> Perhaps but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.

It does. Many socialists want to (and do) use markets as part of their desired transition. Capitalism is not actually pro-market by default, it just uses markets to accumulate capital. Left to its own devices, anticompetitive (i.e., anti-market) behaviors always arise.

Capitalism vs. socialism is not markets vs. a planned economy. It's about who owns the means of production.

> Socialism (absent central planning) doesn't have a means of allocating capital, so no one has ever tried it for long.

China's doing it right now via state capitalism, erring on a side where they allow capitalists to exist in an extremely controlled fashion and they regularly jail or put to death those who violate their rules - or they seize segments of industry. Socialists often create transitional plans where they maintain much of the same system but with significant curtailing of private property.

Other socialist countries / groups have operated largely by collectives, where initial capital is raised jointly with the government but once a venture is going it self-sustains as a collective bringing in new capital and divying it up by and to workers. Vietnam runs a mixed system where this is the dominant mode of production (the other is a China-style "controlled" capitalism).

Socialism is also a pretty wide brush. Rojava is communalist and local councils are the primary vehicle for regulating and controlling production. EZLN is anarchist-ish and nearly everything is a collective or co-op, with workers pooling capital to start a venture but also working within it and sharing alike. There are many ways to do socialism.

> When they do, everything falls to the tragedy of the commons.

I'm not sure what this is referring to.

> Even authoritarian socialists agree to this.

No such thing as "authoritarian socialists". That's not a self-identity or an ideology, but a pejorative produced by liberals and the folks that take that libertarian-made political compass too seriously.

> Socialist anarchists have various opinions but agree that socialist organization is an unsolved problem.

Anarchists tend to think that it isn't even a problem. Once they win, they depend on self-organization.

> No one is prevented from setting up a socialist organization in capitalist countries, its merely the case that when they do, they aren't able to externalize their costs and they don't achieve very much.

I mean, socialists can organize a party or something within a capitalist country, but you can't do socialism within a capitalist country. The entire system's function is dictated by capitalism - a co-op, for example, is still competing with all the other capitalist companies and has to follow the rules set up for them or perish.

Not sure what you mean by externalizing costs. If you're thinking of co-ops, they absolutely can and do externalize costs.

> Then all forms of what you consider to be socialism will fail because of plunder.

I don't see why.

> yeah, its not cool to mess with other people's stuff. that's the problem here.

Depends on what that stuff is. Private property is distinguished from personal property in a socialist view.

> Maybe if "getting a footing" wasn't synonymous with expropriating the capitalists this wouldn't happen.

If socialists weren't socialist this wouldn't happen? This doesn't make any sense and it doesn't address the point.

> This is true. its also the case that rulers over a mixed economy have vastly more wealth at their disposal than rulers over a command economy and a collective that has norms prohibiting the collection of rents. This is because the market generates more wealth and rulers are able to extract more wealth because there is more wealth.

So the story goes. The expropriation of value from the Global South has something to say about that, though.

Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Best of luck to you, friend.