...One of these things is "keeping up with the Jones's."  That's why communism won't succeed -- people always want what they don't have, or what their neighbors DO have.

It's been this way since caveman days. If Nguk killed a critter and brought it home, his next-cave neighbor would try to bring a bigger one home to impress the ladies.

The trajectory doesn't seem to be heading that way though. See link.

Communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. One may have pre-eminence at one time, and the other pre-eminence later -- but both exist simultaneously. I remember a Time magazine article in 1981 about the 17,000 millionaires in the USSR.

Capitalism, by definition, will let people slip through the cracks that it deems to be not sufficiently economically useful. Unless something is done, these people become revolutionaries. So the capitalists allow the existence of socialism as a necessary cost to provide stability. THAT is why so many of the super-wealthy seem to favor socialist stuff.

Meanwhile, communism, so far, has never been able to exist on any scale larger than a kibbutz with capitalism to provide the surpluses necessary for its operation.

Both, ultimately, concentrate power in the hands of a few.

What you are more likely to see is global corporatism in an alliance with government such that government socialist programs protect the global corporatists from the teeming multitudes.

Either way -- one can't replace the other entirely because both need each other.

The SOLUTION is to think Beyond Capitalism and Communism to economic systems that don't reduce man to an economic being only and that don't define wellbeing only in terms of goods available.