Couple things here: Communism is Socialism, a form of it. Communism has never been “implemented” either, as it’s specifically a post-Socialist stage. The ML states you’re referring to were Socialist, and didn’t reach Communism.
Secondly, the ML states were ML states, and as such were deliberately adapting new theory proposed by Lenin and distilled by Stalin.
I’m in no way a Stalinist, or a simp for the USSR, your comment is just wrong.
By your very same logical chain, Capitalism is an ideology 400 years old that failed miserably every time, as well as Socialism. It’s meaningless word salad.
Okay, so it sounds like you’re a leftist, and likely to agree that the bourgeoisie deliberately pits the Proletariat against itself as a means to prevent unified action.
I think your biggest issue is that you’re comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people’s access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn’t even reached full Capitalism yet, then I’m afraid you aren’t being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was “good.” However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people’s lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn’t go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers’ freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.
It depends on why you aren’t supporting either party. If it’s because the libs are too radical and the conservatives are too fascist, then you’re a centrist liberal. If you’re legitimately outside the scope of those two, such as to the left (or somehow to the right), then you aren’t a centrist.
Being extreme isn’t wrong either. The strength of a position with respect to current society says nothing about the founding logic for said position. Climate change, for example, must be radically acted on to prevent even worse results from happening, and it must happen now or we will suffer even more.
Being between two ideologies is not a virtue in and of itself. Refusing to align with either of 2 generally shitty Capitalist parties, and being a centrist, are completely different things.
This is obviously a leftist meme making fun of liberal and conservative fighting. It’s from the perspective of someone to the left of liberals, not between liberals and conservatives.
Socialism in the traditional Marxist path is a transitional step to Communism, yes. Communism, however, is fully anti-market, and as such is anti-competition. Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, perhaps you meant to say a system like Market Socialism should precede Communism, rather than some impossible form of competitive Communism?
Define “thriving,” even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.
“Capitalism” did not make everyone’s lives better. Development did. That’s why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.
Simple “blind brand loyalty” and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of “Late-Stage Capitalism.” Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.
Blind brand loyalty isn’t the issue here, and you cannot “fix” Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.
All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it’s safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.
I’d argue that the people who think Socialism can only work with abundance, even Communism, fail to understand that Socialism and Communism must be built over a long time, and imagine concepts like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” must be applied to a pre-existing Capitalist economy.
Really, they just don’t see the timescale. There’s no meaningful reason Socialism cannot happen today with current productive forces.