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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. |