The Socialist left dosen't talk about finding the right people to put in power, it talks about putting the people in power Yes, but that's a meaningless slogan

The Socialist left dosen't talk about finding the right people to put in power, it talks about putting the people in power Yes, but that's a meaningless slogan. "People" can't be in power in general, only individuals can, that is the nature of power. And so when it comes to actual implementation time, socialists put specific individuals in power - often a lot of power - and they spend a lot of time trying to ensure those people are good/moral/intelligent/wise/etc. This is why left wing movements have a habit of becoming obsessed with specific leaders. Mao, Stalin, Chavez, and in more modern times Jeremy Corbyn, to a much lesser extent Bernie Sanders etc. You later assert that "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't actually mean dictatorship in the e.g. Soviet sense even though that's exactly what it always turns into. Because, again, dictatorship of the people is a meaningless slogan. [Marx] with Engels collected hundreds of factory reports and studied them for theirty years in nearly abject poverty I'm well aware of Marx's life story, that's why I said it was cloistered. He spent his entire life doing nothing but reading books in his library and writing political philosophy, sponging off his friends to make ends meet. For a man who claimed to think about the poor so much, here are some notable things he appears to have never done: * Visited a factory * Gone down a mine * Socialised with the working class * Attempted to win votes or take part in any kind of political process at all Basically, his life was devoid of reality checks of any sort, which is why his ideas turned out to be so useless and disastrous. He even turned down an invitation from Engels to visit his factory, iirc - that's how much he cared about real workers! This entirely sealed off existence is one reason he ended up engaging in so much intellectual fraud. His books were notorious even in his lifetime for false claims and faked citations. In particular he frequently found himself making false claims that industrial capitalism was in a downward spiral, because he was citing decades old reports from factory inspectors. Those reports had gone on to trigger changes in legislation and factory conditions, which later improved. His entire thesis was that industrial capitalism would have an apocalyptic end, but it simply wasn't happening, in fact the opposite was happening. If he had actually spent any time doing real work, or had even joined the factory inspectorate himself, he could have observed this improvement directly. But he lived entirely through the experiences of others, in a dreamworld of his own making.