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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
3 explanations, in order from what I believe most likely to least:
It could be selection bias. All communist nations originated from dictatorships, and as democracy isn't a key part of communism, any democratic ideas get kicked to the side. It may require a dictatorship in the first place for a communist revolution to occur, as democracy may lead to people feeling content enough with the system that they may not feel it needs fundamental change.
The inevitable need for concentration of power in the hands of a few. Assume that the powerful will always try to concentrate power in their own hands one way or another. Capitalist societies use wealth (a.k.a. purchasing power) to replace the concentration of political power that a dictator would enjoy. As communist societies lack such a mechanism, the powers-that-be can only use political power to force their own superiority.
The centralization of economics leads to concentration of economic power that can be used effectively to buy loyalty from would-be challengers to a dictator's power.
Because people like Communism and they don't understand it, so dictators lie and say they are communist to get in power.
Ultimately, it's because the foundational ideas of communism don't scale.
in theory communism makes resources the property of everyone. In practice, somebody has to manage the resources, and in doing so controls them. if you control the resources, and especially if you have the power to defend that control, you effectively own them. this means that while in theory the people own everything, the truth is that the government owns everything. by similar logic to the first bit, if they own everything then they have control of everything, meaning that they are authoritarian. that being one of the major defining characteristics of a dictator its not far from there to become one even if you aren't trying to. ironically, this is all how it's intended to work save for the dictator part. this is the apple mouse charging port of communism, an intentional thing with a bad result that can't be given up without invalidateing things you have said or done.
also, communism tends to be brought about by coups and coups tend to lead to authoritarian leaders, compounding the above issue.
