As an American, my first exposure to the ideas of socialism and communism came through the reflection of the Cold War. I was six when the Berlin Wall fell, but after decades of spy games and proxy conflicts related to the “age old” fight of Capitalism vs Communism (note the capitals here), my exposure to these economic forces and their related governments had been crystalized. At least, they had inasmuch as any idea can when you only hear about it being bad and know of a single aspect - dictatorship. These were ideas of our enemies, of those who hated the vaunted Democracy that came with the American way of life.

Since I’m not six any longer, I have had the time to look into these ideas and I realize that most of what I knew was propaganda. I’ve lived in a country ran by a Communist government - Vietnam - and studied the theories of Karl Marx under the tutelage of professors , even reading Das Kapital. Karl Marx was wrong about the inevitability of the communist utopia.