No, that's the fake claim that nobody believes these days. Which is why no nations are rushing out to become Communistic: as an ideology it didn't just lose, it got completely demolished. The ideology espoused was never actually sincere in any regard, it was merely a fraudulent cover for a power grab by the party elite, which is why the claims of Communism have always contradicted the reality perfectly.

There has never been a single implementation of Socialism - including Communism and Fascism - that has delegated any power to the workers. It has always and will always be held by the party dictatorship. No property, including the means of production, is ever held by the workers, it is always controlled by the elite of the party dictatorship for the purpose of plundering profit and enslaving the workers. Which simultaneously explains the extreme poverty Socialism has produced every time it has been attempted.

You're conflating Marxist-Leninism (and Stalinism, Maoism, etc. they tend to get named after their dictator) with communism. You've just demonstrated that most of the countries that call themselves communist or socialist... weren't. That doesn't change the word or its definition.

The Free Territory and Catalonia were libertarian socialist communities. They were betrayed by Bolsheviks and Stalinists respectively.

> Which simultaneously explains the extreme poverty Socialism has produced every time it has been attempted.

Britain forcibly deindustrialized India, reducing it from the most productive region of the world to one of the poorest. This, somehow, is not an indictment of capitalism, but all the dictatorships that call themselves communist are an indictment of communism. I don't care at all to defend the likes of the USSR or their satellite puppet governments, but you're drunk on propaganda if you think any of these criticisms you've leveled cannot be made against the so-called "free world".