@njnyjobs I think maybe you need to differentiate Marxism from Communism. Yes, Marxism is based on communism, but they are not the same.
Marxism includes the inevitability of the class struggle and advocates violence to reach the ultimate state.
Communism is a simpler, far more benign concept – from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Everybody contributes to the barn raising, everbody shares the food.
As always though, the devil is in the details. Few societies have managed to perpetuate anything like that for more than a couple of generations or to extend it to more than a few hundred people. One bad apple seems to make mangoes of the whole barrel.
Capitalism seems to me to be heartless at it’s core – survival of the fittest. That of course does not prevent capitalistic societies from taking care of their weak and timid. It’s just that the guiding principal of capitalism – greed is good – makes it so easy for the self-centered with power to make their self-centeredness into government policy.
So the powerful have a vested interest in perpetuating economic inequality. Hence the dogma associated with communism in capitalist countries is so over the top: they want to take our children away, they want to take our religion away, they want to take our choices away. The irony is that the capitalist world increasingly offers few choices to the majority while the minority rich get more and more.