I mean this is neither here nor there, but "communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism" is not a Marxist take, doctrinaire or otherw

I mean this is neither here nor there, but "communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism" is not a Marxist take, doctrinaire or otherwise. If you're a bolshevik, you believe that having and defending a revolution requires a vanguard of devoted party members who run shit. If you're a democratic socialist, likewise you think there needs to be a centralized group in control during the revolution -- you just think that this centralized group should be selected by vote rather than self-appointed. If you're an anarchist (and anarchists are typically not marxist), then you're someone who thinks that managing a revolution without centralized control is possible. And you might be thinking: why on earth would someone argue that putting the centralized party in control is a good idea? There's a simple reason for that: the Paris Commune. Why does the Paris Commune matter? They tried to run a revolution on anarchist lines... and so, instead of immediately marching on Versailles to take down the extant government, they just sort of faffed around in committee meetings until a couple of months later the extant government's army came and killed them all. Leninism (the centralized, essentially authoritarian stuff) was a reaction to that. Because they observed how thoroughly fucked over the Commune was, specifically due to the lack of the sort of centralized control that would get people to take up arms and march on Versailles, the bolsheviks decided that they would do everything they possibly could to centralize the fuck out of everything. And I mean, they lasted for longer than the commune did? At the very least, the bolshevik experiment had some measure of democracy until Stalin came along 7 years after the revolution. So, yeah. people don't believe "communism could work if it could be done without authoritarianism." Instead there's an active debate (running for a century and a half now) about what type and level of centralized control is necessary to do a revolution without being immediately killed by the old government, and what level of centralized control is so hyper-centralized that it makes a Stalin happen.