<p>Well, it is absolutely true that no country has every gone through the stages Marx predicted, and as I said that’s because there were major flaws (less evident at the time he wrote, but much more evident in hindsight after 150 more years of economic theory) in his analysis of capitalism which prevented these stages from occurring (for instance, business cycles didn’t work the way he thought they did, and wages didn’t tend towards starvation levels like he thought they would, etc., a lot of this is because his definition of “value” was off)</p>
<p>What a lot of people get wrong is to say that, therefore, the Soviet Union, Cuba, etc., were never really communist. This is <em>not</em> true, they most certainly were “communist,” they just weren’t “Marxist.” The Soviet Union was Leninist/Stalinist, China was Maoist, etc. Just because they produced totally different results from what most communists hoped for, doesn’t mean they weren’t communist in their methods and institutions. It’s like saying that a person isn’t religious because he is a Muslim instead of a Christian, and only true “Christians” are “religious.”</p>
<p>Marx and his “Communist Manifesto” was not the gold standard of communism, the idea of communism was around before he wrote about it, and after he died and Lenin picked up his ideas and modified them beyond recognition, it somehow got into a lot of peoples’ heads that “Marxism” and “communism” were one and the same thing. As you may have learned from your philosophy professors, one can be a communist without being a Marxist, and one can be a Marxist (philosophically) without being a communist.</p>