Not even on paper!

If you read carefully Marx’s communist manifesto, you’ll realize that it doesn’t. Work. Not even on paper!
According to Marx, communism will come to be when enough people formerly belonging to the middle class will have become poor. As a consequence of their wealth having been siphoned away from them.
Becoming poor will make those former middle class people open to communist ideas. And will convince them to follow the already ‘enlightened communists’ into revolution.
For a while – again, according to Marx, the society will have to be led by the successful revolutionaries. In a dictatorial manner, because not all people will have risen to the communists’ level of understanding.
So. ‘Communism’ will be instated by some disgruntled people using dictatorial methods.
How auspicious is this?
Let me go even further.

Why were those people disgruntled in the first place?
Because capitalism!
Not so fast. The Adam Smith kind of capitalism worked just fine. Only after it had been warped by greed it had started to sputter. Specially after Milton Freedman had enshrined greed…
This being the moment when I need to remind you that Adam Smith’s first book on this subject was “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”…

‘Those’ people had become disgruntled after too many in that society had been convinced, at least for a while, that ‘greed was good’. And what was Marx’s proposed solution for that disgruntlement?
That all ‘means of production’ – meaning all property/wealth, to be taken away from individual people. And entrusted to ‘the people’.
Since ‘the people’ were going to be led by the “communists”, in practice the communist revolution meant that all wealth was going to be confiscated from those who happened to own it and entrusted to a very small number of people. Who happened to own the secular power in that moment. As the main consequence of the communist revolution. Apud Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto…

Let me revisit now Milton Friedman’s words.
‘Greed is good’.
According to this line of thinking, wealth becoming as concentrated as possible is a good thing. Since greed is already good, concentrated wealth is but a logical consequence…

Then Marx’s Communist Manifesto was nothing but an avant-la-lettre short-cut for an easier implementation of Milton Friedman’s greed hailing ideology!

See what I mean?

Karl Marx communism did not and cannot work.
Because it leads into a vicious circle.
It creates a monopolistic situation which cannot be avoided. Time and time again, history has proven that ‘this time is different’ is nothing but wishful thinking. Whenever too much decision power is concentrated in a too small number of hands, the situation becomes untenable. The more concentrated the decision power, the faster – and more dramatic – the eventual collapse.

How about a ‘different’ kind of communism?
The only sustainable kind of anything – ‘social arrangements’ included, had been ‘natural’. Had appeared in an evolutionary manner.
In contrast, all revolutionary developments have produced counter-revolutions. In many instances even more destructive than the revolutions themselves.
What will come after democratic capitalism? I don’t know!
But it better be better than what we have now.

And come in quietly!

Otherwise…

How about a return to bona fide democratic capitalism?
To Adam Smith’s kind of capitalism?
The one whose entrepreneurs used to put ‘moral sentiments’ above greed!

Wishful thinking?
Maybe!
But is there any other way to achieve anything? Other than to start by wishing that something?
And since Smith’s brand of capitalism did work, communism always failed and a viable alternative has yet to appear…