Sidhe said:
If you only take the failures yes, Cuba isn't too bad, but essentially communism seems repleat with failure, Because people don't work the way communism would like them to work.
It could also have something to do with the fact that Communism has never actually been put into practice, nor is it even really a political system. It was Marx's theory of history. He just assumed Communism was the inevitable end result. So far, he's been proven wrong.
A few power-hungry individuals, such as Lenin, decided "Hey, this is a pretty good tool to rally the poor masses around so we can usurp power, lets say we're trying to bring it about so they'll follow us."
And so they set about it. Of course, none of the "Communist" governments have ever been "Communist". It was, for example, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. This is mostly because Marx never stated how the Proletariat would magically come to power. These governments never clarified it, because they never intended to allow it to happen. Why? Because if everyone is "equal", not only does the specialized job economy upon which all modern society relies collapse, but so does government (the natural end state of Communism, as defined by Marx, is a classless and stateless and composed of total equality; effectively an Anarchy), as any government official would be out of a job, and out of power, which is why all this was done in the first place.
So, is North Korea "Communist", in the ideal sense of the word? No. Has there ever been a "Communist" country, in the ideal sense of the word? No.
Is North Korea a brutal, Stalinist regime bent on oppressing the masses and seeking ever greater power and glory for itself? You bet. Close enough for a "yes" since that's what most other "Communist" countries were anyway (and it's a nice catch-all label for them and their ilk): the tool for a single charismatic man to subjugate all others to his bidding while distracting them with fairy-tales of liberation.
