Let's talk about communism and the left

1. Communists envision a worker-controlled society without money, classes, or large-scale ownership of assets. It's an extension of socialism, where workers control the means of production (in layman's terms, democratically control business). According to Marxist theory, a country first becomes capitalist, then state socialist, then communist. As you might realise, no country has ever reached the third, and its debatable if any have ever reached the second. They were "communist" ideologically, not in mode of governance.
2. A combination of general anti-socialist sentiment and warranted concern about the USSR's historical crimes. There is a dispute between three sides on this issue:
   • Those who say that those atrocities are inevitable when aiming for socialism/communism - therefore those ideologies are bad
   • Those who think the crimes can be avoided via a different mode of socialism. That's me. The USSR and most socialist countries largely came from one socialist school of thought, but there are many others: anarcho-communism, syndicalism, democratic socialism, market socialism, left communism, etc.
   • And those who think the atrocities were good actually. You definitely don't want to be this one.
3. Most Marxists are communists, as that is what Marx advocated for. Your friend is most likely one; most communists or socialists would agree with that about Biden, though some would still not vote for him. As for Biden, he's a centre-left liberal, and is most definitely not loved by the radical left.
4. Centrism is a thing. However, defining yourself by what you've not can lead to problems.
5. I personally don't think that claim is borne by empirical evidence. And regulation is definitely not communist by itself - an actual commie would want to abolish Nestlé or put it under worker control, not regulate it. Some social democrats,* for instance, would support heavy regulation of industry, but communists claim that their efforts are futile and will be undone.
6. See my answer to question (1.) They were definitely ideologically communist, but hadn't reached the ideal communist society they purportedly were fighting for. However, some communists and socialists would claim that they were ideologically perverted by corruption and malign interests, and therefore not very communist in practice.
7. China claims to be ideologically communist and striving towards a socialist society. However, it has pretty weak corporate regulations and and poor health-care; which conflicts with its stated leftist ideals. They claim that they will eventually switch to socialism once they are economically developed; there is little evidence to support this IMO, especially when it's not in the ruling party elite's interest to do so. There is also Cuba, which does have some of the equality many socialists etc. fight for, but is marred by authoritarianism and suppression of dissent.
8. Not sure what to recommend here. If you want to hear the Communist point of view, the Manifesto is a quick, easy read, though a bit outdated in a few regards and obviously biased. But I'm guessing you want a more neutral introduction to the topic; unfortunately, I don't know any that are reasonably approachable.

* A much milder leftist position.

all this talk about (failed) authoritarian communist regimes. You all forget why we never saw a "real" communist or properly socialist nation. The US of fucking A.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America

Nearly every country in Latin America has a history of a horrible right wing or facist us-supported dictatorship which came to power with the help of the us, after socialist won elections, revolutions or coups.
I'm not saying that these would or could have been "good" socialist states, but with a high probability they would have been better than what they got instead thanks to us-interventionism. Fuck the us administration.

Remember Allende and all the possibilities we could have had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

what really is communism?

A scapegoat. Like you said it's all over the place, that's because people (US politicians, specifically) just use that word when they want to point fingers and say "this is bad".

Honestly, Wikipedia is a pretty good read if you want to learn some of the fundamentals. Then sure, books straight from the horse's mouth can help fill in the blanks, though those materials won't necessarily talk about the legitimate problems of communism (the big one being resilience against corruption).

I'll answer some of your questions.

Why almost every average citizen (americans and brazilians at least) says it's bad?

Because of the cold war. Americans, in recent history, basically were at war with "The Communists", and for a pretty long time. I don't know about Brazil, I suspect it's continental spillover. In Europe, "communism" is not a dirty word, it's just an ideology we consider not worth pursuing.

My best friend is a school teacher and is a marxist. He says Joe Biden is still a terrible choice, but the only alternative to Trump and he is not a communist at all, but i keep hearing people call him a commie. WTF is he? If possible, ELI5 what he is and what he stands for.

Biden is solidly a US democrat. On the US scale, he is on the left but very close to the center. He's not fiscally conservative, but as close to a classical republican otherwise as a democrat could get.

People call him a commie because "commies bad, and democrats bad, ergo democrats commies". Just ignore those people, they lack some fundamental thinking skills.

Why there is right x left and no place for something in between? Is there a need to everything be one side or another to work? There is no middle ground in politics? Grabbing aspects from the left and from the right and co-existing in the same government is a problem?

There absolutely is a center. I'm a centrist myself, though a European one (which means very far left on the US scale, with some different ideas about spending). It's also worth bringing up the Political Compass, which establishes an additional dimension to the 1-dimensional right-left scale. It's not perfect, I wouldn't even call it "good", but I'd definitely say it's better than the right/left system.

There's another hidden side to your question which is "why are there always two, and only two, parties". This isn't true of every country or every political system. And to answer that, say hello to the following playlist of CGPGrey videos:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNCHVwtpeBY4mybPkHEnRxSOb7FQ2vF9c

A lot of people really think letting companies run wild and free is good. That the market will regulate itself. I think this is naive, because even now they do some really shady stuff. Just look at Nestle.
Why people say that and is there some truth to this that i can't see? Is regulating companies a communist thing?

This is a very big question to answer. "The market regulates itself" is a belief in a property of a "free market". The core idea is that in a "truly free market", companies will compete with each other, and optimizing for success means optimizing for the customers, and ultimately the "bad companies" will be out-competed by the better ones. The free market definition is supposed to be specifically about pricing, but it's often used to talk about non-price regulations in a more general sense like you brought up.

I'm not explaining it very well, but every absolute is flawed anyway. There is some soundness to it though, and an argument a lot of republicans bring up is that too many regulations kill the incentives to enter the market, and raise the barrier of entry to compete with established companies (which will have an easier time to comply, because they have more money). There's also the argument that regulations are a circumvention game. There's a lot to it - once again, a good place to start is Wikipedia.

What books about the left and the right i should read? Nothing too dense.

The Dictator's Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. If you only read one book about politics in your life, make it this one.

In brevity, answering 1-3: Communism is a political philosophy which emphasizes a communal approach to problems. It's also associated with social security, worker owned means of production and lots more. It gets a bit muddy because many past governments were called or called themselves communist or it's little cousin, socialism. Examples include cuba, PR China, Soviet Union, North Korea, even Nazi Germany. These all have in common that they're dictatorships, hence people call communism bad. If you go back to the guy (Marx) though, he'd argue that these dictatorships are just bourgeois by a different name. Contrast that with the northern european social democracies. Definitely not dictatorships and they're doing very well for their citizens. Something being called communism doesn't make it bad, or antidemocratic, or even communist. Note that there is also anarcho-communism and democratic socialism. Nevermind that china e.g. isn't very communist at all anymore.

Now, ever since communism has been around, everything that is bad and is to the left of the point of view is therefore called communist. You can see that the term communist loses it's utility. I'd recommend treating any use of the word with scepticism. Instead, what's instructive is to look at the way a policy treats democracy and how it deals with social inequality. If someone yells "communist dictatorship", but you can't see democracy being eroded, then that's hogwash. If someone yells "these communists just wanna laze around and have actual working people pay for their expenses" - look at how and why money changes hands: Is the proposal about making billionaires pay more such that we can fund welfare for those who have been made redundant in their workplace by automation? Maybe not such a bad idea.

As for 4: There's generally a second axis: Authoritarian vs Libertarian. I'd argue there's more axes you could set up as needed, but generally, most claims of communism towards a Lib-Left position are somewhat moronic.

For question 5: Yes. If you need more ammo in discussions or a more formal way of talking about this, might I suggest the term "externality" from economics? It refers to costs that an action incurs that are not applied to the person doing the action. Pollution is the prime example: If regulation is inadequate, my company can pour heavy metal salts into the rivers without punishment. This is advantageous to me, as it is cheaper than other disposal. So when I make a product, the calculation is cost = material + labor + capital. In actuality it is cost = material + labor + capital + cleanup. But if you don't pay for the cleanup, you can offer your product cheaper or make more profit. In such a situation it is economically infeasible to do the cleanup, because then the competition will be cheaper. And someone will have to do the cleanup, usually the government and therefore the taxpayer. By regulating the ways waste can be disposed of, we are internalising the externality, i.e. putting it back into the calculation of the company. That way, we get prices to where they should be.

Regulating companies where the market fails to do so is not communism, it's just slightly tamed capitalism. Who owns the means of production, i.e. the machines and factories? The workers or the billionaire class? Thought so.

As for 6 and 7, this entirely depends on the type of communism you refer to. Did we try maoism or stalinism? Yeah. Did we try marxism where the people own the means of production in an actual democracy? Not to my knowledge. You could argue that a cooperative in a social democracy is the best we got here.

Lots of people gave great answers, I'll give this a crack. At risk of going in with the knowledge level of Jordan Peterson (I've literally only read The Communist Manifesto and the first chapter of "The Conquest of Bread"), I'll attempt to throw my entire single semester of comparative economics at this.

What exactly is communism in layman terms? Because for me it's all over the place. Everything that seems to care about people is put into the communist basket, but a lot of people call it a dictatorship. ELI5.

There is no lay definition, which is why it's a boogeyman. The simplest explanation is "workers own the means of production," but in practice that generally tends to be the state owns the means of production as a representation of the people, which is what largely causes the charge of regulation being communist to come up. This may be the issue of relying on a vanguard party, but we're leaving lay discourse here.

Why almost every average citizen (americans and brazilians at least) says it's bad?

The Cold War. We had American communists, there was a large party of them, but a lot of the west's response to communism is directly in response to how communism has existed, usually in a totalitarian regime that never shed its authoritarian government to reach Marx's idea of a communist society.

My best friend is a school teacher and is a marxist. He says Joe Biden is still a terrible choice, but the only alternative to Trump and he is not a communist at all, but i keep hearing people call him a commie. WTF is he? If possible, ELI5 what he is and what he stands for.

Marx was, by and large, a philosopher. He felt communism was inevitable, and wrote heavily about that (the Communist Manifesto, Das Kaptial I-IV, and most of his body of work that wasn't about sociology or theology, the latter being what he got his doctorate in). He was also something of a "failed" economist, if only in the sense that he was never good at math, and his analysis was based on theory that later Marxian economists later formalized mathematically. There were socialist economists before him, and especially during his time, and he had falling-outs with most of them at one point or another because he felt they weren't radical enough, as they typically called for a socialized free market structure that protected workers from exploitation while protecting their rights as provided by liberal philosophy.

Back to "Marxist but not Communist." Marx was a philosopher. Even I'm philosophically aligned with Marx, thing some form of socialism is a solid goal and in general agreeing with many of his opinions, but I don't think communism is a good pursuit. My issues are external to Marx's philosophy, largely to do with issues of history and sociology.

Why there is right x left and no place for something in between? Is there a need to everything be one side or another to work? There is no middle ground in politics? Grabbing aspects from the left and from the right and co-existing in the same government is a problem?

This happens all the time. In Sweden, even the fascists like the socialized parts of their government, but want to protect these institutions for true Swedes. Nazi Germany was built around a concept sometimes referred to as "Herrenvolk Socialism," basically socialism for the right groups of people. Neither of these are middle-grounds, though, they're still far-right.

The other issue is socialsim, liberalism (in the Enlightenment/European sense) and conservatism are all at some odds with each other. I think you could leverage socialism for something of a truly liberal society, but conservatism is where liberal philosophy goes to die, either by being taken to an extreme (libertarianism) or simply murder (passing laws to restrict people because you disagree with their right to do the thing). Even the liberal philosophers saw some need for behavioral restriction to protect the rights and sovereignty of others.

My answer here isn't great, but it's mostly to do with the fact that we aren't all (me, especially) philosophers. We don't give a lot of time to thinking about these issues, so we often parrot what we hear.

A lot of people really think letting companies run wild and free is good. That the market will regulate itself. I think this is naive, because even now they do some really shady stuff. Just look at Nestle.

This is a bastardization of early capitalist economic philosophy. Adam Smith wrote about many mechanics of capitalism, and the requirements for it to work properly, which are about as stringent as Marx's rules for true communism. The expectation is that when these rules are all met, it'll work out. The common assumption today is there was a time when this worked out. Even Smith saw value in government regulation for protecting workers.. While I've never read Smith, the general vibe I get is he was attempting to describe the rules as he understood them, not say "this is how it should be." Like any philosophical work, there is a lot of nuance that is very easily stripped away, if not warped to match a conflicting agenda.

These rules require such specific conditions as full, equal information for a transaction, a completely unrestricted market, and perfect competition. Even in his day this didn't happen, and he was very critical of how capitalists behaved, particularly with regard to how they treated their workers.

Why people say that and is there some truth to this that i can't see? Is regulating companies a communist thing?

I'll just summarize what I said for brevity: People don't actually read Smith and pull pithy quotes. Regulation is not communist. Arguably anything short of bloody revolution to precede economic restructuring isn't communist.

People say that communism didn't work when implemented and the other side says that it was not really communism. What is the truth here? It didn't work? if not, why it didn't? If it was not true communism, what it was and why it was not true communism?

There is this notion of "state capitalism," that some would charge the Soviet Union of. The state controls the economy, and handles free trade with other nations. Arguably, this is what caused the decades of famine in the SU, when crops were sold off for reinvestment in urban industry, causing mass starvation in rural areas.

China operates many state-run companies, but is fairly unique in that it opened to private enterprise in its port cities in the 80s IIRC. They're more of approaching a free-market economy with an authoritarian government, however. In terms of full communism, I'd say both of these reflect the failure and corruptibility of a vanguard party, which is also something of a necessity, because you need to have people to organize the new economy.

Is there a country that is communist today?

Cuba and Vietnam are as close as you can get to communist states that don't resemble fully authoritarian state capitalist countries. There is some inherent restriction of freedoms, like not speaking out against the government and whatnot, but from what I've heard Vietnam isn't too bad about that, even, being better than many so-called "liberal democracies."

What books about the left and the right i should read? Nothing too dense.

Honestly, if I could answer that, I'd have read them. I'd say just go to the source material. Marx lays out his ideas of communism in the Communist Manifesto, which is short. It provides an interesting ideological crash course. I would recommend Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy, which was the textbook I used in my comparative economics course. You can find the second revision on libgen. It's well-written and mostly fair (they're not too keen on communism and it shows, just be aware of that, but they tried to be fair). Unfortunately, to really understand this stuff beyond the point of pulling random quotes and platitudes, you've got to read some old or at least very dense stuff.

Communism hasn't been a great model for society because anyone that attempted it found that it leads to massive corruption and stagnant business practices. And every flaw that gets introduced to the system seems to compound over time until the point of failure. Another aspect of communist failure is it's outward comparison to other systems. The USSR's failures were created by things like the Cold War and how it compared to the US or China at the time, they were racing to compete with each other which led to lies, corruption and cutting corners, still happening today. Chernobyl was the result of trying to arrogantly compete with others and having a failure in the systematic processes that businesses operate.

As others have said, calling things communist/commie is used as a broad range insult to the world powers we suppose as enemies. It gets attached to everything like Socialism in this derogatory fashion simply because the masses are largely a bunch of idiots who regurgitate what others say without thinking for themselves about the actual differences involved. Poor education in the US for history and government is very prevalent. I don't think we have anything to fear from most of the policies that are being called communist or socialist turning US democracy into an actual communist or socialist state. And I wouldn't view Democratic Socialism as a bad thing so long as it doesn't over extend into every aspect of our free market system. I don't think a perfect Communist or Socialist state would work or be ideal at this point, and that should be simple to understand that everyone has different ambitions in life and some can't help but succumb to greed or desire power, 2 things that don't work in the perfect models. Do you really think you can eradicate that from humanity?

Communism doesn’t work for nation states, that’s all. I’ve yet to see the theory on how communism manages global economic policy or how it manages a military large enough to control its borders or influence protecting trade the way the US blue water Navy can.

Small scale communities? Yeah I think it works fine in that respect. It just makes sense.

I’m more interested in a tightly controlled but capitalist economy with a hell of a lot of social programs; especially UBI when increasing automation makes it wholly necessary.

I also 100% believe communism has never been seriously attempted at a national scale. Authoritarian state dictatorships a plenty though risen under the banner of worker rights, sure.