OK:
a ) Communism as an idea brought forth by Karl Marx: A violet way to prevent the kapitalist from exployting the working class. Wanted to use force to overthrow the elite and put a dictatorship of the proletariat in power - REALLY BAD IDEA.
b ) Communism as the regime in power in different countries: Was only communism in it's name and some superficial claims. Actaully the socialism in ex-Yugoslavia was the closest thing to the real state-communism (and it was a faliour - BTW: Bohor - love your profile picture - I know it's kinda late - but happy aniversery of AVNOJ).
c ) Second international - the main brain behind it was Karl Kautsky. I suggest you read all his work! He tryed to combine the positive ideas of communism (people not exploiting another people, people being together in peaceful and harmonious comunities, people caring for eachother,...) with other positive values of the society (even tried to prove that the original idea of communism is close to the original mathods that the early chritianity used). He was the first to attack Lenin when he imployed terror in the Russian Soviet Republic (even before the first SSSR). His kind of communisim (also referd to as Austromarxism) - a good idea, that could be really build upon.
Personaly I would say I am more of a communist then anything else - but not in the political sence (far away from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mao, Castro,...). The main idea of: Everybody work as much as they can and take as much as they need; might be unpractical but if people would not cheat on the idea (which they would) it would not be a bad world out there. I'd only change the "work as much as you can" into "work as much as it is needed". If all the work would be distributed among all the people who would be able to do it people would need to do less and would be able to gain more.
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