Exactly. You have people here advocating things a toddler can understand is wrong.

Also, it's ironic that after a price system enabling rational economic action and private ownership of the means of production enables PCs and smartphones to come into existence, you have people sitting around typing on these devices espousing fantasies about socialism and communism.

It could work in small groups, but not in societies. Societies always tend to be oligarchies, no matter how their political system is called.

There has never been a true communistic society and there will never be one.

Well, a couple things. While I do not personally support full on communism, it certainly isn't as bad as many peg it out to be. I would argue we have never had a true communistic government in human history. Even countries that we peg as being communist still have that upper 5% of the population, which is completely against the entire idea, not to mention there really should be no money in any citizens hands in a communist government. And that comes from the inherent greediness of people. Even though a person may support the ideals of communism as a whole, they themselves still want to live above their neighbors once those ideals are in place (This is seen in many types of government...the United States is really no different, as many Republicans and Democrats don't themselves live by the very rules they think should be in place).

I really don't think it is the worst thing in the world to have a nationalized health care, nationalized secondary education, etc. My issue with a country such as the United States having this, however, is I know for 100% certainty it will not be operated efficiently, and will lead to worse conditions. People want to get paid for the work they do, and I certainly would feel abused if I got paid the same (nothing) to do accounting than somebody else got paid to work in a fast food restaurant.

Additionally, as somebody who is smart with money, and knows that there is an extremely simple concept called saving, a communistic just feels so wrong for me, as even making the exact same salary as my next door neighbor, I will be worth exponentially more than them when I retire.

I loathe with extreme violence any system that tells me how to spend my own income and decides my needs for me and disregards my wants.

Only way I could see it working is in small voluntary sub culture within a society. Too many people either hate putting in more than they get or take advantage of others work for it to function on large scale.

As for "true" Communism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

Both lasted only 3 years, though.

My view is:

We'll probably never know how communism is, as there never was, and probably never will be, a truly communistic country.

The same goes for capitalism btw - there has never been a single country in the world that truly adopted capitalism, to it's full extent.

I believe that people who read Marx/Engels will find that he really had a lot of good ideas and insight. And yet, the same person would probably come to the same conclusion when he reads Adam Smith.

Btw, I believe that the US communist-paranoia under McCarthy etc. just proves that they actually considered it a very strong and powerful ideology. If they had really believed that communism is a clearly inferior system, they wouldn't have felt the need to fight it so badly.

What I find kind of interesting, by the way, is that the US is a christian country that still has extremely many christian believers, many of which probably consider themselves to be very anti-communist. That is somewhat absurd I think, for christianity is actually very closely connected to communistic ideas. Pope Francis wasn't too far off when he recently claimed that communism "stole the flag of christianity", and communists are pretty much "closet christians".

By the way, people have already so often discussed capitalism / communism, and to me it feels like these discussions usually end up as people repeating a handful of propaganda slogans everyone's heard time and again.

Therefor I'd be interested in knowing people's opinion on what I consider to be a diffrerent, yet somewhat related question:

If (in, say, a few decades) technological progress and increase in productivity would lead to most people simply not being required for work anymore - how should society, and the economical system, react to this trend?

There are many influential leaders etc. who believe that this is really going to happen sooner or later. There are even already certain words for this theory, like "tittytainment" (a word which was apparently invented by geostrategical US mastermind Brzezinski) or the "one-fifth-society" (suggesting that in the future, only about 20% or less of the population might be required to work)

wat

He's half right and half wrong, as i remembered later thinking about this post after my initial reply last night. Long-term, capitalism rewards businesses and individuals who choose to inject more money into the bottom rungs of society. Short run, capitalism absolutely condemns it, usually through short-tempered investors who flip their shit over anything other than constant growth in dividends. Capital investments alone are seen as a necessary nuisance, let alone any who dare to help their poorer workers get a leg up.