I'm not critical of your views on Soviet Communism, but have my reservations about your antipathy to a healthy full-throttled utilization of moral concepts in your commentary. This originates with Marx himself, as the excerpt from a Marx scholar point out below.

“Marx and Engels, According to Lenin, lay more emphasis on the dialectic than on materialism. They certainly reject all philosophy which opposes dialectical and historical thinking. In opposition to old mechanical materialism and “abstract Idealism”, they advocate dialectical materialism and it is in the name of this materialism that they condemn bourgeois class-oriented morality and predict the inevitable advent of an active, dynamic and humanistic morality—the fighting morality of the proletariat. While almost all Marxist reiterate Marx’s and Engels’ view that existing morality is either bourgeois or human, Marxist commentator cannot agree as to whether Marxist ethics and morality could also be characterized as naturalistic….. “…”It is true of course that young Marx treats communism as naturalism. In his mature writing, however, his interest in naturalism seems to have evaporated. From the point of view of moral philosophy, Marx’s ethics could be treated only as a corrupt form of naturalism. As naturalism tends to degenerate either into egoism—Hobbes’ egoistic naturalism—or into skepticism—Hume’s sympathetic naturalism, Marx must have rejected at least these forms of naturalism…

It is obvious from Marx’s and Engles’ utterances about ethics and morality that they are not moral philosophers as they fail to discuss any aspect of human behavior in a systematic and philosophical way. They merely scorn the existing ethics of their time, avoiding explaining and coordinating the changing forms of its historical development. They overlook the fact that, although the pattern of man’s moral life may be very different in different ages, the inner texture of this life and man’s endeavor towards moral progress are always the same. We do not need Marx and Engels to remind us of the discrepancy between moral principles and moral practice. Such is the nature of morality that even dialectical materialism depends on its existence…. The principle weakness of Marx’s Ethics is the assumption that man and his spiritual goals are nothing but a product of material and external forces and that morality is always dependent on material production and socio-economic relations.

Marx’s dogma that socio-economic conditions alone are the roots of all forms of morality must be discarded. Another effect of Marxist ethics lies in its tendency to ignore the morality of the individual and subjugate it into some implausible notion of a collective morality.

Yet, in spite of the vagueness, ambivalence and inconsistency permeating Marx’s utterances about ethics and morality, his assertion of the dignity of man as a rational and conscious being is a sublime and momentous moral truth.

From: Marxism and Morality, A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics (Nicholas Churchich)

Note to evildoer: That’s why I found your objection to my previous posts in which I interlaced fact and value freely to be indicative of your Marxist bias on the subject; a bias that is widely criticized by all who read Marx carefully.

How odd that whenever you are out of your depth, which is about two minutes into every discussion, you appeal to piety to shut down your mind, in the typical maccarthyte gesture that is the foundation of the US media self-inflicted stupidity.

I did not offer a "defense" of soviet communism, just as I did not offer a defense of Nazism, and just as noting that slavery worked for a long time and was a very effective way to develop the U.S. is not a "defense" of slavery.

I asked for some seriousness, not reducing history to propaganda slogans, and dividing economic systems according to whether they are "for" or "against" an imaginary human nature.

I know intellectual seriousness is hard for you, so I'm willing to help you train, every day a few more exercises for your brain and maybe in a few years you will be able to think on your own. Now pull, hold tight, release, again...pull. hold, tight, release, that's it! Are you tired already?

of course one must take into account how people behave. It is you who have suggested that the Soviet system ignored that. There is little substance to this. It is a caricature of how the system actually worked. you might want to read for example, Mancur Olson's account of Stalin's labor strategies (in Power and Prosperity) to see how far this is from reality. (Olson is anything but a communist). This wouldn't matter if it were merely ignorance. We are all ignorant of a lot of things. The problem with this caricature of communism is that it is one generated on purpose by apologists for capitalism to scare the children, and this is therefore directly harmful to understanding our own system.

Now, I really don't know what it means not to accept uncritically the wide variability of human forms of ordering their lives. Perhaps you want explain? Are you arguing that it isn't so? To repeat, one of Marx's most enduring contributions to social science was the analysis of the concept of ideological representations, that is representations of reality that make certain contingent arrangements that benefit dominant groups look natural, timeless and inevitable. This is something that has penetrated culture at large, although often only in respect of things past. for example, it is now clear to most everybody that the science that explained why black people were naturally inferior and incapable of self-governance was an ideological representation that described as anchored in nature what was a contingent arrangement that benefited slave-owners.

The concept of "human nature" used in social darwinism and neo-classic economics, that see people as inherently competitive, possessive, and utility maximizing, and therefore only capable of thriving in systems that reflect and magnify these tendencies, is also an ideological representation in that sense. Human beings are all of these things, but they are also a lot of other things, including co-operative, generous, fair-minded, ethical, emotional, irrational, loyal, etc. And human beings have thrived in vastly different forms of social organization, from the monastic community to the wild West, from the amazonian tribe to the Singaporean dictatorship. This representation of "human nature" merely serves to justify the superiority of one political and economic system by anchoring its contingent features in eternal nature.

I don't get your point. Where did I appeal to anthropology to make an ethical argument here? The naturalistic fallacy is precisely to argue of the basis of human nature, as if from the fact that we are greedy, it follows that we should be greedy or that greed should be encouraged.

The anthropological variety of human social organizations adds an inductive dimension to the fallacy of deducing moral arguments from "human nature."

and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is ‘by no means an injustice’_______Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This shows the value of second hand summary. Are you really going to get a fair account of one of the most radical thinkers in history from an encyclopedia?

Marx was in (excessive) love of irony as a writing style, which did him no good, because one can always cite a sentence he said to poke fun at something as if it were his position.

As part of his labor theory of value, which I btw consider of little use in describing contemporary capitalism, Marx described how in a perfectly fair and free market in equilibrium, operating according to classical theory, when everything sells at its cost of production, the capitalist profits because the cost of producing labor (the cost of feeding and housing a worker + education + pension, etc.) is lower than the cost of producing a marketable commodity with that labor. In other words, what creates room for profit is the societal acceptance of a living standard for workers that is below what their productivity makes possible. Now that last sentence, which points out that the general level of wages and profits is the result of societal bargaining (a form of cold class warfare), seems basically true, even though Marx's original modeling of how this happens is outdated.

When Marx says this is just, he means that it happens without any special coercion or manipulation of the market, when everything including labor trades at its "fair" price. Of course he is being ironic and making fun of the idea of the "free market".

Moral of the story: If you want to understand Marxism, read Marxists, not Encyclopedia entries about Marxism.