I think you subscribe to a modern lite-socialism that has gone through quite the layers of extractive iterations. If you read Karl Marx, the underlying philosophy and worldview that brings with its overarching narrative, what you find is more than the democratization of work and profit allocations/distribution and ownership of means of production. And if you notice what I said, it has its positives. Certain functions can be applicable. Some concerns are real. However, socialism today as subscribed by most is not Communism or Marxism in the true sense, although they might extract ideas here and there. Hasan Piker is a Capitalist Socialist.
The old Marxism which I am referring to, that Communism largely based itself on, was narrative-driven and had archetypes of how the collective functioned historically from an interpretive point of view that is explanatory weak, and limited, which I don't think is accurate picture, and they assume things about human nature by definition that one can demonstrably scrutinize.
To correct you on the matter of human nature, Marx had zero conception outside the material world. I can make assumptions about why he neglected that; it gave him the clean slate for him to draw associations more freely. He never addressed the functions of how hierarchies existed before feudal lords exploited peasants. The Communist Manifesto starts with Marx describing history as class struggle-oriented.
Since I am lazy, I will just post some notes I took from starting reading that text before I exited since I found the book to be juvinile:
"Materialist class perspective, no mention of issues of values in society as the salient issue where oppressive tyrannical elites undermine the poor instead of viewing class as a justifiable social unit when that is an overgeneralization of wide diversity of societies and their value-functions to hierarchical participation and interactions. Simply calling things a class struggle between rich and poor is an inadequate framing of any society of the past without understanding the function of society. Communism in this respect presents itself as a reductive, removed value-less skeletal beast that seeks to stilt societal functions, insensitive to the human condition and its love for life and struggle for it."
It's actually worse than I described it above. Communism by Marx was seen not as an integrative system but as a competing one to all other systems -- that includes culture. Tradition was merely reduced to a system of conservation of the bourgeoisie and propagation of it. So for him, all that needed to be wiped clean before ushering in a system he called radical.
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Again, this is something I fundamentally disagree with. It is important to note that this is written in the Manifesto, clearly reducing the concept of culture as a training for the masses to support elite economic advantage. Everything is extremely materialistic, defined by class dichotomy, or as he describes it "class antagonism."
Marx said, ideally he wanted the abolition of the family and you're saying it was not about the wrong perception of human nature:
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The solution for him was that children would be brought up in what he called the Social. The relationship between a father and a son was problematic to this guy because for some reason it perpetuates the state of the bourgeoisie.
The man said the state was a superintendence of production, reinforcing my thought that communism was a hypermaterialist perspective turning everything machine-system oriented because it was an industrial capitalist overcorrection, instead of being a holistic independent thinking that served the essential human good.
Not only that, Marx not only did not have a historical materialist worldview, he posited that there was no such thing as an individual human nature that you can abstract, the nature of humans was the interactive process of a whole group, the guy was a macro-functionalist.
If you bring together these thoughts, there is no wonder that The Soviets and China became what they became. It was always cthe ore of Marxian thinking to systematize and break down traditional, even biological sense of human nature and community for a systemic functionalist one.
Dude even said removing the distinction between town and country. These are strange ideas.
There is a reason why the Communist Soviet Union turned out the way it turned out, and its issues were a feature, not an error. I can even grant you that it was an inner-system imbalance. Nevertheless, here is the fundamental kicker, the whole system is based on materialist atheistic functions and that comes from holding nothing sacred but economic justice from elites, even if the cost is to turn a whole country into a soulless place.
I am a free-market guy. I would not call myself a capitalist. Just free commerce, old school and I do believe people should be able to be rich, but there should be a way for the extremely rich to potentially give back more. If people want to integrate socialism or try socialism, they're free to do that. I'm not a capitalist propagandist and have a lot of critiques for capitalism as practiced by America, for example. I was a psudeo-socialist in the past, around high school. I was never antagonistic to socialism. My sympathy extended such that I probably considered myself more of a Socialist than a Capitalist back in the day. So I am not affected by the red scare or Americanist view of any kind. I don't care what any party says, this is from what I think it wrong. It's what I think is not functional or aligns with what I care about. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the soviet union was not good for the human condition and a lot of the thinking of Marx was defined by his experience of the early mercantilist industry, steel beams, coal, and blackened white kids in the factory. Besides the kids in factories, the Soviet Union was way more industrialist than America ever could be.
And it is very important to distinguish my critique of Marxian thinking and communist Soviet with mere support for workers and possibly several solutions for that. If people want to democratize work, they can do it. Marx was more than just that and so wat the USSR.