Communism (or Marxism) was originally a legitimate part of the workers' movement. However, it also attracted a layer of intellectuals and budding bureaucrats interested in the idea of a rationally planned economy. This was a "deviation" from the original Marxist message, but an inevitable one, much like the primitive Church inevitably became the Patristic Church when the apocalypse failed to arrive and usher in utopia. The bureaucracy latched on to the centralist and gradualist aspects of Marxism. In time, Social Democracy became an integrated part of the capitalist and imperialist system it had once saught to destroy.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks represented the interests of a would be (later actual) bureaucracy with the usual intellectual hangers-on. Due to the concrete conditions under Czarism, Lenin reached the conclusion that only a revolution could secure the power of this stratum. The connection between Bolshevism and the working class was incidental and easily broken after the revolution.
Without Lenin, no October revolution. Fact! Does the absolute necessity of a ruthless political genius of Lenin's type, something as strange as a revolutionary realist, disprove the materialist theory of history?
In nations with a weak bourgeoisie, some other social force must take power and modernize the economy. This other social force works through the state. Communism is an attempt at modernization through a bureaucratic state, which hence substitute itself for the bourgeoisie. Like the bourgeoisie in the bourgeois revolution, the Communists "unite the entire nation" around them, only to cast aside its plebeian allies after victory has been won. The system created by Communist regimes could be called state socialism, really existing socialism or bureaucratic collectivism.
In virtually all cases, it's less efficient than non-socialist economies on the same level of development. Compare South Korea and North Korea, Austria and Czechoslovakia, West Germany and East Germany, Thailand and Burma, Botswana and Albania, etc. One of the few exceptions to the rule is Libya under Gaddafi, one of the most succesful economies in Africa or the Middle East, but ironically also one of the few planned economies which lacked a Communist ideology, instead preferring Gaddafi's bizarre blend of Islam, Fascism and Bakuninism.
Stalin's five year plans and victory in WW2, eulogized even by Trotskyists, were really "made in the USA". Note also the complete lack of innovation in the Communist nations, doomed to mimic, steal or import Western capitalist technology (the Soviet space program was probably the product of stolen German research).
The above doesn't mean that "free market capitalism" is a solution either. "Third World" nations which modernized usually had a mixed economy: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Iraq, Iran, Israel, present-day China. Apartheid South Africa was also heavily protectionist. Note also economy in Putin's Russia. Further back in time, note Meiji restoration in Japan.
China is an anomaly. It's very interesting.
If you think Pinochet's neo-liberal Chile disproves any of the above, you are a basic bitch. Besides, even Pinochet subsidized the copper mines!
Communist regimes that want to survive should presumably devolve into mixed economies.
Questions such as "what is the class character of X" or "where in the historical schema of Marxism does Y fall" are fundamentally meaningless. So are esoteric discussions about "state capitalism" (in the leftist senses of that word).
Communism might come back, perhaps in the form of de facto nationalist movements based on the oppressed masses of the Third World. However, the dynamic of these neo-Communist movements cannot be analyzed using the usual Marxist theoretical toolkit. What are we to make of, say, a tribal militia fighting for control of some jungle, while spouting the Communist Manifesto?
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