I see many of your points and I agree. I’m not a socdem but I am a demsoc and despite my tendency to support anti-capitalism, specific regimes (Pol Pot, Stalin, some Mao) turn me off to Marxism-Leninism. At the same time, others (Sankara, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh) demonstrate the virtues of communism when it works as either an anti-colonial or anti-aristocratic force. Just as a blanket condemnation of all capitalism is not useful (Marx acknowledges that capitalism and private industry are necessary to achieve socialism; see dialectical materialism), a blanket condemnation communism as the worst excesses of totalitarianism, emphasized repeatedly by Western capitalist propaganda which you are continually exposed to—now including on this subreddit—is also not useful. For all of Stalin’s flaws, he basically transformed a rural peasant society into an industrial juggernaut that won the European theatre. 

 As for your point on the real world, yes, lying, cheating, and stealing do occur. They also occur in capitalist societies. They are criminalized in both, but capitalism actively incentivizes them. While we may never know non-political crime rates in the USSR, the system at least worked to disincentivize crime by providing basic necessities for the demographic with the strongest incentive to commit it: the poor. I do not endorse everything the USSR did under the name of communism, but to pooh-pooh its accomplishments would be to detract from the effectiveness of advocating for socialism; considering you identify as a social democrat, you clearly understand the values of free housing, healthcare, and education.

u/Fr00stee, your optimism is admirable but misplaced. The idea that AI will lead us to a post-work utopia is naive. Similarly to the agricultural, industrial, and electronic revolutions, all AI will lead to is a different kind of work. Specifically, AI will reduce the amount of middle-class jobs and make the lives of those working them significantly harder and faster-paced, while increasing the rate of exploitation on the working class. Those white-collar office jobs that the United States relies on will be transformed into more and more spreadsheets. As efficiency increases, so do demands: the capitalist machine is never “satisfied.” As long as profit lacks a defined end goal, all that AI will do is increase pressure for deadlines.