What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.

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.

A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:

- 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.

Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or it is not communism...

For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".

I suspect there was a sneaky edit between the time of my reply and the time you read it.