Communism is a great idea - in theory

Once in a while I encounter people, primarily on social media, but sometimes even in person, who say that they are communist and talk about the communist ideals and how they think we should all embrace communism.

One common aspect of all of these people that none of them have ever lived in a "communist" country.

I'd say the idea of communism is great in theory, however in practice none of the implementation have worked and almost none of them were good for the people.

The best proximation to the ideal I know of are the Kibbutzes in Israel, however

• They are small - only a few have more than 2000 inhabitants - definitely not country sized.
• They were created by volunteers - people were not forced to live according to these ideas.
• Their communist aspect have largely disappeared by the end of the 20th century.

All the other communist experiments have quickly turned into dictatorships. (See Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea for a few examples.)

So when these days someone promotes the communist ideas I need to assume that either the person is actually clueless about the history of actual communist regimes or that they actually think living in a dictatorship would be a better idea than what they have now.

I'd say they should be required to go and live in North Korea for a year and if they manage to come back then they can start to advocate for communism. If they still want to.