Q. Having read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, I'm lead to concur that real Communism has never been tried. Does this mean that if done properly, it could actually work?
A. No. In fact, one of the things we can learn from the antics of former Communist dictators is that even though those societies were actually examples of State Capitalism, they still allow us to conclude that Communism doesn't work.
I call this the 'Lenin Paradox'.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx was very specific about the circumstances under which true Communism would come about. The way he described it, the polarisation of the classes was inevitable, and you would eventually end up with a hand full of people who own everything, and everybody else who have nothing. The everybody else in this equation, clearly having had enough of that sort of nonsense, spontaneously rise up against the few, and the rest is whatever the opposite of history is—the one that describes things that didn't happen; I don't know... CNN?
In fact, the circumstances he described sound exactly like a Communist dictatorship.
Sorry proletariat, you had your chance and you missed it.
Capitalism 1, Communism 0.
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