Well, I think we underestimate them if we think of them as Communists. I really do think they are fascists and that is the future we are building for ourselves. I don’t know how long communism with complete central planning and government ownership can survive, the Soviet Union’s 70 years was not a good test because they had the good old USA under Reagan pushing them in a way that no one would push us in todays world. But I think the communist system is creaky and eventually the wheels come off and those in power go for a better life for themselves and their children. Fascism is a different system since the state retains ultimate control but doesn’t impose it always, less creaky, more durable.
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
What I see happening is them using the economic ideas of fascism, with the social ideas of Communism, since the racial purity & aggressive nationalism themes of fascism are so discredited.
But getting back to Hayek, the key point is that there is no reason to spend much time arguing about fascism vs. Communism, as there isn't much difference between the two from the standpoint of "the liberal of the old type". Realize that Hayek was writing in the 1940s, before the Left appropriated the term to mean "another word for socialist". When he said "the liberal of the old type", he was talking about someone who truly believed in individual freedom and a minimalist State, what we call today a conservative.
If it wasn't for the intercession of World War II, The Soviet system would have collapsed by 1960.