Economy Without Money - Communism in 5 steps

Actually, I would prefer to have more poverty if it meant stronger military.

• Identified "correctly" to the benefit of Lenin's career, and very definitely not correctly when one considers the well-being or welfare of the Russian people.
  

Any example of this in the text?

• The word "communism" refers to the French concept of the commune, which were those villages which sucessfully separated from the oversight capacity of the local baron, noble, or magistrate, the same word from which community is derived.  The local community was envisaged as the fundamental structural element of Communism: 
  
•  Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
  
• Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
  
• A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.
  
• No capitol cities, no centralizations of distribution or power, Communism envisions a landscape of equally distributed suburban communities with a community center making local decsions and promoting local interests.
  

I would argue that, even if he defends worker councils, there's no reason this can't federate into a national democracy. 

• Well, then you would argue without complete comprehension.  Marx and Engels believed in Democracy as the core dynamic of local decsion-making but  Marx and Engels would have considered any "Federation" or "National" anything a failure to realize the promse of Communism.
  

Lenin is, if not a communist, not a fascist. These are literal polar opposites in cultural and economic practice.

• It is true that most definitions of Fascism  include some declaration of anti-communist principle but, like Orwell, I fail to see any important distinction between Hitler's and Lenin's cultural or economic practice.  Both achieved hyper-industrialization through mass slavery, mass murder of the ruling class,  fetishization of bourgeoise nationalist culture, and hyper-industrialization by tanks, planes and machine guns at the expensive of proletariat blood, freedom, equality.  If, for example, we use Umberto Eco's checklist for Fascism, we see that Lenin or Stalin qualify just as easily as Hitler or Castro or Mao.
  
• "The cult of tradition"
  
• "The rejection of modernism"
  
• "The cult of action for action's sake"
  
• "Disagreement is treason" 
  
• "Fear of difference"
  
• "Appeal to a frustrated middle class"
  
• "Obsession with a plot"
  
• "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare"
  
• "Contempt for the weak"
  
• "Everybody is educated to become a hero"
  
• "Machismo"
  
• "Selective populism"
  
• "Newspeak"
  

• Upon arrrival in St. Petersburg  Lenin refused any power sharing coalition with any Leftist or Socialist faction.  Lenin assembled an army, appointed himself chief executive and within weeks began to reject the authority of any polticial entity in Russia, period.  Just because Lenin used the word Communism a lot didn't make him a good practicing Communist any more than Lous XIV's use of the word Christian make that King a good practicing Christian.  Every time Lenin faced a choice between sharing power with anybody and keeping power for himself, Lenin consolidated power under his dictatorship and like any perfect instantiation of Fascism, commenced to murdering everybody that held on to any power apart from his.  There was never a moment in Lenin's life where it might be fairly said that Marx would have been proud of Lenin's work.  Lenin betrayed every Communist principle the moment that principle slowed his rise to de facto Czar.
  

• Less than a year after making himself dictator, Lenin established the Cheka to dispose of all rivalries.  By 1920, Lenin was mass murdering peasant uprisings demanding  the right to publish their opinion.  If Lenin was only propping up the proles until they could stand unopposed, then we should have seen Lenin begin to share power after he successfully mass-murdered hundreds of thousands of poltical rvials but Lenin only consolidated power.  If Lenin was ever sincere about Communism, he would not have snapped up the fanciest palace in Moscow as personal residence while millions of proles starved homeless.
  

The CIA admitted that the Soviet Union was much more democratic than they propagandized, even saying Stalin (leagues more authoritarian than Lenin) was merely the leader of a strong party.

The soviets (worker councils) elected leaders that went to regional areas and it federated up.

Lenin built this system during his rule because he was doing what the dictatorship of the proletariat did, establish communism in a transition phase.

Liberals don't read Hobbes and then ignore the rest of the work that has been created in the philosophy, and to treat communism/leftism the same way ignores how ideas grow and get better.

• Unlike Marx, Hobbes did not coin the term LIBERALISM or set out in detail, as did Marx, the parameters of that concept's theory.  There is a terrible tendency in the oversimplifications of polticial discourse by Twitter, to think of Liberalism, Leftism, Progressivism, Populism, Socialism, Communism, etc as one monolithic principle when they are in fact independent notions all, with contradictions aplenty and a much smaller Venn diagram of agreement than the pundits of FOX News dare suppose.    Some ideas grow and get better but the defintions of terms and concepts should never be as fungible as the fashion of the season.  We know what Marx and Engels called Communism and we know that Marx despised the violent  opportunists who employed  his name to their poltiical self-service.  Some ideas grow old and get better but the notion of dictators is older than humanity itself and the dictator's use of fashionable theories and philosophies to justify coup is as old as words.  We don't do anybody any favors by failing to recognize dictators by their deeds or justify any dictator by arbitrary reductions to label.