Not sure there are any real communist nations left. It's one of those ideologies that looks good on paper, but falls apart, as soon as humans get added to the soup.
Idealists never seem to account for base human nature.
Name an ideology where this doesn't happen.
> Idealists never seem to account for base human nature.
Are the implicit “in practice” (cf on paper) and “base human nature” weird synonyms for America invading or doing a coup?
China is still pretty communist, even if you define it purely economically rather than by all the other traits too (e.g. heavy censorship). The list of largest employers in the world has a lot of state owned Chinese firms.
But, to be fair, the note about not taking human nature into account, applies everywhere.
I think that we've all seen very smart people fail to account for human nature, and things go badly.
Open source/free work is very human, and I have found it important to keep human nature in mind, as I work.
I also agree that empirically, communism is always a disaster.
But I would also say that communism doesn't even look good on paper. It looks terrifying! To naive and frankly clueless young minds with no appreciation of human nature, human society, and so on, a superficial acquaintance with the subject matter might seem nice, as it might play on tropes and juvenile grievances, envies, and sentiments. But an honest look at it by an intellectually properly formed and informed mind will inspire horror. It is a dehumanizing ideology.
Now, that doesn't mean our hyperindividualist, capitalistic, and liberal consumerist societies don't have their share of poison. They do, and again, to a good degree because they misconstrue human nature. But communism or even socialism are no solution to these ills.
(JPII's "Centesimus Annus"[0], among more academic works by him and others, addresses some of this. People often pay attention to his anti-socialist, anti-communist legacy, but remain unaware of his critical stance toward capitalism and liberalism.)
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
