>I do not consider capitalism a "thing". Free Markets generate winners and losers.
Markets are different from capitalism. The fact that you don't consider it a stage of human history is strange, as capitalism has origins in a series of historical events. The Wikipedia article on capitalism is very good for this.
>obfuscates that and tries to reason that there is some oppressive force, exhibited by a ruling class, over the peasantry
No, Marx talks about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat being the two classes which engage in struggle in our capitalist society. However class struggle is not unique to capitalism, it is, as Marx describes, the history of all struggle hitherto. Now there are other minor classes aside from these in society, as there were in Marx's time - the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. However peasantry was largely used to describe the feudal mode of production.
>I don't think feudalism is a thing in the present, at least not in central europe.
Many parts of the world had not yet emerged from the feudal mode of production around Marx's time, and large swathes had not even seen large industry expansion. Even in Lenin's time, the functions of capital were not as developed in Russia as they were in other European nations (Germany and England being those leading the industrial revolution); in fact, Lenin split with his contemporaries on this, those opposed to him, the Mensheviks, believing that Russia had not reached capitalism yet, thus a revolution would be inappropriate and doomed to failure.
>"Morals as a concept are installed by rulers to keep their sheep in check, deal with it".
Marx also talks about the common forms of morality, family, justice etc. as bourgeois distinctions, as do his contemporaries such as Max Stirner and Bakunin.
>Marxism and Communism may be closer to each other than anarchism and communism
Marxism is not a form of society, it is a method of analysis, which originated in political economy but has since been carried over to various other fields, ranging from geography to literature. Communism implies an anarchist society, as Communism is to do away with rulers, including those rulers of land.
>There is no autocratic rule in the free world.
I was referring to the method of organisation within a company or firm, not how countries are organised. In terms of country political systems, those which are parliamentary democracies are, according to the Marxist analysis, bourgeois democracies, to perpetuate and ensure the survival of the flow of capital.
>But at what point do people accept that every time a country tried communism, everything went to shit?
It depends, some take this position, and others do not. Communism and its sisters, including syndicalism, took root, such as in revolutionary Spain in which 2 million people were engaged in large-scale worker unions, with no bureaucracy, all voluntarily engaging. Same is the case with the third French revolution, when Paris was split into 48 communes, each coordinating with regular meetings the affairs of the revolution.
I think you have an uncharitable view of Communism or similar ideologies, especially given the much changed nature of our world since those times of revolution in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Don't you think it should be up to modern day Marxists and indeed leftists of any and all persuasions to find and fix those errors?
>I don't feel particularly exploited, btw. We live in a very free world. If you don't want to sell your time, just don't do it. Start your own company. See how that goes.
Whether you feel exploited or not is irrelevant. This can be attributed to commodity fetishism and false consciousness as elaborated by Engels. Most people (especially in developing countries) do not have the opportunity to move out of the situation of selling labour-power for a wage, and even if most people did, there are still those who must do it. Just as the answer in a feudal system isn't "make everyone a lord", the answer within capitalism isn't to make everyone a property owner. There is not sufficient property (in particular land capital) to do this, anyway. Capitalism also requires large amount of wage labour, which would not be possible if the whole world were self employed, and we would resort to a bourgeois commodity exchange economy. Those born to parents without any land will not have any land. This is unfair in my eyes.
>Somehow, those who are too weak, or preoccupied with other things, are blaming those who did try, for the fact that they have relatively easy lives.
Hard work does not give reward, at least not within capitalism. This can be shown by those people who not only take large risk but they work hard too, and they're still wage labourers. And what perpetuates this? The system of property ownership. This had been identified indeed as far back as Rousseau and propagated and identified by all those anarchists and Communists through the 19th century.
Further, we do not blame those who try, we blame those who, in contempt of the idea that every man is born equal and free, hold property for their own profits. It is possible to try and succeed without holding property.
>If there had never been an option to become rich in the first place, how many of those guys would have pulled a Picasso instead and just painted?
This is ridiculous. People generally want to follow their passions, you are forgetting that a lot of development in technology happened when capitalism wasn't about, and indeed the scientists and inventors worked only because they were not oppressed by the rule of wage labour. Oscar Wilde talks about this in his book The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Those great inventors of the past usually did not work for profit at all, they worked out of the flame lit by curiosity, only resorting to the force of work when they had no money - again as a result of capitalism only affording people good life if they own property.
>the worst peasant today lives like a god, compared to the richest of the rich just 100 years ago.
And that's still not good enough. Saying that conditions have improved is just like saying "well, it could be worse" - in other words, the fallacy of relative privation.