I will mostly ignore the first part of your response because I don't think there are good arguments that these things are inherent to communism. Especially viol

I will mostly ignore the first part of your response because I don't think there are good arguments that these things are inherent to communism. Especially violence against the population seems a rather poor argument because this is what happen when a ruling class tries to force a system onto the people against their will and that is easily avoided if the people are those who want the system and it is of course also independent of the system the ruling class wants to implement. To be explicit, the parts that are inherent include purging the "capitalist class" [...] Yes, but »purging« has an unnecessary negative connotation, it sounds a bit like just killing everyone. [...] the central planning of the economy [...] No, communism and free markets would work together just fine. [...] the complete rejection of alternative political beliefs [...] No and yes. Whatever political beliefs you hold, you will usually hold that your believes are more true or better than all others. So this is no more true or false for communism than for any other set of political believes. [...] the complete rejection of [...] democratic politics [...] No, why would that be? There are as many things in a communist society as in any other society that require making decisions and that may have competing solutions. Why couldn't you make them with a democratic process? Heck, you could democratically decide to become a communist society and democratically decide to stop being a communist society in case you are not happy with the result. And even if you deemed communism untouchable and would insist that communism must not be subject to the democratic process, even then a huge number of things like health, foreign, or environmental policies are still independent from your economical system to varying degrees and could still be subject to the democratic process. But that is of course a silly idea. By the way, note that communism is a heavily overloaded term especially if left unqualified. You can certainly find people that believe communism requires central planing, that communism requires a violent revolution, or any other combination of things. So you could certainly support some if not all of your points by just referring to specific groups with specific sets of believes. When I refer to communism without qualification then I mean the very essence of it in the sense that it is [almost] universally accepted as an aspect of communism and not specific to some variant or interpretation of communism.