Except I didn't! I looked at history to illustrate how society doesn't 'naturally progress', is not immune from social regression.

But that's exactly my point, which I made in the previous post and have just done so again in this post, both of which you're deliberately misconstruing: the failure and breakdown of an economic system results in social regression, which is why a socialist revolution is so urgently demanded.

The 'true capitalism'?

What's that then?

Which is to say that it is removed from historical processes and that history itself is dead.

I never said capitalism is 'based on greed', I said it demands it.

I'd argue that first and foremost it's based on exploitation, which is why the class struggle is necessarily embedded in the economic pre-requisites of capitalism itself. Capitalism creates the homogeneous conditions of oppression for the oppressed, and the nature of capitalism thus creates such potential for revolution in an unprecedented manner (which is why I would never equate capitalism with Roman society); for starters, capitalism requires a certain level of literacy and numeracy in its oppressed (which wasn't the case in previous class societies), which brings its oppressed classes into communication with one another, and so on.

Anyway, my point is that the 'greed' I've referred to with regard to capitalism is demanded by capitalism in spite of whatever it is you think that constitutes 'human nature'. It's the self-expansion of surplus profit, dictated by the wider forces of the system itself, which was to Marx what made it so absurd (and, evidently, fascinating).

The notion that 'humans are naturally selfish' is a tired one that doesn't ring true on any level, I'm afraid.

I dunno: speak for yourself.

What does 'money escapes' mean? 'People suffer as the result'?

It sounds like - especially magnified by the haste with which you were so quick to attack the notion that state capitalism isn't socialism - that you've come to whatever conclusions you have by way of misguided historical lessons. I can't account for it personally - everyone's different, with their own sources of information, however part of an existing trend they are. Might be to do with taking Stalinism on its own words, and watching from afar the way this 'socialism' failed tremendously for half a century before the Berlin Wall came down and history was announced to have ended and that capitalism would flourish once more.

That's a narrow view of things and both a cause and effect of political defeatism.

It doesn't help that academic circles came at certain points in the 20th Century to associate their ideas with these states, and so in their ultimate breakdown they thought socialism, the system to which they thought they'd pinned all their hopes, was thought to have been empirically disproven.

You're talking without any regard to the arguments I've presented, without that is any regard to what socialism actually is, how Marxism works, how capitalism works, etc., etc.

I don't know; it seems if you 'whisper socialism' in a lot of places in the world today all kinds of confused anger manifest.

I don't know who you're referring to here. I don't think a Marxist would 'silence' anyone who 'complains'. Taking time to argue for the case of socialism against its opponents and other reactionary apologists isn't silencing. But then I would expect you to know that significant difference, and that you're referring to examples that wouldn't help your argument in any way.

There are great number of reasons why Cuba quickly became an isolated state operating according to capitalism - directed heavily by a state, hence 'state capitalism'! It wasn't due to some defective internal logic in communism itself. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is enough to show the potential of socialism - that itself was part of a material reality that it couldn't remove itself from.

I stress again that Marx himself wasn't a utopianist; he didn't invent communism, he based many of his observations and ideas on what was already happening around him, which is why The Communist Manifesto added to history and didn't create it when it opened with the words, "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism!"

To speak of an inherent drive toward doom in socialism is to reject the notion of counter-revolution. Since the state and the capitals in whose interests it acts isn't going to simply step down and let the workers take over, there is class tension on an everyday level; strikes, agitation, revolutionary activity. But there's always counter-revolutionary forces, too, in the way police break down agitation and protests, in the way trade unionism helps to strangle revolution and negotiate with and dilute workers' demands through the framework of bourgeois self-interests, etc. McCarthyism in America - which helped to 'silence' a great number of artists and other people who dared admit they had problems with capitalism - for which even an accusation was enough to have someone's name blacklisted. In the land of the free, too! Etc.