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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
I gave up on Marxism as a 'serious' ideology (maybe such a thing is already an oxymoron) long ago when I learned that they've failed to resolve the Economic Calculation Problem even though it was introduced 100 years ago. Even though it kept rearing its heads every time they actually got their way and were able to implement the system.
The trajectory of Venezuela and (recently) Argentina alone should make someone skeptical of their ideals!
You can redefine 'efficiency,' you can try to redefine people's desires or propose that as long as things are more 'fair' (as defined by you) it doesn't matter if people's desires are fully sated...
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
Even more telling that even the partial solutions require re-introduce market mechanisms, and thus private property and trade.
But rather than take this critique (and the various real-world experiments that have occurred) seriously and throwing their efforts into truly solving it or at least trying solutions at smaller scales... they just plow on ahead trying to remake various economies into their preferred system and damn the predictable consequences.
Someone I read recently (might have been here?) pointed out that almost all notable lefties these days aren't even trying to pretend there's any place where socialism works and people are thriving, or that Marxism has viable answers... its literally just power politics at this point, leverage grievances, make exorbitant promises, and lie through your teeth to get to a position where, ironically, you can leech massive amounts of wealth off the Capitalist system, and deliver some of that to your supporters as reward. The more earnest ones might still try to claim they're opposing fascism but its almost impossible to believe that they don't know how their proposed system has failed to achieve its goals everywhere it has been tried (this is the part where someone says "ALWAYS HAS BEEN").
At this point I am genuinely in favor of a permanent exchange/exile program where avowed communists/marxists over the age of, say, 25 can be sent to any given country of their choice that will take them, and we will accept one citizen from said country that can correctly answer some economics 101 questions.
On the other hand, if there's any "moderate" Marxists who dislike Capitalism but aren't actively trying to dismantle it, I'd also be willing to put them into a policy thinktank where they can propose methods of possibly addressing the worst excesses of Capitalist society (measured in a quantifiable way and compared to a meaningful alternative/baseline!) and work on making Capitalism better. I don't want to remove all ideological competition to Capitalism, that would be hypocritical, and our own theory says competition helps improve most things. But these Marxists would have to understand that the very instant they're caught doing any of that activist shit, I, personally, will be loading them on the one-way flight to North Korea.
I feel like your last point is basically the social safety net and pro-union wing of the left (and now right?). In that respect we already do have a lot of pushback against pure capitalism in a practical sense, and a lot of it came from socialist strains.
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