Thanks for the endorsement. Sadly, I don't have much endurance, and I write excruciatingly slow, which is why I tend to give up in these discussions.
Neither was I expecting such graciousness in your reply. It's far harder to concede than to convince, particularly in a medium where one is protected by anonymity. My respects to you.
How do you suppress individuality for greater individuality? Are you suggesting that people have different levels of individuality and that some people's individuality may have to be suppressed to increase others'? Can you think of a way in which this makes sense in real life?
Your original argument was that collectivism means obliteration of individuals, whereas communism aims for the good of distinct individuals, so they ought not to be compatible.
If by individuality you mean the liberty to do as one wish, there are two kinds of liberties: the negative, or the freedom from coercion; and the positive, or having the means to actually do anything. Traditionally the right thinks the former is the best way to provide the latter, whereas the left thinks talking about the former is meaningless if the latter is not already provided. Collectivism, as a form of the extreme left, follows the second logic and argues that before collectivisation, most people did not have the means to do what they wish anyway, so they could not enjoy individuality - think of wage slaves. Thus, instead of obliterating the individuals, collectivisation in fact increases individuality. Consider the aforementioned case where a million people have one dollar each, and one has a million dollars. If all wealth are collectivised, everyone would have two dollars, and correspondingly two dollars' worth of individuality.
Again, this isn't necessarily bad logic. If you measure individuality by material, it is clearly better for everyone to have two dollars each, because of diminishing returns of money. So suppressing the liberty, and thereby the individuality, of the millionaire, would increase the overall positive liberty, and so the collected individuality, of everyone. Nor would the right wing refuse similar reasoning. Apart from anarchists, most people would agree that a mad gunman expressing his individuality in a campus is generally a bad thing. Limiting his liberty may be a small cost in comparison with other students' lives, on which their individuality must depend.
Now, Marxism is something different. Because of affluence, nobody has to sacrifice his material needs for expressing his individuality, so the kind of individuality you can have must be greater than absolutely any other societies. There isn't any trade off to be made, unlike under collectivism. This is how Marxism achieves both individual well-being and individuality. Unfortunately, affluence proved to be a bit out of reach, so collectivism remained the norm for communist countries. As it happened, under collectivism it wasn't the case that everyone had two dollars. It was more like everyone still had a dollar each, and the people's commissars owned the remaining million instead of the millionaire who was sent off to a gulag. This is a distinction I want to stress: it is still theoretically possible, though I don't believe it, that a proper collective where everyone has equal share of rights and privileges can deliver prosperity. The misery in Soviet Union and others was not caused by equality. It was caused by inequality disguised as equality (hence harder to protest). Whether a truly equal society can be better than a capitalist society is a separate question.
Coming back to your original point, no, communism did not call for obliteration of individuals. Nor did collectivism claim to do so. Collectivism happened because Marx claimed it was the necessary route towards communism. It went wrong not because the theory was inconsistent, but because the theory did not prepare for when reality diverged from what ought to be according to the theory. Collectivism as it happened was very different from Marx's imagination; the only relation was that the arguments supporting Marx's socialism can and have been used to justify the corrupted version. This is the reason why people can legitimately claim that "true communism never happened".
Yes, for example, freedom of speech. So did Marx, say, collectivisation. Both schools of philosophy did prescribe exact policies, and neither managed to get it completely right. It turned out, however, that classical liberals were less wrong than Marx was.
Nor does it make much sense to say you need a dictatorship to achieve anarchy. Or that the dictatorship is in fact democratic. Or that if I don't have to work any more I'll work just as hard. Unfortunately Marx was being very liberal in interpreting words. George Orwell's doublespeak wasn't pulled out of thin air.
Not quite. Remember that historical materialism is deterministic. Marx did not so much argue for "communism is good for us, therefore we should have it." He was saying "once this and that conditions are met, communism will inevitably happen." He probably didn't think being conquered by a foreign power was a problem, because the countries that were able to invade their neighbours were probably the most developed countries, which would be the first to meet the revolutionary criteria. After they have converted into communism, surely they would not have to worry about lesser countries invading them.
If I may offer some advice, please try read the original writings by Marx and Engels, instead of airbrushed versions from later communists. They are dry, dull, and often just impossible to understand (which is why very few actually read them), but many contradictions and unrealistic assumptions made by Marx were watered down by later interpretations. For instance, the assumption that revolutions would happen to richer countries first. Or that Marx quite often argued democratic socialism was too weak to provide real benefits.
Engels was generally more readable than Marx. His The Principles of Communism is an introductory text in a Q&A format. It's a good piece to start with.
