> It is trivial to prove that in most self-professed communist countries, the workers have not held the reigns of power. While this is true the question is: Wh

> It is trivial to prove that in most self-professed communist countries, the workers have not held the reigns of power. While this is true the question is: What does 'the workers holding the reins of power' even truly mean? Why didn't that state last longer in communist systems where it initially was the case (I suppose both the Paris Commune and the short-lived Soviet Republic in Germany after WWI are additional examples)? These affairs or definitions tend to be more gradual than we commonly think. For example, we usually take for granted that both the US and France have been democracies since the late 1700s. However, by today's standards they weren't (France in particular) because they hadn't universal suffrage and excluded large parts of the population from political participation. > Really? From the UK all I can see is the literacy rates getting worse and worse in either country, people being driven into unspeakable amounts of debt by private universities and bank bailouts, and Americans dying of silly things like Type 1 Diabetes just because they couldn't afford enough medicine. Those are certainly urgent problems but not necessarily ones that are entirely driven by poverty: Literacy rates drop because education systems are insufficiently funded and don't keep up with societal changes. Rampant university debt and bank bailouts are symptoms of a crony capitalist system that has politicians and corporations collude in order to extract value from society (i.e. rent-seeking). People dying from type 1 diabetes is a symptom of a dysfunctional healthcare system, which in rich countries is less a question of poverty but one of ideology. The true epidemic is type 2 diabetes, though, which is caused by malnutrition and obesity (which in turn in rich countries indeed are linked to relative poverty).