I don’t have enough theory or analysis under my belt to make any broad kind of comment, but I can speak to personal experience as someone who is still trying to purge myself of this particular brainworm (thanks hexbears). The propaganda is insidious, they get you young, and a lot of the time, it fucking works. I grew up on the tail end of the cold war, so I might have copped it a bit worse than some of the younger folks here, but I got shown my first piece of explicitly anticommunist propaganda about age five. Obvs I’d picked up bits and pieces coincidentally from other media, but primary school was the first time we got herded into a room and subjected to an “educational” video, which probably deserves its own post tbh. Despite being vaguely dissatisfied with capitalism and getting into punk in my teens, watching the Soviet Union fail collapse under the concerted effort of western hegemony (see? Fucking insidious.) kinda cemented me into the “but human nature / only works in theory” mindset for a long time, without actually understanding the theory at all.

All that to say, my gut reaction a lot of the time is still “China bad, communists want to steal your stuff” until the rational part of my brain kicks in and goes “Hang on a second!” - Most of that is due to reading the discourse here. But that rational bit takes effort. Consciously overriding the gut reaction is -hard-. Reading and internalising theory takes time and energy. And when you come home exhausted from a 40 hour week generating revenue for someone else, you don’t necessarily have the mental resources to do that. Of course that’s by design and I absolutely fucking hate it, but I get it because I’m still living it, and I don’t think this kind of experience is particularly unique.