Surely RadBanker, you are not referring to Huey Newton & Bobby Seales' Black Panthers for Self Defense, an African American revolutionary group, founded to protect black neighborhood's citizens as a communist entity?
Do you happen to have any objective evidence to substantiate this gross generalization since my funk and wagall's state communist is a philosophical concept where there is a totalitarian form of government run by an singular authoritarian controlling everything?
I do not remember Huey or Bobby advocating sedition, except to P.O. JEHoover who worked tirelessly, to discredit the founders, members, and the group as a whole. perhaps you are remembering those biased headlines?
They were specifically a Maoist Communist party, and raised the majority of the funds they used to arm the party by selling Mao's little red book. They were flawed in many, many ways, but make no mistake that they were communist revolutionaries that took the majority of their inspiration from Mao's "Mass Line" organizing strategy.
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/
Authoritarian does not belong in any reasonable definition of communism, though it has been a feature of many state capitalist entities that were led by parties that called themselves communists.
The only universal definition of communism is: a stateless, classless society.
The majority of communist theory assumes that there will be a long difficult process to reach this. If you unite with this, the term "communist" when referring to a person or group should likely assume that they are sincerely aiming for a stateless, classless society.
The prevailing strategy in history so far has been to use a strong, centralized "socialist" state in order to build the material conditions needed to achieve communism.
When we arm ourselves with both theory and knowledge of history, we can look back and see that while they may have been led by "communist" parties, and they may have called their States "socialist," the strong central State has proven time and again to be an utter;y and completely failed strategy for achieving either socialism, or communism.
I disagree completely with this strategy, and instead advocate for a massive decentralization. We must build the horizontal decentralized institutions that will obsolete and replace the centralized, vertical institutions of today. This is usually called "libertarian socialism" or "anarchism."
Cheat sheet:
If there is a State, it isn't communist.
If the workers don't directly control the means of production, it isn't socialist.