The free market today (so called) is heavily managed by governments, leading to a kind of centralised control which converges with what Marxism produces in practice. Neither deliver what they promise.
Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.
The free market does exist, but not where it is supposed to. The black market sometimes acts as a free market... As do car boot/yard sales... Precisely because it is not interfered with by the authorities all the time. Putting everything online is going to increase government interference.
We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
> We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that
Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
> Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.
Communism is no button you just have to push. It can be described as a society so prosperous that its members do not need to work anymore to live, where classes have been abolished and where the State has disappeared.
It needs to be built and engineered. Countries like China and Vietnam are going in this right direction, and they are already more prosperous, more industrious and more democratic than their western adversaries despite starting from basically scratch
