Can you have communism without authoritarianism though?

well, we’d have a more settled answer if historically communists of all stripes weren’t immediately persecuted wherever they win power (whether democratically or through revolution), but Revolutionary Catalonia strongly suggests the answer is yes. its most anarchist regions successfully managed themselves pretty well for more than 2 years during a vicious civil war before being crushed, and those are the literal worst circumstances possible to try and build an egalitarian, stateless, classless society in. i would imagine doing this is substantially easier without a well-armed state trying to murder you.

(also ironically, the anarchists in Catalonia sometimes had to fight the Marxist-Leninists who were ostensibly united with them against the Francoists, because the two sides had such radically different visions of society)