> The only implementations are basically run by dominant elites, who emerge as the ruling class, resulting in exclusive political economic systems. This is mig

> The only implementations are basically run by dominant elites, who emerge as the ruling class, resulting in exclusive political economic systems. This is mighty reminiscent of basically every other system of large (super-Dunbar-scale) society control, from the ancient priest-kings, through the Roman "republic" and imperial systems, medieval feudalism, and late-stage capitalism. When control of the political system (how society allocates resources) can be used in a self-dealing manner, and resources can be used to control the political system, the steady state will tend towards the pattern you noted above (especially when those resources tend toward power-law distributions). Notably, the argument can be made that the situations where political power has reverted to a wider base (including the establishment of modern democracies) has come about when social or technological changes destabilized the economic distribution structure. Examples include the workers' movement you cited, the growing late medieval era's growing merchant class (whose willingness to be taxed to fund mutually-beneficial programs and corresponding demands for control over those programs helped trigger the creation of European democracy), and the western Roman Empire's decaying ability to use the funds of expansion to exert social control in its occupied territories. Lastly, it should be noted that, as brutal, illiberal, and inegalitarian as the USSR ended up being, the society they replaced (the Tsarist Russian Empire), being an industrialized dictatorship built around an enormous serf class was probably worse on all three counts.