Imagine a world where you could say "Communism is bad" with the same impunity as you can say "Naziism is bad"...
I can imagine a world where "Communism", like "Naziism", was a label for a single system of government implemented by a single group of people in one time and place in history, with no theoretical model (and prior practical advocacy) that shared the same name but had substantial differences.
OTOH, that world is very much different from the real world, so when one wants to criticize one of the things called Communism, one needs to be careful in identifying which it is, since there are multiple of them, and they have different traits.
What? Failed to realize? Leninist vanguardism was, viewed optimistically, a deliberate modification of key elements of Marxism to address the fact that Lenin wanted to avoid the mess of actually having to have a mature capitalist society with the features Marx saw the transition from capitalism to communism through socialism requiring, what with Russia not having gotten there yet.
Viewed cynically, it was a modification that allowed using the language of Marxism -- an idea that had quite a bit of appeal internationally at the time -- to implement a centralized authoritarian dictatorship governed by a narrow elite, as well as providing the cover of a superficial theory that provided a veneer of an excuse for how "Marxism" could be applied a country with what was largely, in Marxist economic terms (not traditional political terms), a feudal rather than capitalist system.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that Lenin's divergences from Marx were unintentional.
What I see is the root of Communism; "No True Communist" is simple deflection.
Either Communism is an unusually badly-designed system, more than usually volatile and likely to implode by accident; or it was built to implode on purpose, using good intentions as cover for a world-historic power grab. There's no way to prove which of these theories is true -- but that says something pretty unflattering right there -- but either way, it's rather horrifying that there are still people out there who go to bat for it, some of whom aren't even on Vladimir Putin's payroll...
What if I believe the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East?
If you mean to provide a reason that I should believe the thing you suggest, perhaps an argument and/or evidence supporting that proposition would be in order.
Communism as anyone has ever tried to implement it, or has talked about implementing it in pratice, is a system of totalitarian social control masquerading as an economic system.
The only difference between Nazism and Communism in practice has been whether "right genes" are defined by race or by your ancestors' professions and social classes. The totalitarianism is pretty similar, really.
(As a side note, "communism" as practiced in the Soviet Union, the version I'm most familiar with, had quite its share of racism as well, both official and just people on the street.)
The terminological confusion is unfortunate on the one hand and great for motte-and-bailey arguments[1] on the other.
[1] As described http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf and discussed at a bit more length at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word... . Note that such arguments are very common. They are not limited to postmodernism or the fringe elements of the social justice movement by any means; I see them all the time on both the left and the right.
No, Stalinism does not represent communism as a whole and Stalin was very controversial even at that time.
"Communism did not work in practice" - by which metric ? The Soviet Union transformed itself into a world superpower from an backward agricultural undeveloped nation in just 40 years while fighting two world wars and losing almost all their male population. That in itself is a pretty amazing feat in itself. Not to take into account the countless inventions we owe to the Soviet Union today, it was a very productive place for scientists.
Ironically, it's the social policy of the Soviet Union which had the most issues since during most of its history, it was a brutal dictatorship sending opponents (and even random people) to Gulags.
Catch-up industrialization is easy; many societies have done it, dictatorships or not. Staying developed is harder; the USSR, like Argentina and North Korea, first developed and then regressed, which is not a particularly impressive feat. Meanwhile, China's development was stalled for 50 years because their implementation of Communism was more than usually destructive; it wasn't until Deng Xiaopang renounced Maoism and overthrew the Maoist die-hards that China finally began to industrialize.
Nor are impressive feats acceptable when they're built on bones; or was the opium trade justified because of all the money it made for the UK and US?
And the GULAG proper existed until 1961, with forced-labor camps for political prisoners (so, GULAG but on a smaller scale) existing until 1987; likewise, the VChK and its many renamings persisted for the whole history of the USSR, and I think the FSB is descended from them -- although they're evidently much less bad.