Bolshevism and Maoism are the Communist programs that the western world knows. Both were founded on the idea that revolutionary tyranny was needed in order to smash the old order and grind it into the dust before building anew, the idea that an individual human life is, ultimately, worthless in the face of what is to be done: determined atheism and materialism converged on the idea that the ends did justify the means, and so many horrors were thus unleashed. This need to stamp out the old order also attracted and encouraged paranoia of the highest order, which led to folks like Stalin and Mao wiping out groups of people who probably never would have been a threat.
Bolshevism and Maoism were prescribed for societies that other Socialists felt were not ready for Communism. The idea on order in the old school was that Capitalism would mature and progress to a certain point where society would become completely polarized between the owners and those who could sell only their labor, at which point it would collapse under its own revolutionary weight and be reorganized. It was not meant for peasant societies like Tsarist Russia or Nationalist China, where small ownership (at least once outright serfdom had been abolished) was still a huge factor, and society was still mostly agricultural and not industrial. In the view of many Communists, Lenin and later Mao, and many others like Castro, all jumped the gun in the big picture.
Socialism, meanwhile, has been taking root in western society since the French first Republic and the Owenists of Britain (who, interestingly, had the support of the Tories, who at the time were backed by small holder petty-nobility, who distrusted the rising commoner merchant class which was supplanting them and which powered the Whig party), where the general idea has been to make society better for the working man by degrees rather than by Revolution.
In the long run, i'd say Communism will come in some form that we cannot yet delineate, due to the fact that "labor" is going to become insanely cheap and abundant due to the proliferation of robots/machines, and this will essentially force society into making a choice between a utopia where the fruits of this abundant labor are freely shared, or a fierce dystopia where a handful of wealthy retreat into gated communities with their machine-provided bounties while the rest of us grapple in some Mad Max-esque wasteland, due to the fact that we have nothing to provide "the market".
Not that i'm saying this change will come all at once, and if the slow progression of socialist programs is any indication, the "choice" i outlined will not be something society makes all at once: we will slowly proceed to that utopia of redistribution one step at a time, as marginal labor costs drop like a stone over the next century and so the number of needed workers will decrease.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
