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)
Its funny cos under capitalism I’m pretty certain plumbers earn more than scientists.
And in the USSR scientists were in the highest wage bracket alongside other highly educated professionals, above politicians and bureaucrats (although politicians and bureaucrats often made more by interacting with the "second economy," the quasi-legal private market that the Soviet government began tolerating under Khrushchev and which served as a persistent drain on their economy and a massively corrupting influence on both their leadership and the more privileged and educated sectors of society which served as the backbone of Gorbachev and Yeltsin's liberal counter-revolutionary blocs).
Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union covers it to some extent, though it has a greater focus on the major figures of the 1980s and the events immediately preceding Yeltsin's coup.
Basically nothing at all. Not even in college. Like, it just all got totally skipped except maybe some one liners that I've completely forgotten.
I remember having the big brain idea "communism would be good in theory, but alas..." when I was like 16, but I don't even remember where I got that
“The Soviet Union collapsed because everyone got paid the same so there was no incentive to work hard”
“Why would anyone want to be a doctor if they get paid as much as a garbage collector?”
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.
In 9th grade geography we were shown population pyramids of various nations and were shown this one of Russia. When asked why it looked so unusual when compared to other nations, my teacher just said "because of communism" and then moved on quickly.
In reality, it looks like that due to the invasion by the Nazis during WW2. When I realized I was lied to, it made me Revaluate many of the things I learned in school.
Damn, that's a really good visual indicator of the effect of the invasion on the soviets.
"Imagine if you were a baker, and you made 100 loaves of bread, and you got paid the same as a lazy coworker who made only 5 loaves. Wouldn't that make you mad? That's why communism doesn't work"
"Now under glorious capitalism, imagine you are the owner of the bakery and you make 0 loaves of bread, while your employees make several hundred loaves a day. Naturally you've taken a risk by selflessly starting a business, so you should be rewarded with most of the money from selling the loaves. No one should be mad at you, of course."
Communism is nice in theory, but in reality it's when Evil Mr Dictator Does An Oppression, but fortunately we ended communism and saved the world by beating the USSR.
I got the 20th century history class taught by the chill sports coach who was made to teach it, he expressed his displeasure by telling us about US Imperialism, the gulf of Tonkin, and how the US war machine is run by and for the obscenely rich. He interspersed this with wild personal stories, including the art of flicking coins in such a way that they become flying concussion discs. One project was to write a song about the Vietnam war, and I got full points for rewriting Gangster's Paradise to be about a conscript fragging officers and doing heroin.
Come to think of it, we didn't really talk about Communism at all, which was either laziness or a stroke of brilliance: rather than try to defuse 16 years of propaganda in every single student, he just showed us that the US government lies, murders and sucks shit, and let us figure it out from there.
Big ups to coach Perez for starting me on my path.
Communism doesn't work, also it is the biggest threat to America and also we needed to have extended involvement overseas to roll back communism and prevent it from spreading
Honestly pretty much nothing, and absolutely nothing about the ideology itself.
Russian Rev got completely skipped over, soviet contribution to WW2 was hardly talked about, China was ignored, LatAm and our meddling was ignored, and the labor movement in the US was stripped of all ideology.
A brief discussion of the domino theory, McCarthyism, and that Vietnam and the Soviet Union were communist was the only context communism ever got mentioned. It existed, and it lost. That was the sum total of twelve years of public school education in the California East Bay Area.
If it wasn't for my love of history and how terminally online I was, I would've gone over two decades without knowing anything else. Future generations deserve better, and I wish teaching wasn't such an underpaid job so I could justify going into the field.
almost nothing about the actual history of communism, but as this really abstract and also bad thing that would force everyone to look and act the same
like there's a spectrum of "individualism vs collectivism" and both extremes, anarchy and communism/fascism, are dangerous so it's good we have have a balance in US democracy and capitalism
they also did a really poor job of distinguishing communism and fascism, so that young me got the bizarre impression that the cold war was a continuation of WW2 in that we were still fighting the "collectivist extremists" but they had to rebrand after losing the first time
It's not just about teaching better, it's a tool of social filtration. Putting (at least somewhat) wealthy people around wealthy people is how upper class consciousness gets perpetuated.
US/Public School, late 80s-90s
we were taught that communism was when there was a massive government which had a huge military and secret police to make sure everybody was equal, but that this was a foolish way to run an economy so the USSR was basically one giant line of people waiting for bread all day under a grey sky and if anyone complained or listened to american music they were sent to a siberian prison and executed. and one day the soviets would launch nuclear weapons at us and then invade us like in the movie Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swazy, so we must all be vigilant.
but then ronald reagan came and used our economy to build up our military might so much that it made the Russians realize the superiority of our system and theirs collapsed, the walls came down and the Russians were now free to wear blue jeans and listen to our music.
my history teachers were all physical education coaches with no education in history, but carte blanche to tell us all of this and we ate it up as kids, because who doesn't want to be the Good Guys.
later in life the cracks formed and my curiosity made the dam burst, but the bad news is that most of the people my age in my middle school/high school cohort probably still mostly believe this narrative, at least on some passive level.
