[seanmcdirmid]

Are you sure that is how Marx described communism, as a cleptocratic system of ruling and exploiting... I mean, I don't remember reading that at all, just like I don't remember Ayn Rand describing libertarianism as a return feudalism where property rights rule out over the collective of the people.

Are you sure Marx wrote that, or are you letting your own bias into your definition?

For the record, I live in a communist country and don't like how that aspect turned out at all. But I don't blame it on the communism, after all, Russia still has many problems even after they threw off communism. Selfish bad leaders will beat you up with any ideology they find convenient.

[sievebrain]

Marx did not describe communism that way, obviously, but it should be equally obvious that his terrible ideas led directly to what happened. Communism isn't some great idea that flawed humans have repeatedly screwed up - it is a flawed idea whose outcome was easily predicted even by Marx's contemporaries.

Seen with the benefit of hindsight, Mikael Bakunin's criticism is most appropriate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Critique_of_Ma...

They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

For Bakunin, the fundamental contradiction is that for the Marxists, "anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved."

Marx directly argued that communism should be implemented by violent revolution that would put in place a temporary "dictatorship of the proles", which is an absurd concept containing the seeds of its destruction.

[dghf]

(This is meant as a reply to sievebrain: there appears to be some sort of thread-nesting limit.)

Bakunin did on occasion describe himself as a communist; but like Kropotkin, his communism was of the libertarian rather than authoritarian variety.