Regarding the communism thing, Vlad may be labouring the distinction a bit too much, but he's fundamentally correct. The forms of "communism" implemented pretty much anywhere are distinctly different from the theory formulated in the 19th century and that advocated by most communist revolutionaries, and in many ways in practice turn out opposed to some elements of communist theoriy as they result in a dictatorial individual/upper class controlling the workers, not the workers themselves attaining control. See the USSR and Leninism/Stalinism, China and Maoism (and its authoritarian capitalist outlook that has been especially strong since the 1980s), North Korea and its wacky juche, etc.
Probably the closest anywhere has got would be the Marxism-Leninism of the USSR in the mid-1920s when Trotskyism wasn't totally verboten and Stalin hadn't quite seized all sorts of power. But the bloody rampages of the Bolsheviks in the preceding years had pretty much put paid to any idea that this would be a worker-controlled paradise; Lenin was quite happy to use dictatorial power and violence to keep his opponents out of power. Basically the problem ANYWHERE is that communist revolution has been followed by the perceived need to use strong-man dictatorial control to "secure" the revolution against its opponents, which is fairly antithetical to rule by the workers, and once a strong-man is established, well, nobody's about to just walk away from that in ten years and say "yeah guys now we're all safe and I'm giving up my godlike power".
Probably the closest anywhere has got would be the Marxism-Leninism of the USSR in the mid-1920s when Trotskyism wasn't totally verboten and Stalin hadn't quite seized all sorts of power. But the bloody rampages of the Bolsheviks in the preceding years had pretty much put paid to any idea that this would be a worker-controlled paradise; Lenin was quite happy to use dictatorial power and violence to keep his opponents out of power. Basically the problem ANYWHERE is that communist revolution has been followed by the perceived need to use strong-man dictatorial control to "secure" the revolution against its opponents, which is fairly antithetical to rule by the workers, and once a strong-man is established, well, nobody's about to just walk away from that in ten years and say "yeah guys now we're all safe and I'm giving up my godlike power".
Damn it, Axver, you broke my brain. I can fathom the entire 13.7-billion-year age of the universe, but that is just...beyond my imagination.
