[cassepipe]

It seems to me that except for a small group of crazy persons on the internet fascinated with the imagery of the Soviet Union and a "US bad justifies anything" hard line on the internet and some sectarian self-proclaimed marxist-[leninist] groups no modern anti-capitalist will seriously defend any of the self-proclaimed "socialist" state. (I very much hope that) the consensus in the Left seems to be that a state-owned economy + no democracy = Horror.

One of the hard part is trying to understand what capitalism even is. In that endeavour, Marx has only laid out the basis for an analysis at the end of his life in The Capital. It's an unfinished work, hindered by a philosophical education he did his best to shake off. Most social sciences did not exist or weren't well established to help him then.

You are only seeing the good sides of capitalism because you are on the good side of the stick if I may say. But without regulations, capitalism incentives are to brutally exploit all living workforce at hand, and this has been very from the beginning of capitalism. It is true that scientific advances in production (and especially the algricultural revolutions) have enabled to production of a incredibly well (in terms of calories available) and cheaply fed workforce which in the end also benefits the working class but this might well be a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism and may have with the fact that investing in mechanization may have seem the best of option in times of working people unrest. Plus you have to factor in the competition that took place with the USSR to be the most prosperous for all state/model.

Maybe the solution is capitalism with regulations/better incentives, maybe it is democratic governance inside of corporations, maybe something else I don't know but history has shown times and times again that unregulated capitalism is awful for most of humankind. I am ready to acknowlegde that market mechanisms have their usefulness but that usefulness must be harnessed for greater good, it should not be turned into a religion.

Whether there exists or not a "human nature", trying to derive social phenomenas directly from it seems a deeply unscientific approach to understanding social systems that does not seem fit for the 21st century.