> It is indeed true that socialists and communists reject the construct of private property

yes

> and jump to expropriation

yes

> and violence

No. Most individual socialists are reluctant to be involved in any form of violence and anticipate it to be defensive in form. You can kind of get a sense for this when diving into who the foreign aggressors/invaders are in most conflicts and who are fighting anti-colonial revolutions following a general breakdown of society + state violence cracking down on political movements. Not a lot of people eager for violence among socialists. Pretty much the opposite - tons of people who are debilitated by their empathy.

> with no idea how to progress from this state to their desired end state.

I would say it's more that there are many competing ideas on how to do so and there's constant infighting.

> This is why "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a terrible idea and likely to fail in any scenario involving human beings.

But it's not relevant to this situation...

> Yes, they were more interested in exporting their ideology to the rest of the world than making it work where they were already in charge

I'm referring to actually defensive capabilities. Not the "defense" euphemism that Westerners use to describe very military investments used in very aggressive ways.

> and frustrating people's natural inclinations was so difficult as to require a massive domestic espionage apparatus.

Those were and are very direct responses to spying and disruption. Western approaches to socialist-run countries create the same conditions every time, creating a form of selection (like natural selection) for organizing around fighting foreign influence. You'll note that those who didn't (like Allende) were and even those who tried to but weren't strong enough (like Sankara) were murdered and had their governments replaced by imperial powers.

This doesn't mean their domestic spying was or is good, just that it was, in fact, a reaction to real and active outside threats. Notice that Western powers are currently engaged in widespread domestic spying over much smaller threats.

> But what is even more interesting is that all those loyal soviet apparatchiks became more bourgeoise as they became responsible for allocating more resources. Perhaps the communists could learn something here too.

The people I'm describing didn't have any responsibility for allocating resources, they were nerds in universities.

> The propaganda was not too far from reality as many defectors learned.

Defectors that weren't already straight-up spies were frequently disappointed. They found the main thing that they sought: popular consumer goods that they envied. But they also discovered higher rates of homelessness, hunger, a lack of safety at night, and more reactionary views towards homosexuality and women.

Defectors in the opposite direction had similar experiences. When they weren't spies (they often were), they were disappointed in their experience, as they tended to get spied on a lot themselves. Both sides tried to poison or otherwise murder the others' defectors as well.

> I think some people do.

I haven't met many people that acknowledge the existence of "bullshit jobs" and definitely not any who thought they existed for dogmatic reasons. But we all have our bubbles. Do you have any examples that you're thinking of?

> > so fundamental to our typical understanding of how the economy should work that we don't even talk about them

> i.e. dogma

Ha, I thought the same thing as I wrote it and then got distracted. I'm thinking of implicit ideas of how the world works, where we don't even think about alternatives. I'm not sure whether I'd call that dogma or not. I'm not finding the right words to describe it, unfortunately.

> Funny, the people on the right say its between center-left and far-left. I think you both need to read more, tbqh.

If we try to place these ideas on a one-dimensional axes for convenience, the far left is clearly taken up by socialists and communists. Socialists reject all capitalists as allies and drive a hard line between them and everyone else. The nearest to them are social democrats, who attempt to create a controlled form of capitalism through democratic means, where strong social programs and safety nets prevent (theoretically) the public from suffering the worst tendencies of capitalism. Then there are liberals who might believe in some social programs that already exist, but shy away from creating new ones and tend to prefer market-based solutions. Then there are liberals who tend more and more towards uncontrolled capitalism. Finally, there are factions within capitalists themselves that create ideologies like fascism who attempt to resolve crises in profit due to labor fights by adopting a highly nationalist and xenophobic position that blames "bad" capitalists for everyones' problems and tries to organize around "good" capitalists that do things right.

Social Democrats and liberals in favor of social programs tend to populate the center-left and center. Other liberals are right wing and it just keeps going farther right.

Folks on the right who call liberals in favor of social programs "far left" do so because they've not actually been exposed to actual socialists or as a bad-faith pejorative.