[Nifty3929]

Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it.

My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.

[ben_w]

It's somewhat messier than that. While I am aquatinted with the authoritarian nightmare that was Stalin himself, and with the DDR's Stasi, and think that Marx's vision was *only* an improvement *relative to pre-New Deal era capitalism* and doesn't have much to offer to the modern world[0], there's people in ex-communist countries who yearn for a return to the "good old days" and don't see what the problem was.

(And hunger probably wouldn't be a big thing today: the communist eras most associated with that were fairly early into the process of transitioning away from agrarian and towards industrial societies. Probably would be less choice of food, but there would likely still be enough food, unless they started seeing every failure as a sign of sabotage like Pol Pot did. Which is a thing I'm worried about with Trump, because that failure mode is not limited to just communists).

[0] because the modern world treats women as equals and we have universal education (which was novel for the era Marx wrote in), and trade unions are a thing. This gets most of the benefits without the various different failure modes that come with different kinds of Communism.