What do I mean by that? Well I mean that it's obvious, reading Marx and even Marx's critics and enemies, that communism was intended as an industrial philosophy detailing the rise of automation and its effects on society.
Communism fundamentally requires automation to work. It's always required it to work. Even the ancient Greeks recognized that, if machines were more capable, universal ownership and luxury would be available to all (but the Greeks didn't believe such a state was possible).Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realise a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here – quite unintentionally – reduces human labour … to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation. - Karl Marx
Ayn Rand even inadvertently created communism in Galt's Gulch by featuring automation!
Much the same way manoralism, feudalism, and mercantilism inevitably evolves into capitalism when industry develops, capitalism inevitably evolves into something similar to communism when advanced machines are involved. Of course, it may not be a smooth evolution, hence Marx's words about revolution requiring a forceful change of hands.
But this explains exactly why communism has consistently failed and the only successful socialist states are the ones that opted to take the capitalist route: communism is a 22nd century high-tech ideology sent back to the 19th century and enacted by 20th century peasants. Just about every major socialist state in history was poor and backwards going into socialism, let alone after socialism took effect. Russia was only a few decades past feudalism; only Manchuria was exceptionally industrialized in China and the rest was still stuck in the Century of Humiliation; Cuba was a banana republic; Venezuela was a lower-middling country at best; Vietnam was about as well off as China; ditto with North Korea; Eritrea was a post-colonial African nation so what even needs to be said—
Karl Marx intended communism to be enacted first in nations like Germany, Great Britain, and Belgium. i.e. Industrialized nations. He didn't even think the USA could do it because at the time, we were still so agrarian. Socialism was always supposed to be built off automata and industry, and yet the 20th century is bloodstained by third-world nations (no pun intended) trying their hand at building socialism from rice plants and bamboo. This not even getting into the fact that the wealthier nations were constantly undermining socialist nations anyhow (I bring this up because I've genuinely seen people say the West had nothing to do with defeating socialism and it defeated itself as if the Cold War never happened), so couple the economic stagnation and tyrannical governments with a lack of technology, and you have socialism's defeat in the 20th century being inevitable.
Capitalism doesn't just inherently need industry; industry begets capitalism. When the Southern Song Dynasty in China came close to an industrial revolution in the 1100s AD, what nearly came with them? Joint stock companies and overseas ventures, the very soul of capitalism. When the Mughals in India in the 1600s nearly started an industrial revolution, what nearly arose there as well? Capitalism!
Is it any wonder that, when the British managed to succeed where the Chinese and Indians failed, capitalism followed suit?
There's a reason the ancient Romans never had a capitalist society, in spite of having marketeering. They simply never had industrial economics.
Socialism requires automation the same way capitalism requires industry. You have common ownership as the Oxygen and industry as one Hydrogen atom. But without robots and AI to act as the second Hydrogen atom, you're left with OH-, aka Hydroxide, which is deadly and unstable and prone to combining with different elements to create different substances (hence the rainbow of socialist types). Add that second Hydrogen atom, and you get Dihydrogen Monoxide, which is also deadly but is extremely stable and life-giving.
The thing is, communism's name has been so ruined by the 20th century that when it actually does happen, it probably won't be called communism or socialism.
