North Korea - 1948 to present day<p>Of course anyone can go down the path of &quot;well that wasn&#x27;t real communism&quot; and that goes for any ideology where humans are involved. You won&#x27;t achieve the utopian ideal put forth in a book. And that&#x27;s really part of the failure, not the reason to explain it away.<p>The fact is some people work harder than others, are more ambitious than others and sacrifice more. And the reason people appreciate a capitalistic society is not only can those types of people get rewarded, those same people motivate others to aspire. And we also know that it&#x27;s easy to deflate the ambitions of people when they feel like the extra work won&#x27;t get them any further.<p>Which in my view is why these communist countries develop the fantastic religion around their leaders and at the same time take on the violent means to force their people into working harder. Respect through fear, intimidation and in the case of NK a fantasy of motherly love by the dear leader. Yes I said motherly that wasn&#x27;t a mistake.<p>But we&#x27;re talking about countries here, when if you want to talk about communism from a smaller scale, I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;d have little to argue with, other than that you don&#x27;t exactly see a lot of what I would call technical progress coming out of communities, at least none I&#x27;ve ever heard of.