At least we are a little bit on the same page then.
I would still maintain though that Stalinism and Maoism was a product of the combination of communist ideology within a tyrranical state, such as Czar Russia.
While I think a lot of present day communists are detached from reality, there is nothing about them that suggests they put their ideal state above democracy.
The old communisties here in Norway have all evolved into a party which strongly emphasize the importance of democracy. Most communists today have learned from the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism and have no desire to repeat it. I think it would be odd to assume that communists somehow refuse to read history.
I think you are perhaps too afraid of collectivist ideas. Social democracy is built on collectivism as well but is still rated among the most democractic countries in the world. In Scandinavia we have very strong advocates of the common good as well as individual freedoms and rights.
Any system can get oppressive taken to extreme. That also applies to capitalism. For the poor living in earlier capitalist systems, they had basically no freedom. The capitalists would own the very house they lived in, the stores they shopped in. They had no bargaining power and no alternative but to say yes to a job no matter how bad the conditions there was no welfare system to catch you.
No, country has a system that allows you to remove property ownership for a 51% majority as far as I know, and even if possible it would go completely against the spirit of a democratic system. This was the goal for social democrats in Nordic countries for decades, yet they never used majority rule to simply take away property from people without compensation.
A democratic transition to communism would be more like the plan that Sweden almost got started on in the 1970s. It involved a gradual buying out of owners at companies. I don't remember the specifics, but it was something like taxes being used to gradually buy out owners. It was sort of a nationalization as you have seen many places, but where the owners became the employees rather than the state.
The problem with insisting that the millions who died under Stalin and Mao must be attributed to communism as a primary cause is that then you get into a double standard if you don't do the same for capitalist democracies. The US, UK and many European great powers have cause the death of tens of millions through invasions and colonization. Are we to put those deaths on the tabs of capitalism and democracy?
I pretty sure most proponents of democracy and capitalism would object loudly and produce a list of reasons why it was "different" back then. I am doing the same with communism. You got to put things in context. Otherwise one can just cherry pick to make whatever ideology one dislikes look bad and make whatever ideology one likes rose tinted.
