Abstracted from your response is the fact that communism, as with Christianity, did not develop under laboratory conditions. It emerged in conditions of extremis — economic, social and political — and its first task in the face of the overweening power of capital was survival.

The development of communism from the days of the Paris Commune up to the early days of the Russian Revolution then beyond into the Stalin period cannot be lumped into the same reductive box, just as neither can Christianity between its pre and post-Constantine periods and on into the years of the Spanish Inquisition.

As Oscar Wilde reminds us: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”