I'm totally convinced that any leader seduced by Marx would be someone I would not care to live under.
Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice.
If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale.
So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible).
The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.
How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use.
I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)
Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice.
If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale.
So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible).
The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.