the steel and battery thing is a parallel that i didn’t connect, that is a very good point. i just keep stressing out about the poisoning of the surrounding areas. hungarians are already pretty “relaxed” about safety regulations, the chinese are even worse
i would disagree that they pushed communism at all, in marx’s theory democracy should be not just in politics, but in the workplace too, but having one party and they deciding what everyone does (and if you disagree, you disappear) is very counter to that
and that was a problem from the very first election the russians had, after the revolution - lenin (who i think was well intended) didn’t like the results, that the moderates won, so he forced his way (which was a fatal mistake to be clear). marx did describe a temporary, transitional phase of “workers’s dictatorship” before the actual communism, and the bolsheviks latched on to that hard, and kept it going, and eventually this was exported to hungary as well - “the singular party knows what the people want and need, or else”
there are some famous examples of soviets appointing people to important positions because of how loyal they were, like guy who ran the chernobyl experiment, trofim lysenko who caused mass starvation with an untested agricultural theory, or the general who blew up himself and a few hundred other people trying to rush a space rocket launch for the anniversary of the bolshevik revolution, even though nobody told him to do so
fortunately hungary, the “happiest barrack” didn’t have it this bad, but it was common that only party members got positions, and often they knew nothing about the subject. a biology teacher told me about how back in the day, the leader of the local farming collective didn’t even know what protein was
imo the current system is worse because they don’t even put the incompetent people in power to actually do the job, they only do it to enable them to steal as much as possible