You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism.

> You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism"

Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization.

> Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.

You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely different from USSR yet still socialist. Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives.

Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system, but people love nothing more than to draw conclusions from these obviously-invalid "experiments".

"You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything that was bad about the USSR". The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that.

" no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system"

That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning team.

"Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives."

Of that infinite number, the violent Soviet-like version became the most widespread because it was the only one that was somewhat stable when implemented on a countrywide scale. That stability was bought by blood, of course.

No one is sabotaging worker cooperatives in Europe and lefty parties used to given them extra support, but they just don't seem to be able to grow well. The largest one is located in Basque Country and it is debatable if its size is partly caused by Basque nationalism, which is not a very socialist idea. Aside from that one, worker cooperatives of more than 1000 people are rare birds.

"The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that."

No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment with that quagmire again. For some reason, socialism is a catnip of intellectuals who continue to defend it, but real-world workers dislike it and defect from various attempts to build it at every opportunity.

We should stop trying to ride dead horses. Collective ownership of means of production on a macro scale is every bit as dead as divine right of kings to rule. There are still Curtis Yarvin types of intellectual who subscribe to the latter idea, but it is pining for the fjords. So is socialism.