I was taught that communism is when all property (including toothbrushes) gets taken by the government and redistributed personally by one leader who has total control, and it failed because no one did any work (as they got paid anyway)

  • MagisterSinister [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Growing up in 1980s and 1990s Europe, my experience was quite different from the open pro-capital propaganda seen in America. Our textbooks had some SocDem authors, so propaganda was still very much present, but more insidious.

    I was taught that Marx had some good points about 16 hour workdays and poor work safety and child labor and workers getting paid in scrip and stuff like that, but that social democracy fixed all of these "excesses" of capitalism. So we should rely on class collaborationism and we shouldn't bother with the other Marxist stuff like a "dictatorship of the proletariat" because horseshoe theory.

    Unsurprisingly, they left out things like stolen surplus value, falling rate of profit, commodity fetishism, alienation, the authoritarian nature of wage labor, basically anything that still has subversive potential today. The "excesses of Manchester-style capitalism" still being very much a thing in developing countries was also glanced over.