It’s been a long time since I read the Communist Manifesto. Do you mean to say that Marx’s goal was violent overthrow? I thought he described more of an evolution of systems until the workers paradise was reached.

> False advertising.

Sure, that’s how non-Leninist socialists (including Marxists) see it. But the upthread claim was that the USSR did not use the term “socialist” but instead invented the term “communist” because it did not view its own system as socialist. In fact, the USSR used the pair of terms “socialist” and “communist” together in much the same pattern (if, arguably, a somewhat different understanding of the precise meaning of the two terms) as non-Leninist Marxists did (its worth noting that one of Marx’s well-known works, with Engels, was The Communist Manifesto.)

> the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful

It was written about 170 years ago, so it'd make sense that the methods would no longer work now. Even if we count the inception of the Soviet Union as its first actual use, it was already pretty old to be relied upon as a manual.

The productivity gains I mentioned are a very important step in that direction. Capitalism and free markets work best on an economy saddled by scarcity, to the point many scarcities are engineered to extract labor from the scarcity gradients a bit like a Stirling engine extract mechanical work from a temperature gradient: you don't need an iPhone 12 (I know I don't) or a 64-core desktop (I could use one) and a lot of people will work so they can have the things they want, but not necessarily need. As the tangping prove, after you reach a certain level of abundance (a low one for them), capitalism ceases to be able to extract labor because the price of wanting more is too high for them.

These people who refuse to participate in this system are willing to live a materially constrained existence in exchange for more free time and a simpler life. I think we all could adopt a less radical position and still live with a little less and enjoy a life a little bit less complicated.

I'm highly sympathetic to the goals of communism and agree that the problems it's trying to solve exist and are inherent in our current system of economics.

But one doesn't have to read much history to see that the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful in any implementation tried in the 20th and 21st centuries.

At this point I consider any communist who doesn't admit the ideology's massive failures to be either ignorant, or disingenuous, because if someone actually wants to solve the problems with the capitalist system, they have to admit what has been tried and failed so far.

I do hope one day we'll find new solutions to the distribution problem that don't create other massive problems like we've seen, because the issues inherent in capitalism won't go away without acknowledging its failures either.

> Anybody wrote a book on trickle-up economy yet?

Yep it's called 'The Communist Manifesto' by Karl Marx. [1]

Further:

'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' by Friedrich Engels [2]

and

'Wage Labour and Capital' by Karl Marx [3]

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/in...

[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...

> I don't think it's fair to call a modern mixed economy "Marxist".

It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.

> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.

Yes, he did.

> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.

Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)

> but he didn't really present an alternative.

Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.

This is a complete misrepresentation of my point. I never tried to 'paint "authoritarianism" as "lefty"'. I specified there's an issue with lefties who are also authoritarians. If you don't think that can exist and if you think it's not that big of a deal, I suggest you take a look at the latter-half of the 20th century. It's pretty uncharitable to paint my argument as being afraid of a student on a campus who's read the Communist Manifesto. That's not even in my argument and requires a lot of bad-faith interpolation to get to from what I said.

> viable threat of authoritarianism is coming from the opposite side

This is nothing more than whataboutism. There's authoritarians on both sides. They're both just as dangerous in the end-game. In Canada, it's the left mainly. In the US, there's highly vocal, and influential to public opinion, left wing authoritarians. In Canada lefty authoritarianism isn't just a fringe, it's mainstream. This is true in a lot of places too. I'm not sure why some folks insist on downplaying the risk of authoritarianism when it comes from the left as opposed to the right. Both kill just as many people, one just uses gas where the other uses starvation.