Based on my understanding (which isn’t much, please mention any additional things I missed) Marx believed that the “proletariat” (the workers) were being abused by the “bourgeois” (the owners) in the capitalist system, and that the proletariat should seize control of the state and the means of production (“dictatorship of the proletariat”), and that the end goal was a stateless, classless society where everyone was equal, and that the state would “wither away”.

As we all know, a perfect communist society was never achieved, and that the state never ended up withering away for any of them.

How would Marx react to the Soviet Union under Stalin and his purges, Khrushchev to his denouncing of Stalinism and brutal crushings of protests in the Warsaw Pact states, to Gorbachev and his “glasnost and perestroika” reforms?

How would Marx react to the communist states that took power in Latin America, Africa, and Asia? Would he be happy that a communist state was able to compete with the capitalist U.S. in terms of global dominance, twice (Soviet Union during the Cold War, PRC in the modern day)?

Note: I am neither procommunist or anticommunist. I think that some if Marx’s ideas were quite good (everyone should be equal, classless society, etc.) but others not so much (history tells us what happens when there is a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the state never withers away like Marx imagines it would, as power corrupts all)

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    10 hours ago

    I remember they have a telephone thing. Fun fact, if you have two receivers, you can like use the other one to listen in and spy on phone calls.

    Is that a landline? We have that in the UK, I used to do that on my mum. Got in trouble quickly when she heard me laughing over the line 🤣

    The distance between a dilapidated city slum and a modern-looking shopping mall is like 20 minutes away. Like. You walk 20 minutes, and its like you time travelled. So bizzare when I recall the memories.

    20 minutes? I saw some that were right next to each other. I came out of a metro station and was in a pomegranate farm, across the road were newly built apartments.

    What I found odd is that their TV provider was their ISP. The TV must have been IPTV and they were allowed to use the internet, by plugging a router into the TV box which had a modem. In the UK it’s generally the other way around, your ISP is your TV provider also.

    Where I stayed had a crapper toilet. I don’t think that was the norm, though.

    • 9 minute walk actually. From my apartment area to the main road where there are malls with KFC, Mcdonalds, etc…

      But yea… having no phones and your mind is bored and wandering and thinking and so you look at things around you… that tends to slow your perception of time, it felt like a half hour walk lol. Memories are fuzzy.

      Btw, we lived right next to a mountain, so like I remember just taking walks there with my dad.

      Oh yea… that explains all the fucking mosquitos… like… imagine being right next to a mountain… its moist af… lol