Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that's a large part of the reason that I'm an anarchist.

I think because true communism never existed. All the previous attempts were flawed, people got corrupted, misused their power and it's difficult to overcome human nature. It might work in theory (or not). But so far the attempts ~~weren't that many and they~~ were all flawed for different reasons.

To simplify, two main reasons. First when done via revolutions it often causes economic and societal shock in which autocrates take the power away from the people. And second, when done peacefull, foreign intervention of secret agencies which again try to put autocrates in powerful positions.

Regimes tend to change with violent revolution, as it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power. Revolutions have leaders, and those leaders are the ones responsible for distributing the power to the masses. But it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power.

Even in the rare instance where a person does give up their power, all you need is for one person to take advantage of the system. Communism rewards people for their labours, but someone will need to judge how much people should be rewarded. One corrupt judge slips in, and the system corrupts with them.

What tends to emerge from the ashes of war and empire.

Lea Ypi's book Free is a phenomenal book describing the albanian communist period. Can't recommend it enough.

I grew up in DDR. It fails because it doesn't reflect reality. People are different, can do different things, and want different things. An ideology that simplifies people into classes, stands between people and their dreams. And will always need an ever increasing police force to force reality to look like the ideology.

Because there was never anything communist about these states in any way whatsoever.

Communism is a state (as in a social, political and economic condition, not a government). None of these states ever reached this condition, and, therefore, was never communist. And, one could argue, that their development literally went the opposite way to what could be called communist with a straight face. As the anarchist Bakunin famously said, "the people's boot is still a boot."

This is why the Maoist-types call this shit "democratic centralism," which is essentially just double-speak for "what the party says goes."

This does not make the idea of communism invalid - but it's still as perfectly vague as ever, unfortunately.