> …Communism wasn't an authoritarian movement back then…
When and where was that?
When and where was that?
Except, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, all wrote about how important it was to be self critical, how important it was to stay grounded in reality, to make reality drive your decision making and goals.
And then they all purposely and aggressively built themselves cults of personality with the express purpose of being just garden variety dictators. They surrounded themselves with boring "Yes men" by murdering anyone who pointed out the clear contradiction between their writing/philosophy/"theory" and reality.
There's a grand canyon between what they all wrote about, and what they clearly did. The closest they ever came was Mao being like "Whoops, a lot of people died, maybe it's partially my fault" but that sure didn't dissuade him, or make him change direction.
Meanwhile their hundreds of millions of insane, murderous followers had no qualms about such a contradiction, such a destruction of reality, because they had been so poorly treated for so long in the old system that all they really cared about was tearing it down (gee, sound familiar?).
A Cult of personality is toxic to functionality. It's toxic to any progress. It's toxic to productivity and success. It's toxic to competence. It's toxic to reality.
Marx aimed to theorize on a worker based authority. Anti dictator or anti oligarchy, sure.
Unfortunatley he outlined inadequate protections against an oligarchy, because he believed a society could self regulate equality (between workers).
Google: Marx on Authority
He also fundamentally misunderstands human nature and our ability to care about anything outside a "tribe" or rather put aside our own desires for those not in our immediate tribe. It simply breaks down at scale.
Just because someone can adequately critique and point out the flaws in a system does not make them qualified to architect a working solution. Especially first draft. The problem with communism is will always devolve into authoritarianism, because its the only way to enforce people putting the needs of others over their own, not to mention those in charge will do whats best to serve their own ruling tribe.
It's how we evolved, its human psychology, and at mass population scale you can't escape it. Capitalism or trade at least to some extent incentivizes mutual benefits on a basic level, but Marx tosses out the one thing about it that works, otherwise the same problems that occur in capitalism as it devolves come about the same way they do in every other form of human governance, with groups/organizations with a shared purpose or identity (tribes) jockeying for authority and power to serve their own interests.