I deny that there is any meaningful or worthwhile theoretical thought behind communism. It was all just made up with zero connection to objective reality.
An extremely bold claim! In your mind, the communist project is one of the greatest and relatively most successful conspiracies to date.
Do you think that all those books people have written about it, both for and critically against, are just filled nonsense, and the writers and thinkers just had to count on the fact that nobody would actually read them? And that I, who have read a small portion, am somehow hypnotized into delusion by them, thinking I have gained knowledge, when in fact there was no knowledge to be gained at all?
I can't of course argue against this, as I am implicitly deluded in general, but I would still question your overall rhetorical strategy here.
If communism was a real thing, it would have worked as predicted. It did not happen.
I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is just absurd.
Yet there are people that still seem to believe it but I do not think they really think it is correct. This theory is the foundation of how much the employer steals to the worker. And that sets up a very conflictive mindset instead of a cooperative one. I believe more in cooperation. I do not deny an employer and an employee, both parts always want more. But both win together.
This is not what Marx believed, he painfully toils through literally thousands of pages arguing for his theory of value, and is not that there is one objective value, which translates to the exploitation of the worker. In fact, his theory is grounded in the profound complication of what we consider 'value', specifically its duality under capitalism: "use value" and "exchange value". What you are most likely referring to is " surplus value" which is something like the amount you can point to that comes from the exploitation of the worker, but it comes from a very complicated pseudo algebra of his own design.
The best thing to pick at, if you are arguing with Marxists, is the general "labor theory of value" and whether that ultimately is correct. The labor theory of value has to do with how we assign economic value to things on the market, and that it ultimately is from the labor of those who produce the product.
"labor theory of value" -> this is what I was trying to say. Probably I did not phrase it well. I did not read the full book, but I tried to learn its main points. As incorrect as it is IMHO, it is still something everyone should study because of its impact in history.
