(Crosspost from /badeconomics who told me this sub is more fitting for this kind of post after all)

I was searching for some political cartoons on the internet and came across this site that stereotypes, generalizes and simplifies economic politic theory so terribly that it's obvious the author must have never done any research. Otherwise I don't know why they'd ever propagate this view that reminds me of Cold War-era rhetorics that have almost become a cliché now. (Doesn't mean that they aren't still popular with a lot of people, otherwise we wouldn't have this happen, for example)

"Characteristics of Communism: little freedom- job chosen for you, can't say bad things about government, you get what you stand in line for"

Explanation: While this might have been the case to some extent in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was no shining example of communism in practice.

They failed to establish a communist society, which is supposed to be both state- and classless, and therefore a state like the Soviet Union could not have been communist by definition, and they even admitted to that themselves, so it's inaccurate to use them in this comparison.

A communist society is supposed to have free access to an abundance of goods and services, a post-scarcity economy, which is the opposite of "you get what you stand in line for". This is supposed to be achieved with large amounts of (planned) automation, which in turn is supposed to make most jobs superfluous and let you decide how to spend your time yourself, with hobbies, voluntary work or whatever else, which again is the opposite of what the site claims "little freedom - job chosen for you".

As for the "can't say bad things about government" part, such a society would in theory, no longer having any undemocratic workplace environments and having no need for a state that enforces the capitalist hierarchies not even have any such institution to say bad things about.

So that's how communism in theory is supposed to be like.

Now granted, Marxist communism does advocate for a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a "transitional stage", which by force is supposed to abolish capitalism and socialize/nationalize all "means of production".

But even if you grant that the site then was probably referring to that as "communist policies" or "policies supposed to establish a communist society", it would still be very much inaccurate to equal "communism" with these things.

This is because on one side, the Soviet Union arguably can't even be called socialist (or having succeeded in created a "dictatorship of the proletariat"), given how little say the workers and employees actually had. The thing that changed was that rather than having many different economic actors there was just one, the state.

And even arguing that the claims would still be justified nonetheless, because "this is what trying to follow the tenets of communism leads to", that would still be arguing in rather bad faith.

For one, the Soviet Union followed a very distinct theory of communism, namely Leninism and some other -isms named after famous (or maybe rather infamous) Soviet politicians, which other attempts at establishing a communist society have not done and would not need to do. (And even if they were to, they could maybe find something to avoid the pitfalls the Soviet Union fell into, after all, we don't have a large sample size on the results of communist revolutions and can't say for sure it would always necessarily turn out like this, though admittedly this could go either way)

Instead, you could try and put another communist theory into practice, for example either the original, "orthodox" Marxism, or more importantly, anarchist-communism, which as all anarchistic political theories is all about having no coercive hierarchies whatsoever. Even having any government whatsoever that is separated from the general population and could tell you what job to take or punish you for saying "bad things" would be tantamount to this theory.

Of course, it could be argued that society in general would take over this instead, but that's not a particularly strong counter-argument. A planned economy, even one that doesn't take place in the kind of post-scarcity economy described above, doesn't necessarily mean that you can't choose your job yourself. In such an anarchist society, production and other economic procedures might be planned, but you could still decide where to work yourself. You don't even have to assume a hypothetical society, given how Catalonia for example was controlled by anarchists for some time during the Civil War in Spain.

Finally, there are (democratic) states ruled nowadays or in the past by Marxist parties (for example Nepal or Moldova), where none of this applies, too.

Tl;dr: Soviet Union, which this seems to be referring to wasn't communist, and their attempts at bringing about communism aren't the only forms of communism that exist, making the claims unjustified generalizations made in bad faith.