'Communism' is a very broad strand of thought, Stalinism, with its emphasis on authoritarian violence as a strategy for achieving a communist society, should not be seen as the sole representative of such thought.Strive wrote:communism and nazism are both nasty ideologies, should always be condemned. let us keep it center left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre-left_politics
The only thing that really unites the different strands of Communist thought is that they see the collective management of common goods to be a goal worth working for.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao and others claimed to believe that imposing a centralised authoritarian state over all of society would be the best way to transition towards a communist society; even they didn't think that they were actually living under communism. They were of course wrong; such a transition never occurred and they instead caused a great deal of suffering to millions of people.
However, the failure of the authoritarian communist projects of the 20th Century does not seem like a good enough reason to me to abandon achieving the goal of a society in which common goods are managed collectively, instead of by a small group of elites. Rather, it seems to be that all such failures have proven is that a non-democratic, centralised state bureaucracy is not a viable strategy for achieving communism and is more likely to lead to widespread repression.
If the failure of the communist projects of the 20th century should lead us to abandon the goal of communism, then perhaps we should abandon the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity because of the slaughter that occurred during the reign of the Terror of the French Revolution.