system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Most economically far-left people are highly ignorant and have no idea about what course of action we should take to “end capitalism”

I’m from Denmark. So when I say far left, I mean actual socialists and communists, not just supporters of a welfare state (we have a very strong welfare state and like 95% of people support it). 

First of all, I’m not well versed in politics in general, I’ll be the first to admit my ignorance. No, I have not really read any leftist (or right leaning for that matter) theory. I’m unsure where I fall myself. Please correct me if I say anything wrong. I also realize my sample size is heavily biased. 

A lot of my social circle are far left. Constantly cursing out capitalism as the source of basically all evil, (jokingly?) talking about wanting to be a part of a revolution, looking forward to abolishing capitalism as a system. 

But I see a lot more people saying that than people taking any concrete action to do so, or having somewhat of a plan of what such a society would look like. It’s not like the former Eastern Bloc is chic here or something people want. So, what *do* they want? It seems to me that they’re just spouting this without thinking, that capitalism is just a buzzword for “thing about modern life I do not like”. All of them also reject consuming less or more ethically source things because “no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It seem they don’t even take any smaller steps except the occasional Instagram story.  

As for the ignorant part, I guess I’m just astounded when I see things like Che Guevara merch, and the farthest left leaning party here supporting the Cambodian communist regime (so Pol Pot). It would be one thing if they admitted “yes, most/all former countries that tried to work towards being communist were authoritarian and horrible, but I think we could try again if we did X instead and avoided Y”. But I never even see that. 

As a whole, although the above doesn’t sound like it, I sympathize a lot with the mindset. Child labour is horrible. People having horrible working conditions and no time for anything other than work in their lives is terrible, and although Scandinavia currently has the best worker’s rights, work-life balance, lowest income inequality and strongest labour unions, in the end we still have poor Indian kids making our Lego. 

Their... refusal to be more concrete is just confusing to me. I think far right folks usually have a REALLY concrete plans with things they want to make illegal and taxes they want to abolish etc. 

So if you are far left, could you be so kind as to discuss this a bit with me?

Edit: 

I’m not really here to debate what system is best, so I don’t really care about your long rants about why capitalism is totally the best (that would be another CMV). I was here to hear from some leftists why their discourse can seem so vague, and I got some great answers.
gpt
I think this starts from a well-observed point of departure, which is that people who want to go farther in reforming or abolishing capitalism than standard-issue social democracy no longer have a clear idea about what that alternative system might look like concretely.

The reason, as you infer, is that many people on the left, both old and young, are now painfully aware that simply empowering the state as a complete replacement for capitalism does not work, for two reasons. First, that even in the best-case scenario, conventional bureaucratic structures are completely incapable of managing an economy in real time--that any functioning economy requires some measure of decentralization right down to the level of individual consumption and production. Which usually leads to the worst-case scenario in a centrally-planned state socialist economy, which is not only inefficiency but corruption and absolutism that is as bad as capitalism. Second, as Trotsky and many other leftists have realized since the 19th Century "revolution in one country" doesn't work--that in a world where capitalism remains substantially dominant, a single country cannot effectively delink from the global economy and establish a genuinely socialist alternative.

The problem you are trying to think about is certainly one that leftists are keenly aware of, and it has divided the left since the French Revolution. Namely, what does the alternative to tyranny and capitalism actually look like? Broadly speaking, this question is one that has especially distinguished socialists from communists/Marxists. Socialists since the 19th Century have often tried to concretely plan out or envision the institutions of a socialist society, and not all of them looked to the state. At the turn of the 20th Century, "market socialism" was a significant concept on the left (the historian James Livingston has written some about this somewhat forgotten moment)--e.g., the idea of using market mechanisms and signals while getting rid of corporate capitalism. 

Communists/Marxists, on the other hand, have mostly followed Marx's lead in being hazy about what specifically comes after the overthrow of capitalism, and it's not because they're being evasive or dishonest. It's literally because in the context of how they perceive the forward motion of history, there is an intrinsic veil between how people will eventually live under communism and how they are in the present because the overthrow of capitalism will make it possible for some of the basic premises of "human nature" as we imagine it to change--that what we take to be natural or normal for human beings (say, that they are driven to maximize their individual utility) are instead distortions of human possibility that arise from and within capitalism. So we can't fully envision living in a postcapitalist society for the same reason that the two-dimensional shapes in the book *Flatland* cannot describe three-dimensional spaces even if they're lifted up above the plane they inhabit. If you want a closely parallel analogy, imagine what it would be like, really like, to live in a post-scarcity society. Shows like Star Trek have sometimes claimed to be envisioning "post-scarcity" with replicators and so on, but it's plain that this just is not the actual situation in the Trek universe. We really can't imagine what it would be like to be human in that context, and yet post-scarcity is at least technologically somewhat possible to envision.

I suppose one parallel might be what people mean right now in the US when they say "abolish the police". Some mean that completely literally and comprehensively, but mostly they mean "redistribute the vast funding given to policing to many other agencies and organizations and narrowly reconceptualize what we mean by policing" with the implication that maybe if we did that, much of what we take to be inevitable and intrinsic might fade away to a great extent. (E.g., we think crime is an immutable and inevitable problem, ergo some think that you must have a vast police force. But what if the vast police force is what causes and reproduces crime?)