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".
