I realize I am getting off-topic here, but your post connected in my head somehow with a book I've been reading: [link|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805056688/qid=1109089801/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/102-7943787-4924158?v=glance&s=books&n=507846|"Hungry Ghosts : Mao's Secret Famine"].

I think the book taught me the reason why hunger and disaster is so intimately connected with the "good people" ideologies coming to power.

The communists, when they come to power in some country, do it after convincing themselves that conditions are ripe for building commusnist society. The communists that are not convinced of that, like Plekhanov in Russia, do not take power. So here they are, in control of the country, armed with the infallible scientific method, ready to build Paradize. And, as they start building, things go wrong. For example, farmers resist grain requisitions. That realy should not happen, according to theory. The country was ripe for socialism, remember? Now, the communists are faced with the decision. Do they re-evaluate their original decisions, or do they press on, applying more of the infallible theory, streightening the dictatorship of proletariat? Lenin choose to retreat, hence NEP. Mao choose to press on, hence Cultural Revolution after 3 years of famine.
(note, I don't even talk about Stalin, who had no ideology whatsoever, apart for power).

So here it is, in the nutshell: the communist make life hell because they expect people to be good. And when the people aren't good enough for them, they replace the people. With corpses.

it has nothing to do with such subjective thing as "morality". The idea is that at some point the society produces so much that the distribution mechanism known as "market" is just useless overhead, taking more resources for the sake of "market" than the amount of production it makes possible. So "the market" gets discarded. The "morality" does not matter, because a) there is so much of everything, even the greediest people will be sated and b) people are basically good, so if the work is not hard (and there is no hard work left, see (a)) they will do it for fun. Yes, point (b) comes close to "morality", but Marx backs it up with other things - I am not good enough Marxist to remember them.

I don't think a single country in the known universe reached the conditions need for real Marxist revolution. Nor do I hold my breath.