"Communism" is being discussed, and implicitly Soviet communism, which ruled a gigantic portion of both Europe and northern Asia for several decades, producing a very definable system of rewards and disincentives, both legal and otherwise.
In other words, real communism has never been tried.
What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and that there is a vast number of communist ideologies outside of ML. You're free to consider those equally bad if you please. I've not made any argument about that either.
It is a fascinating picture of exactly what keybored argued that the immediate reaction of people is to drag out strawmen like this.
Color me intrigued. Any good books to recommend?
This Wikipedia list is reasonably comprehensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_ideologies
The main split is between "right-communists" and "left-communists" (hence Lenins "Left Wing Communism: An infantile disorder"; the Bolsheviks were considered "right"), where the "left" are those who rejected ML/Leninism on the basis of "democratic" centralism and the idea of a vanguard party.
Most of the anti-ML ideologies like council communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian Marxism are in that category.
Perhaps texts by Joseph Dejacques, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman would give a reasonable introduction to those.
It is irrelevant if it is "real communism" or not - it remains an objective fact that all of these regimes have derived their ideology from one very specific branch. In fact, all of them make a big fuzz over exactly that, and all of them had a history of brutally persecuting supporters of other communist ideologies.
You don't need to support any of them to recognise this. I did not make an argument about the desirability of any of them at all, very intentionally.
How, exactly, is it you imagine this is a "No true Scotsman"?
What I have argued is, if anything, that there are lots of Scotsmen, and trying to reduce them all to one is meaninglessly reductive.
In other words, I've indirectly explicitly argued against No true Scotsman.
- Communist Totalitarian Thinking
- “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here
My emphasis. You seem intent on attacking strawmen.