You make bad faith arguments. When someone wants to talk about "capitalism" v. "communism" they typically want to discuss the idea of capitalism and the idea of communism as political enterprises.

When you respond to this argument with historical examples, you are being disingenuous by shifting the modality of discourse to a different logical type. The first few computers are nothing like what we have today, many airplanes, trains, and automobiles crash, no one turns around and argues that the very conception of a train is bad because of these historical instances. It is like taking a discussion about an interface design and then moving it to the level of implementation detail.

It also isn't a binary distinction. When people criticize negative outcomes of capitalism it does not automatically mean they espouse "communism" (more specifically some private definition of communism you have). They may simply want to critique the problems of the current system and propose some other alternative (maybe one that's more anarchic, for example).

These labels are such a curse on political-economic discourse. They have no stable, objective referents, and they do nothing but allow people to bring the conversation to an abysmally stupid place with rapidity (I include my own tendencies in this reflection).

> You make bad faith arguments. When someone wants to talk about "capitalism" v. "communism" they typically want to discuss the idea of capitalism and the idea of communism as political enterprises.

This is not quite accurate. Most of the advocates of communism want to contrast the historical instances of capitalism (with all of its visible faults) with the idea of communism (with all of its ideological perfection).

This is exemplified in this particular thread (although present everywhere) by freejazz's statement "So how is the Amazon-economy a more moral choice than communism?"

"Amazon-economy" is capitalism as a real system/historical instances. "Communism" is the idea of communism.

So, the claim that people usually want to discuss the idea of capitalism is false, because they almost invariably argue based off of real-world drawbacks of capitalism. It's not bad faith to then compare those to real-world drawbacks of historical+contemporary instances of communism.

If someone really wants to discuss the idea of communism, they have to elide any mention of specific instances of capitalism (while still taking human factors into account for all theories proposed).