Communism

I would consider myself a Marxist, with some asterisks, just not a Marxist-Leninist. The way I intend for communism to be achieved is for there to be an eventual revolution of the workers – realistically, this won't happen in a society where anti-socialist biases are widespread from indoctrination, so the strategy before then would to push for social democracy and better education until people are more receptive to socialist messaging. Post revolution, it becomes more complicated.

I call Marxist-Leninists authoritarian because, from my view, the stateless democratic endgoal of it would be impossible in a capitalist world – as long as there are powerful capitalist countries with anti-socialist, any true democracy attempting to achieve communism is easily sabotaged (looking at Latin America, or Palestine where Israel funded Hamas to sabotage the PLO, or even Iran which wasn't socialist at a but was labelled "socialist" and got a CIA-created monarchist revolution). The conclusion I draw is that in a geopolitical climate like with say, the USA, the only communist countries that can exist are the ones which have a highly authoritarian government and generally violate human rights or basic freedoms a lot.

So, that begs the question you asked, really – if communist worker's democracy is impossible in a world with too much working against socialists, how should one expect to take the leap from a capitalist world to a socialist world? I don't think that's something I have a really definite plan for, but if I had to make an attempt, I think the most likely way is to do what I originally mentioned but on a global scale – getting enough people around the world accustomed to socialists, communists, and even just very left-leaning social democrats, getting them familiar with leftist ideology and grievances, enough for one spark to be enough to start a global revolution all in a relatively short timespan. After that, the immediate priority should be education reforms and pushing education heavily, since I believe full democracy can only work if it's a democracy of the well-informed. There should be armed forced to take care of any imperialist leftovers, but other than that I think it should be a highly centralized worker's democracy, working towards full communism. Now, this almost sounds like democratic/reformist socialism with a revolution thrown in once you get far enough, which would be ironic because I always bash reformist socialism for expecting socialism to be achievable in the framework of a fundamentally capitalist system (which let me be clear, I think is impossible). But looking at the modern capitalist world powers, most of which are rabidly against communist countries, I just don't see a way in which communism can be achieved globally – the USA and Europe probably need a revolution before the world can start transitioning away from capitalism.

When it comes to the difference between authoritarianism and democracy, there's no clear answer, but people in communist countries that have existed have very little influence from voting, and civil liberties are highly restricted (the USSR even started collapsing once people got free speech). I honestly couldn't clearly define the point where it stops being "democracy" – the answer is far more complicated than I could imagine.

As for your initial statement – I have seen a lot of socially conservative communists. The OP of the current post, for example, has a post basically mocking being social progressive because "no war but class war". I think a lot of communists misinterpret this as "the fight for social progress is a distraction from class conflict", when in reality it means something along the lines of "we shouldn't discriminate against each other over ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.", we should work to improve both the rights of marginalized groups and fight the war against capitalism. A really common sentiment I've seen among MLs is basically trying to use " is full of queers and women" as an insult (although the actual wording is... a lot more inflammatory). There seems to be a lot of extremely bigoted rhetoric passed around, although I haven't seen it brought up on Lemmy comments a lot, and I haven't seen enough of communist communities to know how common the sentiment is here.