this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Communism
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To be fair, if you weren't raised in a socialist country, it's almost certain that you were taught a caricature of Marx and Marxist thought.
He was treated as an important philosopher and was a recurrent author used to criticize the current system. and we used a lot of excerpts from his manifesto, das Kapital…
But he wasn’t seen as you’d depict him in communist countries. We confronted his ideas with Arendt’s for example…
Ultimately, we weren’t taught that he was bad or good, we were just taught his thoughts among other philosophers’ and we used them to write our own essays, form our own opinions.
Without knowing how that was done, it sounds like it just as easily could have been done deliberately to demonize him, by comparing him to Arendt's theories.
I translated an online course with deepL, that sums up what we've seen on him (allegedly, I don't remember exactly as it was back in high school!):
https://hastebin.ianhon.com/a13c
Sorry, didn't find any other way to paste this long ass text without polluting the comments so I used this.
Actually not the worst way I've seen him taught, far from it in fact.