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John brown was a violent abolitionist before the civil war. He led the raid on a military base called Harper’s ferry to get guns to trigger a slave revolt. Maybe with some kalishnikovs (ak-47) they might have been able to succeed.

On your first point you should read the question of nationalities which Lenin wrote shortly before his death. He clearly wanted to take down the tsarist apparatus after all the existential threats to the Soviet Union were gone.

Where did Luxembourg say Lenin was trying to recreate the tsarist empire? She was critical of the Bolsheviks authoritarianism but If anything she was also critical of the Bolsheviks limited allowance for nationalism and would’ve suppressed nationalism further, she was a strict internationalist.

If they did dismantle the state apparatus before the Nazis came what do you think would happen? The Soviet Union was barely able to turn the tide of the war with a united front and 20 years of intense, brutal industrialization. If they had dismantled the state and Russia was just a bunch of rural locally run villages in a loose confederation in 1939 the Nazis would’ve steamrolled over them and genocided the population.

He did but not nearly as much as Stalin.

Equating soviet style communism and fascism completely ignores the base. Yes the structure of the government is similar but in fascism the underlying economic system is still capitalistic and market based, while in Soviet style communism it is nationalized and planned. It also ignores ideology, fascism is about asserting national and racial supremacy to the detriment of inferior races, communism is about seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie and giving control to the proletariat. Even if the government structure is similar, the policies those governments enact are wildly different. Thats like saying reddit and lemmy are the same because they both work on up voted content percolating up.

Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin’s plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn’t as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn’t have killed and gulaged millions of “suspicious” people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.

With any of them the super structure of the state and how it’s organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can’t say one is and one isn’t.

If your looking for modern day examples, the zapatistas are a pretty good example.

For historical examples you can look to the Paris commune, civil war Barcelona, the original zapatista movement.

local communities managing themselves (something like city states maybe?) and their relations to other communities

Your describing a Soviet you filthy commie.

But for real what your describing is communism as marx originally thought of it. The one example marx gave as a model for what communism would be was the Paris commune which adheres to a lot of what you said. Most leftist agree that that’s the end goal it’s just a matter of how to get there. Lenin originally pitched the Soviet Union as just that, a bunch of local councils(soviets) freely cooperating and making there own rules. He saw how the Paris commune’s openness and military indecisiveness led to it being brutally suppressed though and wanted an interim top down dictatorship and rapid brutal industrialization to handle this threat. The threat never went away though, first with the Nazis almost annihilating them then the u.s. pointing nukes at them, so neither did the dictatorship.

Their end goal was still avowedly the same though, and communism, to me at least, is about that goal. Their are a bunch of different theoretical paths to it, and there’s tonnes of infighting as to which ones the best, but all communists agree that the commune/Soviet/city state should have all the power.

It’s not a matter of doing work, more who you work for. If we all worked for each other and collectively decided what to produce instead of the capitalist class we’d all maybe decide to work 20 hours less a week if that means a small minority of people didn’t get jets, yachts, mansions etc.

Yes the middle class liberals and some workers viewed republicanism aspirationally but most of the peasents and serfs didn’t. During the French revolution a lot of the peasents resented the republicans in Paris, mostly for religious reasons, shown most clearly in the war in the Vendée. Even after the revolution they were against republicanism. They did like the nationalism of the revolution though. This can be seen in first mass election for president in 1848, Louis Napoleon won by a landslide in the countryside off nationalist fervor with little respect for the republic he would soon overthrow. Even after he failed spectacularly and lost the country the first election after he was ousted saw a majority of conservatives and cryptomonarchists elected. Republicanism didn’t lose its reign of terror association in the countryside until the late 1800s.

With regards to those who suffered it was, like in the reign of terror, mostly political dissidents. Don’t get me wrong they did suffer by the guillotine and the gulag, but your average worker by the 1960s had a middling quality of life. The poor especially had better economic security then they do now. Most of the resentment for the Soviet Union was built up on nationalist and anti-imperial lines. Communism came to represent the Russian imperial apparatus that stood over them. Much like republicanism came to be associated with the French empire during it’s domination over Europe. This is why you see a majority of Russians having favorable views of communism, because taking away the nationalist aspiration the only other upside to the post soviet system was the lack of political repression and quality of life improvements, both of which were promised by capitalism but were never fully realized for the average person.

It’s hard to remove the idea from the foreign power trying to force it on you, but not impossible. It’s just a matter normalizing the term and asserting it’s true meaning, separate from the foreign power that tried to use it as a means for imperialism.

You could say the same thing about the terms democracy and republic, which a lot of those regimes you listed also claim they are. There was a time in the early 1800s of Europe where republic and democracy meant the reign of terror in the French revolution, an association strongly encouraged by the ruling monarchs of the time. They didn’t give up on the term though and they reasserted it’s original meaning of government by the people. You can’t let those in power dictate the words you organize around, because they will just define all of them as bad.