To expand: Robert Owen ran semi-Socialist company towns with large expansions in protections, lower working hours, and high rates of profit. When he took his model to the other bourgeoisie, he was cast out of high society and publicly humiliated.

Owens built a practical model for socialist economics, which reverberates into the modern day. He was living proof that these policies could create prosperous surplus over time, and his methods did get adopted in subsequent socialist governments.

But it's true. Simply proving out the mathematics of socialist economics isn't enough, because the practice still overly democratized political influence. For authoritarian capitalists, this wasn't seen as beneficial. Better to Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven.

Engels writes about this in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

This feels like a big nut of it

But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.

Not enough to be efficient. You need to be the guy doing the firing when the downturn comes, rather than the guy who is getting fired.

That struggle for power is what Capitalists cling to.

I hate how Marx has become synonymous with Socialist thought despite the fact that Marx represents only the Bureaucratic side of Socialism and Proudhon and other Anarchist thinkers are ignored. Proudhon literally wrote Property is Theft.

I think that what fucked over Owen, according to Engels, was not his coops but his assessment that they were inadequate and more fundamental changes to society were required, concerning marriage, religion, and something else that I forget. For just the coops, he was celebrated in a way that isn't even that different from the OP, because he didn't really shatter the existing paradigm, but produce an extremely productive version of it that just happened to be relatively pro-social.

Dude having to do this shit with your resume when everything you’ve done is design bridges or make things has me wanting to kill these marketing majors

I literally have to make up shit like ‘installed foundations at 34.2% faster rate and increased lunch break efficiency by 12%’

It's weird how they can take the long view on some things and yet they will happily run a company into the ground for a 1% higher quarterly return.

Yep, the Reserve Army of Labor must be preserved, and time to allow Proletarians to accumulate on their own time and eventually compete must be stifled.

tl;dr-- the cruelty is the point.