR and PRC are communist on paper, but are more totalitarian than communist in how they were (are) actually governed.
Here are some of the things communists advocate for:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Most communist countries actually followed these, at least at the start. (There are some countries, particularly in Africa, that claimed to be communist to get aid from the USSR, but didn't actually implement communism). The problem in practice is that this is liable to be taken over by totalitarians, as you noted.
The main difference is that communism is bottom up pyramid of societies, while capitalism is a top down pyramid of companies.
If you think capitalism is not coercive, why do you go to work every day for less value than you produce? Contracts are based on enforcement too. The root word in there is force.
So the results of a communist takeover and a dictator rising to power are almost indistinguishable aside from one glaring difference. Communism lacks the autocrat. Should it even be a shock to us at this point that one always seems to come along and fill those shoes?
No, it doesn't.
There are subsets of Communist thought that require centralism, but they aren't all of Communism.
Marxism isn't all of Communism.
> And in practice there is always centralization in Communist regimes.
All actual Communist regimes have been based in Leninism and it's derivatives, which are a small subset (in terms of schools of theory) of derivatives of Marxism, which themselves, again, don't constitute all of Communism.