"Imagine no possession" --John Lennon
Communism (from communis -- common, shared) is a very broad name most generally given to the idea that sharing and equality should be the basic values and principles of a society; as such it is a leftist idea falling under socialism (if that we take to mean a "focus on wellbeing of people at large"). Many branches, theories, political ideologies and schools of thought have come to grow from this concept, Marxism, Leninism, anarcho communism, primitive communism, Christian communism and Buddhist communism to name only a few -- of course, some of them good and other ones evil, only exploiting the word "communism" as a kind of brand (as also often happens e.g. with anarchism). Unfortunately after the disastrous failure of the violent pseudocommunist revolutions of the 20th century, most people came to equate the word communism with oppressive militant regimes, and so we shall stress that communism is NOT equal to USSR, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism or any other form of pseudocommunism, on the contrary such regimes were rather hierarchical, nationalist, cruel, nonegalitarian and violent, we might even say downright fascist. Really there is very little difference between Marxist and far right regimes, the difference is essentially just in the name, and so we MUST NEVER think of communism as of Marxism. As for LRS, we embrace TRUE communism and aim to make unconditional, selfless sharing the basis of our less retarded society -- ideologically this is probably closest to anarcho communism. Yes, large communist societies have existed and worked, for example the Inca empire worked without money and provided FREE food, clothes, houses, health care, education and other products of collective work to everyone, according to his needs. Many other communities also work on more or less communist principles, see e.g. Jewish kibbutz, Sikhist langar, free software, or even just most families for that matter. Of course, it's not claimed these societies and groups are or were ideal, just that the principles of communism DO work in practice, that communism should be considered a necessary attribute of an ideal society and that such society is not impossible due to impossibility of communism because as we see, it is indeed possible (if anything, only its scalability gets really questioned, and even if global communism was proven to be impossible, who says we are obliged to establish a single global society?). The color red is usually associated with communism and the "hammer and sickle" (U+262D) is taken as its symbol, though that's mostly associated with the evil communist regimes and so its usage by LRS supporters is probably better be avoided.
Common ideas usually associated with communism are (please keep in mind that this may differ depending on the specific flavor of communism):
TODO
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