Tankies take a moment to engage in some North Korea propaganda. 'North Korea is a democracy'

Well, not by the above definition, but that can’t apply to individuals since it describes qualities unique to groups of people and their relations.

So we get into a bit of a semantic dilemma here. Conventionally, communist can have two distinct meanings. One, describing an economic and political system, is the one I cited above. This is the most appropriate definition when speaking of nations or other large, autonomous societies. We could, in theory, assess whether these instances operate as communist societies in miniature, but it seems fairly clear they do not. And it’s not clear they really could, given their reliance on broader social systems. Indeed, many have argued that communism is only possible as a global system. If true, this could explain the failure of any existing or historical nation to reach this standard.

However, “communist” has also frequently been used as a term to describe people who advocate for or seek to build the above society—or at least claim to. So in that sense, users on those instances could be reasonably described this way. But this gets very messy. On the one hand, we could simply accept their statements on the matter. However, that would mean accepting that some dishonest people would be labeled communists despite not really matching the above definition at all. On the other hand, any standard to separate out such charlatans would require us to know their true intentions and perhaps even the reasonableness and effectiveness of their political actions and strategies.

Is an abolitionist who in every concrete action supports the institution of slavery really an abolitionist? Many so-called communists behave similarly with respect to the state. They claim their end goal is a stateless society, but at every opportunity they defend and expand state power, violence, and impunity. I don’t see how this will ever lead to a stateless society. So these questions are very difficult to answer, and some may even be fundamentally unknowable.

So TL;DR would be I don’t know, maybe, some probably yes, others probably no.