Not a day goes by, that I don't check my Facebook page and find posts from FB bloggers extolling the virtues of Karl Marx and posting photos of him, Lenin, or the image of the red Hammer and Sickle, that defines the Communist Party to this day. The FB bloggers have appropriate handles like "Acid Communism" and "Democratic Socialism Now!"
Often, I have no idea who these people are, whether their blogs represent real people, organizations, or just bots that are operated anonymously. The bloggers tend to use similar terms of denunciation to dish out criticism of the wealthy or the authorities that the wealthy control, and offer viewers similar promises to trim the wealthy of their hoarded cash. Facing scrutiny of their plans by critics, they fall back on patterned, simplistic responses to deflect the criticism, accusing their critics of being bootlickers, boomers, or brain-dead.
The images showing poor people facing eviction or rich people reclining on piles of cash, or parodies of Elon Musk, form the nucleus of the criticism, and contain little more than a few lines of perfunctory, moralistic text. The bloggers show little inclination to engage their critics in anything but snide, dismissive terms, again making me suspicious about who they really are.
Again, the text contains little more than stock condemnation of the billionaires hoarding their wealth. After all, they could use that wealth to feed the hungry or clothe the naked. The bloggers issue peremptory demands that the powers-that-be and their corporation allies pursue policies of openness, tolerance, and inclusion. They contrast the greed of American billionaires to lovingly utopian portrayals of a Marxist society—adequate housing and consumer goods for all—as if we have never heard of Marxism before, and have never seen a Marxist society in action.
Truthfully though, not much separates the perception of a utopian experience from a dystopian one. With the right advertising or the right spin, the negative "-ism" can have as much visceral appeal as the positive one. In the case of Marxism, however, Marxist supporters have a lot of history to cover up--the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Red China, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milošević, and many others. The application of Marxism in the real World has brought little else but government-induced bloodshed and hardship to facilitate its success. It's asking a lot from jaundiced viewers to overlook so much history—in the lifetime of many of us. The nations unfortunate enough to fall under Marxism have spent billions trying to recover from its intimidating scourge.