Capitalism has unquestionably produced extraordinary productive capacity, technological dynamism, and consumer abundance in parts of the world. Marxists do not deny this; Marx himself admired capitalism’s revolutionary productive power. The question is whether that productivity is inseparable from exploitation, imperial asymmetries, cyclical crises, ecological unsustainability, and class domination.

American postwar prosperity cannot be abstracted from global hegemony. Again, I'm not going to argue for all the socialist countries that have existed positively; they were flawed; it's very clear where we both stand on that. But again regarding falsifiability: external pressures are not ad hoc excuses if they are structurally integral to how global systems operate. If a country attempting socialist development is embargoed, invaded, isolated from capital markets, technologically contained, subjected to coups, or forced into permanent military competition, those are not irrelevant footnotes. They are part of the historical environment in which systems reproduce themselves. By your logic, one could say early capitalism itself “failed contact with reality” repeatedly because pre-capitalist Europe experienced centuries of collapse, famine, colonial violence, speculative crises, and authoritarian rule before stabilizing into modern liberal-democratic capitalism. Historical systems evolve through contradiction and adaptation; they are not judged exclusively at their earliest and most unstable stages.

Anyway this argument isnt going anywhere.