Yeah no I'm not making some "new soviet man" argument. It doesn't help that in the USSR everyone was suffering deprivation, but it's well known that there's a hedonic drop off point once people have enough money to not have to worry about bills any more and have some disposable income. Most people have a degree of empathy (not self-sacrificial altruism, which genuinely is rare) and when their needs are reliably taken care of most would want to reduce the suffering of others.

If you don't care whether your friends, neighbours or kids in Africa live or die, that's a you problem. For the rest of us, we'd rather reduce the suffering of others.

Again, I lived this experiment. I have never seen people so dehumanized and so insensitive to other's suffering like when their basic needs were "taken care of" by the state. I am talking orphanages full of children with deformed bones because they never saw the light of day. Prisons where abject torture was wide-spread and routine. Gulags.

Today's Western people, in comparison, are angels.

You know why communes failed? Because everyone was stealing - from workers to guardians, even those in charge were stealing. You know why they stole? Because they were starving. You know why they were starving? Because they couldn't buy the food they needed. Why? Because there was no profit motive for others to provide that food.

People don't work the way you think they do. Until you understand that, you'll spread suffering instead of reducing it.

I already said this but I guess I have to repeat it: MLs create dictatorships and dictatorships based on wishful thinking, and lying to themselves as well. I don't support them, in fact such systems are basically equivalent to fascism. They're a step backwards into monarchy, but worse because they're ideological rather than pragmatically oriented.

That doesn't invalidate the point that capitalism has some significant flaws that we should be trying to address. As an anarchist I believe that these flaws cannot be fundamentally addressed by just changing our masters. In the short term (as in, my lifetime) all I can hope for is an increase in the prevalence of worker cooperatives and unions, nationalisation of naturally monopolistic necessities like healthcare and public transit, improved welfare systems (UBI would be good) and improved community bonds. In the long run I think the ideal human system would be without coercion, oriented around cooperation and coordinated from the bottom up - but as ideals should be, this is something to guide efforts towards to the degree practical, not to throw human bodies at in the pursuit of power and a fever dream (plus little power over others is to be begin with in anarchism, that's the point).