There are things like anarcho-communism which center themselves around smaller communes and less state power. I'm not sure whether I agree if authoritarianism is inherently bad, if we define it as "the state having a lot of power" and the converse of libertarianism and not "the state existing as some oppressive force against the people". Redistribution of wealth doesn't necessarily require state power anyway - in most flavors of communism, the redistribution of wealth occurs by some revolution of the masses, not through the state.
Communism is just about achieving a classless society that operates entirely for the good of the masses. Just because communist regimes have done really forgeted up stuff (and, I'd like to add capitalist countries have also done horrible things, they just survived the cold war) doesn't mean the core of the ideology is bad. Whereas I think the core of national socialistsm is horrible, because its based on psuedoscience and conspiracy in order to justify ethnic cleansing.
I don't really have a great answer for you though, I once commented "i'm basically a communist" on this forum but in reality I don't feel like I've done enough reading to justify calling myself that. I still don't have a lot of great answers or justification for the application of communist ideology, which is what makes these threads kind of annoying to me - even if I wanted to get rhetorically dogpiled by a bunch of angry libertarian teenagers on the internet, I probably wouldn't be able to make a very good case for anything, and that's frustrating. I'm going to do more actual activist work and research to figure out what I actually have faith in, and I hope to be a better representative of the left after that. If you want a really good answer, I'd suggest /r/DebateCommunism.
This exactly. national socialistsm is based around racism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and is
inherently totalitarian. Assuming you think all of those things are evil, that makes national socialistsm automatically evil. Communism has none of those aspects; the core idea is simply the establishment of a classless society. Many communist regimes have done terrible things, but this doesn't make the ideology inherently evil. Many communists vehemently oppose totalitarianism, the Soviet Union, and other similar regimes, and opt for other variants such as anarcho-communism, syndicalism, or left-communism.
In my eyes, there's pretty much no question about this. Anyone who thinks communism is inherently worse than national socialistsm either doesn't understand that communism is not the same as Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China, or is a national socialist sympathizer anyway. I don't entirely blame people for this, though, since schools rarely make the distinction, and many historical communist regimes were of a Stalinist bent (largely due to Soviet influence). On the other hand, if the poll was about Stalinism, Maoism, or Leninism in general, you could have a decent debate.
how about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy?
Not really relevant. Social democracy is a relatively moderate ideology that hasn't been accused of many atrocities. Many perfectly sane, successful, and democratic countries are social democracies (see: Nordic countries).
Poll