Everyone knows what communism is, and generally in the real world it
doesn’t work out for the people. Communism has many flaws and after a
long while of thinking how these flaws can be fixed it became apparent
it would need to be fundamentally changed.
Not really and it would really help if you could share a short definition of yours or someone else that you'd agree with (by which I mean it being a suitable definition not necessarily agreeing with it's content).
Seriously if you call something flawed, without naming the flaws or what it is and then presenting fixes to unknown problems and asking for a comparison with an unknown definition, then this gets borderline impossible to answer and encourages opinionated comments.
For a start about how not everyone knows what communism is: Marx&Engels literally had to write a manifesto to explain what THEY considered the action plan of a movement that was aiming for communism, because even 150 years ago everyone talked about it, accused each other of it or wore it as a badge of honor, but there were hundreds of definitions around even at the time, so what they talked about was wholly nebulous.
However you could generally sketched up the perimeter of the idea. For example: Prior to the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions you had a feudal caste system, where you had those who ruled and those who are ruled and those who told the ruled that this was all dandy.
And it sucked. People accepted it though, more or less, probably because there was no alternative and no means to change it. And then through a series of events a lot of veils got pulled from the machine of power so that people got a much bigger appreciation of how much it sucked and how it was anything but inevitable or optimal. So for example the philosophic movements challenged the church and the grand narrative, the political movements challenged the ruling class and their narrative of meritocracy, the economic progress challenged the entire feudal society, aso. Bigger productivity could means less work, more stuff and better lives, but also bigger populations and bigger empires.
And while the revolutionary liberals made grand standing assertions about the individual and it's liberties, for the majority of people that was probably irrelevant drivel as they went from agricultural servitude to industrial wage slavery without much of a practical difference other than technicalities about status, such as the status change from subject of a king to being citizen with similarly little political power. Democracy was still tied to wealth, either directly more taxes=more influence or indirectly like in having a political position = no income = only a job for rich people or due to the lack means to generate publicity for themselves without money.
So people saw the master/slave relation of the feudal caste system and it's successor the capitalist labor system no longer as a given, but imagined what it would be like if they could actually do what the liberal revolutionaries were saying (probably without meaning it in that radical way), "what if people could actually govern themselves without kings or rulers of other names and what if one could actually produce for ones own consumption instead of having the reward of ones labor largely being taken by someone else, whether it's a king demanding taxes or an employer taking the product of ones labor giving you a measly compensation and selling it for much more".
So the general outlines were largely described by a cooperative:
an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise
Just that it's not just one enterprise but a community organized like that. However that is an utopian ideal and not a concrete outline for how such a system would look like or how you'd move from "here" to "there". It's not an impossible or unthinkable idea, on the contrary it's quite easy to imagine primitive societies to live like that and even more advanced societies to live more like that.
That being said it faced tough oppositions from those in power and privilege that already opposed the liberal revolutions and that now found new allies in that liberal camp who also wouldn't want to give up the newly acquired privilege over the working class.
And contrary to popular believe Marx wasn't talking all that much about what communism is or how it would look like and even his assertions on "how to get there" were not rock solid definitions but rather pragmatic in nature. What he actually did was give a definition of "how the CURRENT SYSTEM works", "why it doesn't work" and an outline of what would need to be done immediately. Not long term, not permanent, not communism, but immediate in that era.
So Marx is NOT the inventor of communism, neither did he thoroughly define it nor lay out a plan for what it would look like. His biggest contribution is the critique of capitalism and as far as I know he was a staunch opponent of utopism. Also contrary to the Nazis or stuff that Stalin did, the problem with capitalism also isn't that it's run by an evil elite or that capitalists are just inherently evil and corrupt and someone else would do the job better, but that the system itself is flawed. Exploitation isn't necessarily robbery and theft, but just business as usual. That doesn't make it any less exploitative though.
So "capitalist" and "worker" are not identities, they are descriptions of a role. Stalin as the de facto owner of the soviet union would have been a capitalist regardless of whether or not he had a working class background.
So with respect to the nature of the system it wouldn't make a difference who is in power. That being said as the communist/socialist movements also were workers movements it obviously made a big difference as to who is in power and who is not. Similar to how many national movements use emancipatory language until they themselves sit in the position of power, which they previously vowed to get rid of, but who also just play the same game as their predecessors.
And it's not even corruption that motivates them, to a degree they almost have to, because not doing so, would lead to a period of turmoil in which people have to learn very fast what had previously been someone else's job.
Though when a majority is up to the challenge and willing to take the risk that wouldn't be much of a problem. But with Marx talking shit about the "Lumpenproletariat" and Lenin even further narrowing down the revolutionaries to an elite group, that endeavor is almost bound to fail and be just a replacement or worse.
And unfortunately Marx and later Lenin had been the most influential figures in the political struggle of the workers movement so that "communist parties", strayed pretty far away of the communist ideal, in the name of "pragmatic necessity".
So that if you say "communism" today there's a good chance people will confuse it for a state capitalism akin to the USSR or of one of it's dominions and sponsored regimes.
This ideology would be similar to communism except instead of paying people equally they would be paid fairly according to their needs/performance.
People wouldn't be paid the same, they would share the means of production, the work and the outcome.
The government would essentially be very centralized and all jobs would be provided by the government and the resources produced by these jobs would be given back to the government.
The crucial question is what this government would look like. Is it direct democratic equal participation and whatnot or autocratic? That difference is huge.
In this society every single worker would be supplied with housing, food, and basic entertainment as long as they worked. They would also be given a small wage (a wage that scales depending on your job/work effort) of which citizens could use to buy consumer goods sold by the government.
That would be determined by the productive outcome of that society. If you could afford to house anyone then you should do that, if you can't you'd need to share houses. But if you can afford to and not do so, then that speaks of a level of spite regardless of what ideology you use to excuse that.
