Communism' biggest enemy was always democratic socialism. It was what stopped European countries joining the Soviet camp.
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland, where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
Most swiss people would probably disagree with this statement.
Isn't the whole point of communism to give power to the people?
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.
Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?
The usual cause for failure is people get disenchanted with living in a commune and leave. It usually takes 1 to 2 years for their communist zeal to be ground down by reality.
It's quite a distinction.
If you want to join a commune in the US, google for one and join it. Nobody is going to stop you or punish you for it. You can start one yourself with some like minded friends.
He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.
If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.
America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.
The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties.
And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote.
It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats.
Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
What were those conditions in Germany that were so different from every other Western European country?
Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite.
Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice.
It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen