The thing about Communism is it has never really been put into practice on a wide scale. Sure there have been so called Communist countries in the past and one's that claim to be Communist today but the reality is those countries never were Communist in the first place. All Communist countries we've seen to date have given us totalitarian states and a small dictatorial elite running the country. Communism is meant to be moneyless, stateless, about equality but in reality what we got was the complete opposite. The State become huge and oppressive, money was still used as a transaction and as Orwell put it so succinctly "All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others".
In Marx's seminal work 'A Communist Manifesto' we have to remember this was written during the industrial revolution and back then his ideas made a lot more sense. Capitalism back then was truly dreadful for the masses, with child labour, terrible living and poor working conditions, harsh punishments with a justice system that favoured the rich, no social safety net etc.
But as the more liberal and civilised countries started to democratise, Capitalism was forced to reform lest there be the revolution that Marx predicted. The elites recognised this and had to give way, ordinary people including women got the vote, labour movements were formed including political parties that represented workers and so on. Marx obviously didn't forsee all this and granted the reform of Capitalism happened after his death but Capitalism married with democracy did force it down a path where it even had to incorporate Socialist ideals (such as the Welfare State and Universal Healthcare).
It would be interesting to see the two extremes in action but we never will as people would never accept them in their purest forms and they probably wouldn't work unless every human in the planet was socially engineered at the same time to do so.
