I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant.
This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".
Something along the lines of:
A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.
I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:
- People actually living and working in communes.
- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).
- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.
I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.
This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.