Not a communist , but I am a socialist so I figure I ' ll take a run at some of this stuff . Communism is designed to stifle creativity and leads to a nomenklatura who are no different than the economic class systems that MLs rail against . I doubt this is the case . Communism wasn ' t designed to be a negative thing , but the means that were required to wrest control from the authoritarian states where it has been tried perverted it the goal , lets not forget , was for an aggregate of producers to democratically decide what was to be done with the products of their labour . Leninism is the result of this , a system designed to defeat class rule that actually ends up creating a small , oligarchic ruling class of vanguard thinkers , or whatever they want to call themselves essentially a conservative and authoritarian reading of selections from Marx . As far as I ' m concerned and I suspect that uLlanganati will disagree with me here it ' s impossible to be a MarxistLeninist . You could be a Marxist which is a profoundly democratic system , based around mass organization of the proletariat , or you could be a Leninist which foists ostensibly beneficial practices upon people through force , but you can not be both .