Capitalism doesn't amount to freedom. That's an abhorrent statement if not meaningless. Part of the political travesty of the current situation in the US is that it isn't a free society at all. It could be to some, but it certainly isn't to others.

As a quick aside, I discovered the other day that proportionally speaking, there are more people in prison in present day USA than there was at any point in Stalin's USSR.

I don't want to spend any more time on the notion of 'freedom', though.

No law is above the economic system that demands it; many laws in society as we know it, for instance, stem directly from the defence of private property. Laws exist to maintain class relations, and therefore the mode of production.

So 'free competition' might be the 'minimal requirement' for a beneficial capitalist method of production (except it also isn't, depending on where you're at in the inevitable boom-recession cycle that capitalism warrants), but that doesn't mean it would be part of a non-capitalist system - it certainly wasn't part of pre-capitalist society because society didn't have the technological means to do so.

What are you talking about, 'willing to share with each other'? Marx(ism) doesn't, in fact, force anything of the kind; please refer me to where it does...

It's not my definition; objectively speaking, the 'communist' states you seem to be referring to operated by capitalist modes of production, it was just state directed, hence the term 'state capitalism'. Though industrial growth can often be formidable in these countries - and hence the USA's fear of them at certain points in history, as a threat to its own economic power and claims to global properties - it's at the expense of its own working classes' basic welfare. Look at China. To even suggest it has ever been socialist is absurd.

Haha, that would be exactly like saying to Martin Luther King 'name me one country that has successfully emancipated Black people and integrated them into the community; exactly, you can't - face it, Marty, it won't work; nice idea though!'

So what, for instance, would socialism look like to you if it did work?

I ask because your general tone is as derisive as it is confused. I ask, also, because I have a strong feeling you haven't a clue what socialism would look like because you haven't got a clue about what Marxism actually is; and you don't seem to have much more of an idea as to what capitalism is either, in all honesty.

Sorry to put it so bluntly, afs, but I have to call a spade a spade here.

Marxism isn't a set blue-print for future society; its serious thinkers were and are vehemently against utopianism.

Marx and Engels and the social theory of Marxism has attempted to analyse the various forces at work in capitalist society since and through its historical development; it recognises the historical importance of capitalism in creating unprecedented global wealth as a result of an unprecedented development in technology, and seeks to change the economic basis of society so as to distribute this wealth equally.

Historically, capitalism is both a cause and effect of class relations; the bourgeoisie needed its own revolution in order for capitalism to develop.

In order to change society, you would have to first analyse how that society works. I would argue that a Marxist, in viewing and examining capitalism, understands its methods far better than even a capitalist does (the latter being governed by the system without much conscious thought into the absurdity of it) and much, much more than a non-capitalist such as yourself who finds themselves apologising for the system.

You speak of 'forcing people to share with others' as if these 'others' are not at present under capitalism losing their own jobs daily, are being discarded from the workplace, from their own share of the social wealth they have actually created.

I don't know of any point in Marxist thought where laziness is rewarded, or where the amount of social labour that goes in to creating (for example) a doctor is treated on equal terms with the amount of social labour that goes into creating a sales assistant.

Socialism demands a planned economy first and foremost, an economy based on social need and not the arbitrary and destructive self-expansion of profit that is demanded by capitalism. You seemingly object to this.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was successful in bringing about all kinds of social change. And as I've already noted, we can trace the development of the Russian Revolution and see objectively how it came to be governed by the Stalinist bureaucracy...

I've linked you before to the introductory pages of Trotsky's own The Revolution Betrayed, I guess you didn't read them. It's interesting to note the immediate effects of the Russian Revolution on the country's industrial growth; but the revolution happened in a country that was desperately backward, as a product of the very conditions that made its occurence as urgent as it was. That's the dilemma of socialism, but it doesn't invalidate it. Otherwise, you'd be arguing against social progression period, against in essence history itself, which is not only strange, it's plain stupid. How do you suppose society successfully operated prior to capitalism?

It might also interest you that Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks spoke out against Stalin before he became leader of the country. When Lenin died, the Bolsheviks were systematically wiped out; Trotsky was forced into exile (and eventually killed in Mexico by a Stalinist agent); Stalin and his bureaucracy systematically censored Lenin's written material to their own political benefits, and Stalin presented his political actions quite literally as logical extensions of Marx and Lenin, labelling the state's official ideology (shiver) 'Marxism-Leninism', even though Lenin, following Marxist thought, was Stalin's most vociferous opponent.

So, you still haven't answered this: Tell me what you're alluding to by 'socialism'.

Go on, go on.