But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we’ve never had a communist country tend to think:

1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I’m a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

True Catholicism has never existed, as there’s never been a time it’s been truly universal. (The word “Catholic” means “universal.”) Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we’ve actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn’t serve to guide our decisions.