Communism

You’re still doing the same shell game: redefining terms mid-argument, ignoring material institutions, then declaring victory.

You said “every attempt at communism results in elites stealing surplus labor.” That is a specific claim about class extraction. It is not the same thing as “inequality exists.” You keep pretending they’re interchangeable because your original statement collapses otherwise.

You wave away Cuba by saying “whoever controls the state owns the surplus.” That’s liberal abstraction. Cuban officials do not privately own factories, land, or finance. Surplus is overwhelmingly allocated socially (healthcare, education, housing, food subsidies) under permanent blockade. That is categorically different from capitalist ownership. Calling every state-administered surplus “elite theft” empties the concept of meaning.

You dismiss Yugoslavia even though workers’ councils directly controlled enterprises and surplus. That alone falsifies your “every attempt” claim. Your preferences don’t override historical structure.

On China under Mao Zedong, you claim redistribution was “just revolution, not communism.” No. Those mechanisms were implemented through socialist institutions: collectivization, mass-line governance, cadre supervision, campaigns explicitly aimed at suppressing bureaucratic privilege. When inequality later rose after political line changes, you treat that as proof against socialism instead of proof that outcomes depend on material conditions and leadership. You’re proving the materialist point while denying it.

You invoke the “nomenklatura” in the Soviet Union as if this is some revelation. Marxists have analyzed bureaucratic degeneration for over a century. Yes, a privileged stratum emerged under siege, devastation, and isolation. That does not automatically make them a property-owning bourgeoisie, nor does it validate your universal claim. Degeneration under pressure is not identical to surplus extraction as a ruling class.

Your rain-and-curtains analogy is embarrassing. Social systems aren’t weather. They operate under concrete historical forces. Treating imperialism, sanctions, invasion, and sabotage as background noise is textbook idealism.

Then you retreat into “communism vs socialism” hair-splitting to dodge counterexamples like the Paris Commune, where officials were recallable and paid worker wages, or early Soviet soviets and factory committees with income caps. These were explicit anti-elite mechanisms. They directly contradict your claim.

At this point the pattern is obvious: whenever concrete institutions don’t fit your thesis, you redefine “communism,” redefine “elite,” or redefine “surplus.” That isn’t analysis. It’s cope.

And your final pivot is telling: “no system works unless the world cooperates.” congratulations on discovering imperialism. Marxists begin with the reality of imperialism. You invoke it only to declare socialism impossible, while giving capitalism a pass despite it requiring global coercion just to function.

Now for the part where you really make yourself look ridiculous: you pretend you're some “hard science” guy while dismissing historical and dialectical materialism. I have a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in STEM, alongside a master’s in Marxist theory. Socialist theory is not vibes or moral preference, it’s a systematic framework for analyzing class relations, production, surplus, and material conditions. You clearly don’t understand that method, yet you keep lecturing people who do. Liberal capitalism, by contrast, rests on idealist fairy tales about “human nature,” “markets,” and “incentives.”

At this point you’re either arguing in bad faith or you fundamentally don’t grasp basic political economy. Either way, this isn’t a serious exchange anymore. I’m done engaging with someone who substitutes semantic evasions and surface-level cynicism for material analysis.