Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.

This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.

I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.

- People actually living and working in communes.

- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).

- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.

I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).

Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in the long term.

Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).

As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.

Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains and the government is left with the impossible task of regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed prices.