I think what people don’t fully understand is that Marxism is meant to be scientific. That means that there will likely be many imperfect and failed attempts at building a socialist society before one comes along that is stable enough to outlast outside interference from capitalist states.

As such, most people I know who like the USSR are also it’s biggest critiques. Unfortunately, there is so much misinformation about the USSR that most discussions about it online are just about delineating truth from propaganda.

Think about it this way, if you were a Chinese citizen would you rather work in a harsh factory setting or work as a subsistence farmer and risk starvation because it didn’t rain enough one year? Because that was literally the choice. There were no other options.

The reason why the Chinese government maintains a high level of support from Chinese citizens is not because they’re great propagandists. Rather it’s because hundreds of millions of people went from extreme poverty as peasants to living stable middle class lives within a few decades.

Why do you see that as such a bad thing? Would you prefer all these people remain in poverty as they have in other countries such as India or the Philippines? I don’t get it.

Then why isn’t India doing as well as China economically? They had the same chance to undercut US labor costs in order to industrialize. However, they could not capitalize on that opportunity as successfully as China did. It’s almost as if Chinese economic policy and central planning played a large role in their development. It’s also pretty clear that China is actually become less dependent on US demand as their own internal economy grows.

This isn’t a one time experiment either. Vietnam is following a similar path and has grown much faster than many comparable south east asian countries.

Nazis took nothing from the left wing other than some rhetoric they used to gain popular support from the working class. Their politics were more inspired by European colonialism than anything else. Lebensraum is basically just manifest destiny applied to Europe.

It’s not uncommon for fascists to adopt socialist rhetoric to try and gain mass appeal. However that falls away under the lightest scrutiny of their actions and ideology. “National Socialism” is the most obvious example. I’d include Pol Pot in that bucket as well.

The USSR under Stalin and PRC under Mao are a bit different. The government in either case made decisions that led to unnecessary death, but there’s no evidence to suggest any of their missteps were motivated by racial animus.

The funny thing is, I imagine this won’t actually save marketers much time. If campaigns become easier to run I think it’s likely the number of campaigns going after a particular market will increase. That might limit their overall effectiveness. Marketers would then have to work harder to find creative ways to get their audience’s attention.