Clear out, no. Replace, yes. The socialism-inspired civil wars of the past did not get rid of elites-in-power as a concept, but they did get rid of some of the specific individuals that previously qualified.

Each time, the socialism did significant damage to the economy... as measured by the elites, anyway.

Nobody, except those who already got it, has gotten theirs since the 1970s. The theory behind trickle-down economics is demonstrably false. When you give rich people more control over resources and production, they keep all the additional profits, because they can, and then use some of those to gain more control over resources and production. Socialists, while incorrect in many (most?) areas of economics, at least realize that the people who do the work should get paid fairly for it, even if their calculations for "fair" are frequently inaccurate. The socialist war is the ultimate penalty for unfairness in the economy.

The system will never find a higher peak without a good, hard kick, off of the local maximum it seems to be stuck on. It doesn't need to be a socialist revolution that does it, and everything would probably be better off if it wasn't them, but they're the only ones that seem to be in position to get the job done now. And once they do, then the non-socialist, non-mercantile-elitist armies may begin to fight, if they have enough numbers, or enough clout with the socialists to steer them away from the cliff peacefully.

You're not going to be rich someday, because your parents weren't rich, and you grew up in the wrong postal code. That's the current regime in the US. Accept that, statistically speaking, everyone that has bucked the trend to achieve extreme upward mobility has been in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, and the right skills, to take advantage of an ephemeral opportunity. Most people still can't afford to be prepared for anything, and also look up from their daily toil long enough to recognize an opening.

You cannot get rich with a lifetime of hard work and wise investments; if you do that, never make a single mistake, and never get screwed, you can retire comfortably, snugly ensconced in hopefully the higher end of the middle class. It's a fine goal, achievable, and not something socialism does well. You can get rich by getting lucky, and buying the right lottery tickets. You can get rich by abandoning your ethics and screwing over those still attempting hard work over a lifetime. For instance, blow a bubble in the mortgages market and erase the majority of net worth for a lot of middle-class families, and then place bets on how many extra defaults and foreclosures there will be because of it. Nobody went to prison for that. It won't be me that does it, but I definitely won't cry if those even peripherally responsible, and those following in their footsteps, ever get shoved up against the wall.

I'm not an elite in this system. I won't be an elite in any system that replaces it, socialist or not. I have accepted that I am a nobody, and will be forgotten before my corpse cools. And I have also accepted that religious fantasies of justice-after-death are bullshit, psychologically crafted to discourage vigilantism and mob behaviors. So when there is an obvious asshole that clearly requires a humility-boosting supplement, for whom the gods fail to send a nemesis, and for whom the prosecutors fail to send marshals, and for whom the helpers fail to send redeeming inspiration, that guy is going to be an exemplar of a strategy for winning the game of life. In the meta-game, successful dickwads encourage other players to become dickwads. I can see the endgame, and I don't win; I don't have enough points, don't have the right cards to play, and I'm not good enough at cheating to not get caught. But I can pick one player that's still in the running, and make it more difficult for them to win.