This type of debate tends to not have a "winner" but yes the last word is important for the internet, which shows the unimportance of internet message board debating. But for example, the famous Chomsky/Buckley debate's "winner" tends to be perceived differently by people who agree with one ideology over the other.
You're not attacking my point properly here. I didn't claim that some capitalists fail and lose out (although I'm not sure how much downward mobility there is from capitalist class to lower classes, as they tend to find other opportunities given their situation). I instead was arguing about the actual ability to own such a factory, and that it is actually quite limited. This is the point about social/economic mobility being limited, as if it's the case that upward social/economic mobility is actually quite rare compared to what free market proponents claim (which is the case), then it's hard to imagine that only such an elite few are the ones who are "the best qualified" to be the owners, as even the opportunity for the rest to try it was nonexistent.
And as for the point about "editing out things from your posts." Notice how I decided to not include your lame attempts at personal attacks again. As I noted earlier, I'm not going to waste my time responding to "you are just wrong" or "you just don't get it" as they have nothing to offer for this discussion. I don't see why you bother still, it's quite sad actually that you have to continue with that over a message board honestly.
What exactly do you mean by "capitalism reflects life"? Capitalism is an economic system that is socially constructed, not a natural occurrence. Granted, proponents of it often try to make the claim that "it's the best suited for human nature" but that's something that I and many others disagree with.
As for your point about equality, Socialists do not argue that everyone should be equal in every sense. Socialists recognize that there are differences in ability and among individuals. The criticism of the economic disparity is that the "haves" in a capitalist system are "haves" at the expense of the have nots and that it is the economic structure that maintains that disparity under the veil of a false sense of equality of opportunity. So I would say that socialists argue for a
true equality of opportunity which would lead to less disparity.
And I haven't claimed that managers correct and police the entire class themselves. It's a systematic process that involves many aspects of economics, wealth distribution and social issues (the last point which Marx didn't hit on well enough).
Your source deals mainly with the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras, which were the two most corrupt period of the USSR. The Brezhnev era is often blamed by the policies of Khrushchev and his rule lead to a stagnate economy (and many Marxists blame the move to more of a state capitalist system for causing this).
So I would imagine that there is a high correlation (and perhaps some causal forces involved) in a stagnating economy and the decreasing work ethic in these poor economic periods. Just as I would imagine that the work ethic was a little lower in the Great Depression in America than it was in the 50s or early/mid 60s.
I don't disagree with you about the point of how corrupt the USSR became and that their method of a planned economy ultimately failed as a strategy. However I assume that you believe that Marxism leads to this (as many proponents of capitalism argue) and this I disagree with.
I didn't say that inflation only exists in this system. I said that the way in which it would increase as a result of redistribution is a function of this system. Of course the main alternative to this is the Marxist Labor theory of value, which also takes into account how money is printed and scarcity but at the same time recognizes that the value of commodities is based in large part the cost of labor. This is part of why Marx argued that capitalism had a fundamental problem, as it would try to raise the prices of commodities as much as possible while lowering labor costs as much as possible (and labor are the ones who need access to the commodities). This, in part, creates vicious cycles that makes the system instable. Although you could argue that it always picks back up, which it tends to do, but the instability is very harmful to the "have nots". Granted welfare states were introduced to make this system less harsh and more stable, and that has worked up until now, although the welfare state has been reduced and reduced so it will be interesting to see what happens to those cycles in the coming years.
There is a political component to feudalism, yes but it is at the core more of an economic system. The way in which the economy was structured and how the modes of production were owned and operated was fundamentally different than under capitalism. The relation of the "lower classes" to labor and the means of production is also fundamentally different under a feudal system. In a capitalist system, labor owns their own labor power and ability to work where they want and sell there time, where as in a feudal system, they are tied to their land, and production benefits much less people than under capitalism.
As for the Stalinist system, the majority of those killed were due to the collectivization of farms. But it wasn't just mismanagement (although I'm sure that contributed) but instead an attempt to get as much for the party/state from the farms at the expense of the peasants. It was done in a quota system in a sense, farmers were required to produce X amount of crops, and the state would take that much, anything above they could keep. The problem of course was when they fell short of that mark, they starved. This is one reason that Humanist Marxists are very opposed to Stalin. The strategy worked quite well for industrializing the USSR, but not for human life. This was basically a process of compressing the industrial revolution into a short period instead of a more natural long process like the West, and in the West many died as a result of this transition too, but it was just spread over time. (Don't misunderstand me as trying to justify Stalin though of course).
Well a collective society is not at odds with granting people their personal gain. This is why Marx makes the distinction between private and personal property:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm (starting with "In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.")
As for the altruistic argument, altruism isn't the notion of completely selfless motivation for certain actions, that is impossible because you derive some satisfaction for fulfilling a desire to help someone else. Instead it is putting someone else's interests
above your own. But I don't see the point in arguing of altruism, as Socialism isn't a 100% altruistic society, just a society based on the social character of economic production instead of wealth acquisition.
As for the "what's to stop someone from hijacking a company for themselves after being elected" Well first, I would imagine the same principle of representative democracy should be at work here and you could even have checks and balances, for example workers councils could have the ability to impeach.
You could use the same question to make an argument against our own method of electing officials: what's to stop the people we elect to run our country from using it for their own personal gain (although the past few years may be an example of that).
Management could still be run the same way, thus equally as practical as it is today, but as I said, with people having more of a stake in how things are run (at least if the context is a market Socialist one).
Fair enough.
Well they're both claims. Even the claim that wealth distribution (in this system) leads to mass inflation. That's a claim of a causal relationship between those two things, and is likely right under this economic system as I have pointed out earlier.
You must still be taking my posting of binary economics out of context. It was simply a point that "you don't have to be a communist to disagree with this wealth structure". I never tried to justify or argue for binary economics, I was simply making a side point.
How is that a strawman? You said "if you're talking about the forced collectivization in the USSR" to which I replied "no, of course those are not non-hierarchical"