Come on man, right at the beginning of the article:

> He was an active communist back when communism was almost a religion, but tore up his party membership card when the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.

> He was an active communist back when communism was almost a religion

You mean, exactly like fascism? Pictures / visits to concentration camps had the effect on the nazis that the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia had on communists. Funny how neither the Holodomor nor the Chinese cultural revolution nor the Killing Fields moved the needle much.

He fought for his homeland, and later saw the errors of his ways. I can respect that.

We shouldn't celebrate any particular ideologies but we should celebrate the fact that José Epita had peoples best interest at heart and tried to change it for the better.

Please note that nowhere in the article communism is actually celebrated, not even in the snippet you posted. So not sure why you got that takeaway.

He didn't had the effort to read the article. If not, he will found this :

> "In 1968, Epita tore up his communist membership card while watching Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring on TV."

Every body should remember that one thing it's communism and other authoritarian communism regimes. I'm pro-communist, but I'm against any kind of authoritarian government (and so, I see Stalin as a hideous dictator like was Hitler or Franco). And isn't something incompatible, as I believe that some kind of communist democratic government can be possible.

There are only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale: free markets and physical power.

Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power.

Naval! Not sure if HN has really gone down the drain, or if this would always have been downvoted.

Hypothesis: nerds are bad at politics because they lack intuition for game theory.

> I'm pro-communist, but I'm against any kind of authoritarian government

Communism necessarily implies authoritarian government. What you think you believe in is a false utopianism due to a lack of erudition.

> Communism necessarily implies authoritarian government

What? Since when and in what way?

The common definition of Communism is where all participants are sharing the ownership of production and trying to remove things like money and financial class. Many ideas in Communism in fact assumes the absence of any kind of central government.

Then that the states that have tried "Communism" in modern haven't actually aimed for any of the original goals is less important. But let's not change meaning of words willy nilly like you did here.

The OP's claim that communism implies authoritarian government is likely based on the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marxism, and this is a quite common view [0]:

"In The Road to Serfdom (1944), the Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that the dictatorship of the proletariat likely would destroy personal freedom as completely as does an autocracy. The European Commission of Human Rights found pursuing the dictatorship of the proletariat incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights in Communist Party of Germany v. the Federal Republic of Germany (1957)."

Of course, Marxism is just one version of communism among several.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

Seems to me like network effects and a command economy would fall well under the definition of authoritarian.

Even that is frequently (and often wilfully) misinterpreted.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is contrasted to the current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It just means that workers are collectively the ruling class in socialist countries, as opposed to owners (of capital) in capitalist countries.