1. Capitalism emerged around the the end of European feudalism (approx. 1500 AD), thus it is not 3,000 years old 2. Obama is as bourgeois as they come. 3. Marx didn't necessarily define communism as an alternative to capitalism, but as a stage of human development which is as inevitable as the shift from feudalism to capitalism was. Too many of you are viewing it in terms of the world's current social, political, and economic conditions. It's not that workers would function like ants that serve only the collective and the leadership, but that the primative idea of competition, i.e. for jobs, between corporations, etc, would be replaced by collaboration in order to survive. As a result, the individual is still just as important as the collective. In addition, governments would inevitably be smaller and would have to function on a grassroots level so that way an altruistic leadership wouldn't be necessary because the group of individuals would be forced to work together in order to survive. Just how the general understanding of how things worked in a feudal society, and every previous economic system, had changed as it entered into a new one, the human psyche would be forced into thinking a little more about the community then just the individual and understand that it would be necessary for survival. The idea of survival, in this day and age, in a "developed" nation is very different to that of survival in an "underdeveloped" country. As a result, many of us can't even began to imagine the hardships of survival in countries in which people don't have computers in which to argue marxism, which is the reality in the vast majority of the world.