system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: I think it is wrong to use China or the USSR as citations of communism as a failed system

For those familiar with Marxist communism, the actual communist society is meant to be similar to an anarchy of sorts. Following a revolution in which the extremely developed capitalist society is overthrown there would be an interim period of dictatorship of sorts which would set up the remaining infrastructure needed for the communist society. Following that, the dictatorship would release all power and let the actual communist society start.

Russia had some manufacturing potential, but arguably wasn't nearly ready enough to proceed to the "communist" phase. Lenin and others sort of wanted to jumpstart it and just skip the long capitalistic society part and go straight to communism. That isn't so much the concern here, but rather the fact that they didn't have nearly the manufacturing society to support it.

China was even worse, they barely had any kind of manufacturing potential and were nearly a complete agrarian society. While they managed to move into manufacturing eventually, the sudden change and poor planning was a massive failure.

Additionally, it seems clear that neither of the society's leaders ever planned to actually leave the dictatorship part. Stalin in particular was just far more interested in having absolute power, and there are some similar tendencies in china, although not nearly to the extent of USSR under Stalin. I think this is the strongest point to make, that neither society were communist to begin with, and were merely totalitarian governments that called themselves communist. Although they had a few communistic/socialistic tendencies, that doesn't make their system of government communism.

Its like when N. Korea calls itself democratic, or perhaps better examples being various middle eastern countries that are "democratic" or "The People's Republic" We never cite them as failures of republic governments, so why should we cite Russia or China as communism failures.
gpt
Let's say you are an IT person- who has developed a brand new operating system.  

This operating system is just... it's the tits man.  Once you get it fully functioning and onto everyone's PCs, it's going to be perfect.

Now, there is one flaw- every time you try to load it up onto anyone's system, it doesn't work.  It causes crashes, hardware failure, the like.

Is the system not a failure?  

The road to implementing anything is often as important, if not more important, then maintaining said thing.

If one can not get the system off the ground, then said system is clearly rife with problems.