>>11064
Well, if you make a profit based off someone else's work and worth, you're indeed exploiting them according to my logic. The thing is, if you work alongside your employees you deserve a part of the wealth created just the same way they do so you would all be "richer" as well: I don't seek to abolish managers or forbid people from knowing how to run a workplace, leading a team is a respectful job too; but if you're just charging them for their work solely because you happen to own the means of production, then you're nothing more than a parasite and the situation is absolutely no different from feudalism. And I don't want to hear the argument of those parasites then investing their money back into the system: socially owned companies can do that just as well, you just have to replace the previous owner with a council and it's exactly the same thing, except 100% of it can be used, whereas part of it would necessarily stay in the pockets of the exploiter.
"Profiting" in that capitalist sense doesn't have to be a mass atrocity, but it's definitely bad and then varies according to the degree, in the same way that violence can range from slapping someone to invading a country.
As long as there's a state it would just be a socialist transition, you can hardly call that a "gommie paradise" as though it were the goal of anyone. Also the conditions would be extremely different today, since the powerful state planning economy was a way to industralise the country as fast as possible in order to make communism possible. Were a similar revolution to happen in Europe, I doubt it would be necessary. I side with anarcho-communists anyway, and the example of Spain that I already mentionned gives me, on the contrary of what you're saying, good reasons to believe violence wouldn't be necessary in order to organise the society fairly. Unless you consider workers taking over their workplace to be violent, but I believe that the fact it didn't belong to them in the first place is precisely a violation of personal property, since, as I said before, I only recognise use and occupation as a basis for possession. That's why I wrote the question of private or personal property was ultimately the dividing issue between ancoms and ancaps.
Every attempt at communism so far was basically bolshevism: the Chinese Communist Party only succeeded in taking power against the Nationalists because they were backed by the USSR, countries of the Warsaw Pact were bound as well to Stalinist policies (see the Prague Spring for example), and attempts made in South America weren't that bad compared to the alternatives. I already cited Pinochet as an example of capitalist dictatorship, and Venezuelan economy actually improved under Chavez, it only started worsening since he passed away. Yugoslavia was even more successful, purposely staying away from Stalin's influence as soon as it could, and enjoying a better quality of life than a handful of Western European states despite receiving no help from the USA nor the USSR. It would only begin to collapse when it started to lean towards capitalism and nationalisms went back on the rise.
The record is even less tainted when you take modern experiments into account and look towards autonomous Kurdistan, currently fighting ISIS and organising itself as a communist country with successful democracy and so on, or the EZLN in the Chiapas, effectively defending the Natives' rights and seemingly not resorting to any authoritarian mesure in order to uphold their legitimacy, although they only rule over rural areas.
Those are all very well-known examples among leftist communities which tend to be brought up again and again, but the argument of "communism doesn't work/has never worked" is so common that we end up repeating ourselves as well.
Like I said, the religious question doesn't bear much importance to me so I never got really into it. I guess it was just perceived as tool of oppression, imposing false authority on the people, preventing them from wanting to change the word since they would find bliss in Heaven anyway, blurring their sense of morality with arbitrary rules set in stone, etc. At least Eastern Orthodoxy of today is far from distancing itself from the state though.